Memorials of old Derbyshire

by Unknown

Country Gentlemen on the London Road.

It may readily be admitted that in the seventeenth century country gentlemen could understand the local dialect, for intercourse with their tenants and the servants and labourers in their employ would otherwise have been difficult or impossible, and that the accent of some Yorkshire squires might betray their origin as surely as that of some Irish gentlemen to-day. But life in the country is no proof of rusticity, and everyone who speaks with a brogue is not necessarily a carter. At the time of which Macaulay writes, civilization was not confined to London. York and Derby, to the inhabitants of those counties, were “town” in the same sense that London is to their descendants. London had not yet gathered to itself all the business, the fashion, and the culture of the nation, and country gentlemen still flocked in winter to cities which had once, perhaps, been the capitals of independent kingdoms, and were even now centres of society, of learning, and of government.

Neither in his virtues nor in his failings was the country gentleman of Charles the Second’s time such as Macaulay has portrayed him. His chief pleasure did not consist in drinking himself under the table with strong beer, for excess was the exception and not the rule with the class to which he belonged, and claret and sack, malago and rhenish, were the beverages he was accustomed to, both at his own house and at the taverns. His principal employment was not “handling pigs, and on market days making bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop merchants”; on the contrary, though a good judge of horses and oxen, bullocks and swine, he left the stocking of the home farm and the sale of produce to the steward who collected his rents. He was better educated in Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, divinity, and law, than the country gentlemen of to-day, and more competent to manage his own affairs; his taste (at least in building, furniture, gardening, and dress) was more refined; he was keenly interested in public events, and willing to make sacrifices for public objects; he took a kindly and helpful interest in his poorer neighbours; though proud of his position, was sensible enough to send his younger sons into trade; and though he could not “shoot flying,” had a proper feeling for sport. He was not free from the narrowness and want of charity, the aversion to change and to new ideas so often found in those who have made divinity and the classics the study of their lives, and religious bigotry was his besetting sin.

The letter-book of 1662–6 throws much light on the George Sitwell, of Renishaw, of that period. In appearance he was somewhat over the middle height, and, as became one already well advanced in middle age, rather neat and precise than fashionable in his dress. He wore a long periwig, scented with orange flower water, a slight moustache and tuft of hair upon his chin, a grey broad-brimmed beaver hat, large bands of white linen or cambric, a dark grey cloth coat of simple cut, unbuttoned at the waist, and with the wristbands turned back to show the soft linen cuffs underneath, a sword belt and sword, cavalier breeches open at the knee, riding tops of wrinkled buckskin, and square-toed shoes, with high heels, and tongues to protect the instep from the stirrup. On his arm he usually carried a horseman’s cloak.[80] His face, with its good forehead and eyes, strong and clear-cut nose, and well developed chin, gave an impression of force of character, tenacity of purpose, and good reasoning powers; and this impression was strengthened by his conversation, for even the most casual acquaintance could not fail to observe that he was a man who had been accustomed to think and act for himself, a man not only well educated, but gifted with a sound judgment and a marked talent for business.

He was an old cavalier who had garrisoned his house for the King, and had suffered fines and “decimation” under the Commonwealth. In 1653 he had served as Sheriff, and had brought with him to Derby a chaplain after his own mind, who preached a dangerously clever Assize sermon on “Magistracie and Ministery, the State and the Church.” In a remarkable letter to Lord Frecheville, written in April, 1661, he expresses his opinion that the “late unhappy warr began about disputes in religion,” and was the work of “crafty, wicked men,” “proud, insolent, factious, seditious spirits,” who, finding it “best to fish in troubled waters,” had made “Godliness their gaine” and “religion the cloake to cover their intentions.” Such opinions were common enough at the Restoration, but it is startling to find at such a moment the expression of a belief that there had been faults on both sides, and that “flatterers of Soveraignty” were as much to blame as “flatterers of popularity.” “We have,” he adds, “a good, a gracious, and a prudent King, who, though he hath not had long, yet hath had grand experience of men, which makes him delight in and love those who are honest. He knows very well that those who were the greatest flatterers of his ffather of happy memory, divisers and promoters of monopolies and revivers of ould obsolete laws, therby to lay uncoth and strange burdens upon the people, proved his bitterest and worst enemies.” Justice between man and man the writer considered to be the “sinews of all Commonwealths,” and the laws of England the people’s “birthright” and their defence against “arbitrary power.” At the first outbreak of the Civil War he had signed two petitions inviting Charles to return from the North to meet his Parliament; and after the Restoration his chief desire in politics was to see “an Unity at home which will be a stronge Bullworke against our advarsaries.” But he was sorely troubled at the King’s neglect of business and the corruption of the public service.

Some account of his fortune and surroundings is a necessary prelude to a study of his manner of life. The Renishaw estates[81] produced at this time about £800 a year, and from other sources—chiefly from the iron furnaces and forges[82] upon his property, for like many of the greater and lesser landowners of that district he was interested in the iron trade—Mr. Sitwell received an amount at least equal to his agricultural rents. In order that the meaning of these figures may be understood, it is necessary to explain that in the seventeenth century the nation was poorer, manners were simpler and more primitive, and the value of money was not the same. The purchasing power of money, as most intelligent schoolboys are aware, was then, according to the usual estimate, four times what it is at present.

The loyal Duke of Newcastle, who is said to have been the wealthiest subject in Great Britain at the outbreak of the Civil War, had a rental of only £22,000 a year. After the Restoration, the greatest estates in the kingdom hardly exceeded £20,000 a year, and in 1669 the average income of peers, taken one with another, was estimated at £3,000, of knights at £800, and of esquires at £400 a year. Mr. Sitwell, with a revenue of £1,600, was therefore possessed of a fortune above the common; he pleads guilty, in one of these letters, to having a “good estate,” and it is clear that in his own country he had the reputation of being a very wealthy man.

His house, “the capital messuage called Renishawe”—situated some six miles from Chesterfield, then a walled town and the “fayrest in all the Peake Cuntrie”[83]—had been rebuilt out of the savings of his minority shortly before his marriage in 1627. It stood (and yet stands, for the old hall is the centre of the new) on the summit of a rocky hill projecting into the vale of Rother, which here narrows to two or three hundred yards, and commanding fine views towards the north and south. On the latter side, a richly cultivated country, cut up into innumerable inclosures by hedgerows, and scattered with forest trees, formed a pleasing contrast to the wild and rugged moorland by which Eckington was approached; and beyond it, to the south and south-east, rose that beautiful ridge upon which Barlborough, Bolsover Castle, and Hardwick stand. The turrets and battlements of these three famous houses, towering up on the hillside above the groves and woodland which surrounded them, were all visible from Renishaw; and to the south-west the country rolled on in successive ridges of meadow land and common towards the faint blue line which marked the edge of the Chesterfield moors in the far distance. From the north front of the house, Mosborough Hall could be seen across the green valley through which the Mosbecke flows to its union with the Rother; on the left, beyond the church and village, lay the ancient woods and picturesque manor park of Eckington in a deep cleft between the hills, and to the right the view down the vale extended for many miles into Yorkshire. East of the house, the promontory upon which Renishaw stands was bare of planting, being sheltered by the higher ground beyond the river, and by the woods of Park Hall and Barlborough, and on the west a plantation of oaks and ashes protected it from the prevailing winds which sweep down from the distant moors.

The river below the house was crossed by a highway, described in a letter of 1665 as a “great road from the West parts of Yorkshire towards London.” Approaching from the London side a traveller would catch his first glimpse of Renishaw from the point where the manors of Barlborough and Eckington meet. The building was three-storied and of stone, with a four-gabled front facing the east, and, towards the south, a battlemented hall between two projecting wings, of which the nearer was furnished with a great bow window. It was surrounded with orchards and walled gardens, and behind it a plantation of ancient trees formed an impressive background. Below lay the cliffs and rocky slope known as Broxhill, then unplanted, but deep in fern and gorse; in the left foreground a line of willows marked the winding course of the river as it approached the bridge, and to the right the ancient mill and water meadows beyond were framed in by the wooded steep of Birley Hill. Proceeding along the causeway (built as a protection against floods) and across the bridge, the road turned sharply to the right and to the left again, and so mounting the hill passed within fifty yards of the house.

This road, with its wayside oaks and strips of green, was not, as might be imagined, a quiet country lane, but a highway full of life and colour and movement. Here, past the court gates, and in full view from the first-floor windows of the house, flowed by throughout the summer months a ceaseless stream of traffic. The smocked carriers cracked their whips as they passed with their covered waggons and long train of patient packhorses, or shouted to the women passengers crouching behind them in the straw. Postboys with budgets of letters cantered by, sounding their horns as they turned down to the village. Beggars in rags, with their little bundles carried upon staves across the shoulder, and wandering pipers and fiddlers, turned to look at the house; Scotch pedlars, with cheap linen cloth in their packs; and hawkers or chapmen with wallets full of little trifles—gloves of cordevant and sheep leather, tobacco boxes, ribbons and shoe-strings, almanacs, horn-books, jocktalegs, and ballads on the Dutch war and the hearth tax. Gentlemen in long boots, riding suits and cloaks, and velvet caps, trotted past, followed by mounted servants; or honest yeomen in coarse cloth and worsted stockings, with their wives in homespun and steeple hats riding pillion behind them. The little processions of marketing and fairing folk came and went; brown barefooted mower-women at hay and corn harvest; labourers in their loose frocks tied in at the waist, patched breeches and hose, and tall hats with vast projecting brims; country women riding to market between baskets of farm produce, with chickens or ducks swinging from the saddlebow; labourers’ wives trudging it on foot with wicker trays of vegetables or fruit upon their heads; farmers’ wains drawn by huge oxen, older and bulkier than any which can be seen to-day; and, in autumn, droves of swine on their way to the woods. Often Lord Frecheville’s or Lord Deincourt’s chariot and four passed the gates, the coach of some neighbouring gentleman bright with heraldry and gilding, a train of charcoal waggons bringing fuel to the Staveley ironworks, or of others laden with long saws and brewers’ squares, cannon shot, fire-backs, or sugar-stoves; and more rarely a ponderous furnace-hearth drawn by twenty oxen, a company of militia in their buffcoats faced with crimson plush, a gentleman riding to the poll at Derby at the head of his tenantry, or the cavalcade of some great nobleman journeying towards London with three coaches and an armed escort of thirty or forty attendants on horseback. It was an ever changing panorama of human life, an endless procession labouring towards an unknown goal, for in the seventeenth century the nation was to be studied rather on the roads than in the cities, and for commerce, for travel, and for news, the roads were all that the railways and telegraphs are to us, and more.