Renishaw was a quieter place than it had been ten years before, when Mrs. Sitwell was alive, and the house full of young people; but its owner, though he “hated ill-husbandry,” still kept a plentiful house. He was constantly visited by various relations and friends, and throughout the summer neighbouring gentlemen would occasionally ride over to dinner and bowls, and Yorkshire acquaintances call and drink at the gates, or rest their horses for an hour or two on the way to London. Mr. Sitwell’s eldest son, and his daughters and sons-in-law, were often with him, and Christmas especially, when the hall was decorated with holly and ivy, and the Chesterfield and Staveley fiddlers came over, and there was dancing in the great and card playing in the little parlours, was a time of entertainment and family reunion.[86] The preparations for Christmas and the New Year began early in November with the brewing of a couple of hogsheads of “Christmas beer” and the manufacture of “a brawne”—a mighty dish, for it is valued in the household book at £2, the price of four muttons or forty turkeys. When that season had arrived, the fat hogs were killed, gifts were made to the servants, and money distributed among the poor of the parish; turkeys, fowls, and rolls of brawn were sent as “tokens” to absent friends; the tenants came with their rent capons,[87] were regaled in the hall with beer, beef, mince pie, and plum porridge, and spent the evening in boisterous games; and a doe was usually sent over from Sheffield Park as a present from the Duke of Norfolk. It appears by one of these letters that Francis Sitwell and his wife and children were always expected from Gainsborough at Christmas, and no doubt the Wigfalls came across in the evenings from their house a few hundred yards away, the Burtons and Stones from Mosborough, and Dr. Gardiner,[88] whom Mr. Sitwell had presented to the living of Eckington eight years before, brought his children from the rectory. Indeed, friends and tenants were entertained with so much conviviality that the example proved dangerous to the younger members of the family. In the last week of 1662, John, the London apprentice, was in trouble with his master, and exactly a year later, Mr. Sitwell, while protesting that he had “ever been wary to encourage” his son in such courses, had to express a hope that in future he would “nether thinke Christmas nor any other time lawless to play the foole in,” but when he recreated himself among friends would “make choyce of sober, civell company, and keepe good howers.”
The owner of the letter-book mentions on one occasion an engagement to be at the Wigfalls’ house for a christening, and no doubt he celebrated the baptism of his own grandchildren, born at Renishaw in July, 1661, and October, 1662, by entertaining his neighbours with music and card playing, according to the hospitable custom of the time. On the 14th of February there was dancing and drawing of valentines, and the Chesterfield Sessions in April, the fairs at Chesterfield, Sheffield, and Rotherham, races and bull-baitings for those who cared for such frivolities, bowling parties at Renishaw and other houses in the neighbourhood, the village wake and the “hare-getting supper”[89] to the harvesters on the demesne, helped to enliven the monotony of rural existence. But during much of the year when Mr. Sitwell and his youngest son were alone, life at Renishaw was quiet and orderly enough, and one day passed very much the same as another. At about seven o’clock they breakfasted upon beer, cold meat, Westphalia ham or neat’s tongue, oatcakes, and white bread and butter. After breakfast, William walked down to pursue his studies at the rectory, and his father rode out with Starkye to inspect his farms and iron furnaces, or to attend to the parochial and county business in which he interested himself. At eleven o’clock,[90] the servants, headed by the housekeeper, Mrs. Heays, filed in to family prayers in the hall; and immediately prayers were over the butler laid the table, with its cloth of homespun linen, pewter plates and dishes, beer and wine glasses, silver salts and spoons, porringers and tankards, for the noonday dinner,[91] and put out the silver bottles and stoneware jugs, edged with silver, upon the oak cupboard by the kitchen door. Mr. Sitwell sat at the head of the table, with his back to the map of Europe and the great staircase; and his son, in a grey cloth suit, fine worsted under-stockings, scarlet silk over-stockings, and riding shoes, at his left hand; and together they conversed about William’s studies and the big trout in the Rother, the flower garden and the home farm, John’s last letters from plague-stricken London, Robert’s adventures at Aleppo, and George’s prospects of making a fortune in Spain. The meal, plain but substantial—it consisted usually of broth served in porringers and eaten with oat cakes, a joint with vegetables, poultry or game, a pudding or tart, cheese and fruit; but on Fridays of fresh and salt fish alone—was washed down by a glass or two of tent or malago and a tankard of ale, and followed by a pipe of tobacco in the little parlour or the garden-house. After dinner, Mr. Sitwell wrote letters in his study, and read the gazettes and newsletters which his cousin forwarded by every post from London; a little later in the afternoon, he played bowls on the green, walked through the folds, looked at the horses, foals, and oxen, and strolled across the demesne to watch the mowers or harvest folk at work. Supper, the second “state meal”[92] of the day, must have been early too; and after a pipe of tobacco, a tankard of ale, and a game of cards or shovel-board in the great parlour, the evening finished with family prayer. On Sundays, the old coach, with its two bay mares, took Mr. Sitwell and his son down to church at Eckington; there, in the large square family pew by the second pillar on the right of the nave, with the servants ranged behind them, they listened to the village fiddlers and Dr. Gardiner’s learned but lengthy sermon; and when service was over, they carried the doctor and his wife back to dinner at the hall. Mr. Sitwell was a good judge of horses (in 1666 he was buying horses for Lord Ogle’s troop), and took some trouble in the breeding of them;[93] his peace-offering of four pheasants to the Duke of Newcastle in January, 1664–5, shows that he shot with a fowling-piece; the use of two coursing similes in the letter-book suggests that he may have kept greyhounds; and it is likely enough that he occasionally rode with Lord Frecheville’s staghounds,[94] for the pale of Staveley Park bordered upon his demesne. He was certainly an active man in spite of his years, and fond of an outdoor life.
Stag Hunting.
Amongst the relations and friends already mentioned as visiting Renishaw in 1662–6, the names of several occur in the letter-book. Mr. Sitwell’s cousins, William and Roger Allestry (Roger represented Derby in Parliament as his brother had previously done, and the features of both, set out in all the glory of Restoration periwigs, are known from engraved portraits), came at intervals to stay with him; and another kinsman, John Spateman, of Roadnook Hall, in Ashover, formerly a Justice of the Peace under the Commonwealth, was there in June, 1666, on his way to plague-stricken London. Captain Mazine, the “great horseman,” so good natured in supplying Mr. Sitwell with the latest news of the Dutch war, was expected from London in July, 1665. “I suppose,” the latter writes, “I shall have the happiness to kis yor hand in the Country shortly, wch I desire the more yt you may be out of the Danger of the sickness.” In June of the previous year, the Captain had been staying at Welbeck, and had apparently ridden over more than once to dinner and a game of bowls at Renishaw. Mr. Sitwell meditated calling upon him in return, and in reply to a message confessed that he was behindhand with him, but when occasion offered would endeavour to come over. William Revell, of Ogston, one of the “Lovers of Huntinge and Hawkinge” in Darley Dale, upon whose lives and deaths (he died in 1669) the Ashover poet wrote his “Elegy”:
“Then I to Ogston, there to break my fast
They all in mourning stood at me aghast,
To think my friend and lover was departed;
And so I left them, all most heavie hearted:
What shall I doe (thought I) to hide my head,