FIRTH, CHARLES HARDING (1857- ), British historian, was born at Sheffield on the 16th of March 1857, and was educated at Clifton College and at Balliol College, Oxford. At his university he took the Stanhope prize for an essay on the marquess Wellesley in 1877, became lecturer at Pembroke College in 1887, and fellow of All Souls College in 1901. He was Ford’s lecturer in English history in 1900, and became regius professor of modern history at Oxford in succession to F. York Powell in 1904. Firth’s historical work was almost entirely confined to English history during the time of the Great Civil War and the Commonwealth; and although he is somewhat overshadowed by S.R. Gardiner, a worker in the same field, his books are of great value to students of this period. The chief of them are: Life of the Duke of Newcastle (1886); Scotland and the Commonwealth (1895); Scotland and the Protectorate (1899); Narrative of General Venables (1900); Oliver Cromwell (1900); Cromwell’s Army (1902); and the standard edition of Ludlow’s Memoirs (1894). He also edited the Clarke Papers (1891-1901), and Mrs Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson (1885), and wrote an introduction to the Stuart Tracts (1903), besides contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1909 he published The Last Years of the Protectorate.
FIRTH, MARK (1819-1880), English steel manufacturer and philanthropist, was born at Sheffield on the 25th of April 1819, the son of a steel smelter. At the age of fourteen Mark, with his brother, left school to join their father in the foundry where he was employed, and ten years later the three together started a six-hole furnace of their own. The venture proved successful, and besides an extensive home business, they soon established a large American connexion. Their huge Norfolk works were erected at Sheffield in 1849, and still greater were afterwards acquired at Whittington in Derbyshire and others at Clay Wheels near Wadsley. The manufacture of steel blocks for ordnance was the principal feature of their business, and they produced also shot and heavy forgings. They also installed a plant for the production of steel cores for heavy guns, and for some time they supplied nearly all the metal used for gun making by the British government and a large proportion of that used by the French. On the death of his father in 1848 Mark Firth became the head of the firm. In 1869 he built and endowed “Mark Firth’s Almshouses” at Ranmoor near Sheffield, and in 1875, when mayor, he presented to his native place a freehold park of thirty-six acres. He founded and endowed Firth College, for lectures and classes in connexion with the extension of university education, which was opened in 1879. He died on the 28th of November 1880, and was accorded a public funeral.
FIRŪZABAD, a town of Persia, in the province of Fars, 72 m. S. of Shiraz, in 28° 51′ N. Pop. about 3000. It is situated in a fertile plain, 15 m. long and 7 m. broad, well watered by the river Khoja which flows through it from north to south. The town is surrounded by a mud wall and ditch. Three or four miles north-west of the town are the ruins of the ancient city and of a large building popularly known as the fire-temple of Ardashir, and beyond them on the face of the rock in the gorge through which the river enters the plain are two Sassanian bas-reliefs.
The river leaves the plain by a narrow gorge at the southern end, and according to Persian history it was there that Alexander the Great, when unable to capture the ancient city, built a dike across the gorge, thus damming up the water of the river and turning the plain into a lake and submerging the city and villages. The lake remained until the beginning of the 3rd century, when Ardashir, the first Sassanian monarch, drained it by destroying the dike. He built a new city, called it Gūr, and made it the capital of one of the five great provinces or divisions of Fars. Firuz (or Peroz, q.v.), one of Ardashir’s successors, called the district after his name Firūzabad (“the abode of Firuz”), but the name of the city remained Gūr until Azud ed Dowleh (Adod addaula) (949-982) changed it to its present name. He did this because he frequently resided at Gūr, and the name meaning also “a grave” gave rise to unpleasant allusions, for instance, “People who go to Gūr (grave) never return alive; our king goes to Gūr (the town) several times a year and is not dead yet.”
The district has twenty villages and produces much wheat and rice. It is said that the rice of Firūzabad bears sixty-fold.
(A. H.-S.)