Joseph Hunter

“ But in a cultivated and populous country, and where the residents have a personal interest in keeping parochial and manorial claims within their just limits, it seldom happens that the true line of boundary is forgotten. Not so in an uninclosed and thinly-peopled country. There is perpetual danger lest the ancient land-marks should cease to discharge their useful office. To this inconvenience the lords of the manor of Sheffield have been always peculiarly exposed on the side towards Hathersage in Derbyshire, where their manorial rights extend beyond the limits of the parish of Sheffield. ”

“ A religious service, in which every soldier of a large army was to be named, might be thought too ponderous a duty; but the monks might, out of respect to their founder and in regard to the object of their foundation, have thought it right to prepare such a list and to enter it in the books relating to their house. This, though such a roll would be of less authority than the former, would still be a most valuable document, answering well to the idea which people form of the Roll of Battle Abbey. ”

“ Tradition guides us, and where we have no better guide we may be allowed to follow her, if we proceed with cautious steps, to the banks of the Riveling, the stream which once divided the manor of Hallam into two nearly equal portions. In a tone unusually loud she has long called our attention to the sloping banks of that rivulet, however now deserted, and according to our ideas less adapted for human habitation than many other places in the neighbourhood, as having once been the seat of a numerous and busy people inhabiting the vill which gave its name to the manor. ”

“ But in these pursuits especially it is true that labour is its own reward: and he found a generous patron in Thomas Lord Fairfax, who allowed him an anual stipend to enable him the better to pursue his inquiries, and, what perhaps he valued more, rocured him access to many public and private collections of records. His industry was answerable to his patron's liberality. Ever witness for him that great national work the Monasticon Anglicanum, the labour of which, Sir William Dugdale would have been the first to allow, rested principally on his coadjutor Dodsworth. ”

“ But it may be asked, since Pope must have known perfectly well the name and highly respectable position in life of his grandfather, why he did not come boldly forward and claim to be descended of a clergyman born in the reign of Elizabeth, and dying in the prime of life, when occupying so good a position? It would have been a more sufficient answer to the taunt of obscure birth, and have shown to the world his descent, if not from a great, yet from a cultivated, ancestry. ”

“ What passes current in the world as a tradition is often nothing more that an hypothesis: and it is difficult to distinguish between genuine tradition delivered down through a long series of generations, and a supposition or conjecture founded on presumptions and probabilities first propounded to the world and introduced to the general currency at a period very little remote. So that the credit which is due to a rumour purporting to be a tradition will be greater when the apparent probabilities are the weakest. ”

“ Every one, learned or unlearned, has heard of the Roll of Battle Abbey, or has read of it in books. There is a vague opinion floating in society that there exists a list of the persons who accompanied William Duke of Normandy in the expedition which ended in the subjugation of Saxon England, prepared by the persons who presided over the monastery which the duke erected at this place as a memorial of the event, and that perpetual prayers might be offered for them, and especially for those who were slain in the battle. ”

“ And accordingly her sons an active, acute, and hardy race, patient of toil, unwillingly submitting to unnecessary restraints, aware of the advantages of their situation, proud of the reputation they have obtained for her, attached to their birth-place, and where-ever they go remembering with more than common affection the tall graceful spire that surmounts the town, the woodland heights around it, and the streams which glitter along its devious valleys. ”

“ An inquiry into the early state and remote history of the Parish of Sheffield Where is now collected a numerous and active population was anciently a deep solitude, the silence of which was broken only by our rivers pouring their waters in natural cascades through the woodland scenery. ”

“ In the case before us, it could not be easy to ascend beyond the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the period, emphatically, when the really ancient gentry of the kingdom were either pushed from their pedestals, or obliged to admit new men to share with them the honour and influence which belong to the possession of broad lands and powerful family alliances. In the forty-fifth year of Elizabeth, February 10, 1603, within a few weeks of the close of her reign, a grant was made by the Crown to Lancelot Turner, of the Manor of Towthorpe, in the county of York. ”

“ There are names of families in them which we know historically did not become settled in England till long after the Conquest. Persons are omitted of whom we have the best evidence that they were in the expedition. In fact, any critical student in that part of history might at this time form a similar list from Domesday Book and the old Norman chroniclers, and one which would be far more worthy of regard than any of these, though still depending for its authority on the credit which we gave to the skill and diligence of the individual compiler. ”

“ The gift of a corrody shows that the Lovetots had by this time established their mill at Sheffield; and it further appears from this charter, that the inhabitants had obtained the accommodation of a bridge over the Don. So that the town seems in the time of the De Lovetots to have possessed every thing essential to the comfortable residence of a considerable population, a church, a corn-mill, an hospital, a bridge where one was most wanted, to which may be added the protection which the castle of the lord afforded, and the benign influence of the family which resided in it. ”

“ There seems to be every reason to believe that the average of health in this kingdom, and consequently of life, has greatly advanced in the last two centuries. We find in 1554 the inhabitants of Sheffield representing to the queen that the fourteen hamlets within the parish were never void of plagues and other evil diseases, which they attribute to the great number of poor and impotent persons inhabiting them. What these diseases were is not very clear, for by plagues we need not understand that dreadful epidemic known by the name of the plague. ”

“ Walter Pope, an ingenious man and no mean poet, is not to be charged with over much of the severity and strictness of the Puritan life. The later Pope, however, would not be over forward to reveal his connection with either Dodd or Dr. Walter; else, if he really did descend from one of the many daughters of the Rector of Fawsley, he might have claimed to himself a descent which, on fair evidence, can be traced to the very depths of the antiquity of English families, the Puritan divine being well known to be of the very ancient family of Dodd of Shockledge, in Cheshire. ”

“ There has been so much cultivation in the country between Rotherham or Templeborough and Chesterfield, that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect to find any remains of the ancient high-way. The road between those places no lies through the town and parish of Sheffield; but the line of the Roman iter is rather to be sought on the south side of the Don, than on the present road which twice crosses the river, though it is evident from the name of the bridge at Attercliffe that there was formerly a ford at that place, and the Lady's-bridge at Sheffield is one of very high antiquity. ”

“ There was a gentleman, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, who had formed a just conception of what I mean, but who sank into the grave in quite the bloom of life, leaving only a very few specimens of what such a work in his hands would have been, among which is your own Abbey of Lewes. ”

“ The inhabitants of the town of Sheffield at this period were probably for the most part small artificers, or persons who had certain services to perform at the castle. In the surrounding country, such parts of the old inclosures as were not retained in the lord's own hand were held by small copyholders, none of whom rose above the rank of the mere farmer. It is not till the De Lovetots have passed off the stage, that we find families within the parish aspiring to imitate, if not rival, the chief at his castle of Sheffield. ”

“ Now though we have no express record of the destruction of the vill of Hallam or its aula; these evidences, together with the concurring tradition, with the subsequent rise of Sheffield, their former existence and their now total disappearance, seem altogether to render the fact of their destruction by the Norman invader a point of probability not far removed from certainty. ”

“ Previously to the time when Sir Thomas Pope made the acquisitions, the greater part of which he disposed of so nobly in the foundation of his college at Oxford, his family made no marriages with the higher gentry. In short, there is nothing to interfere with the probability of the Rector of Thruxton being of a branch of the family, nor anything in it which the Downe family could look upon as degrading. We must not suffer the glare of the coronet to mislead us: we are speaking of times before the Popes were ennobled. ”

“ Like all our old surnames the name of Lovetot is found with great variety of orthography: Lovetoft, Luvetoft, Lovetot, &c. Arms the same in figure, but difffering in tincture, appear in ancient authorities purporting to be the insignia of this family. In one of the windows of the parish-church of Sheffield, in the time of Dodsworth, they appeared a lion rampant parti per fess guled and sable on a silver field. The same lion on a field of gold was used as the insignia of the house of Worksop, till another was adopted formed out of the arms of a later patron Thomas Nevil lord Furnival. ”

“ The walks which that gentleman cut in the boldest part of the cliff, and along a natural terrace extending to that part of Stannington in which are the chapel and minister's house, were thrown open to the public, and much frequented during several summers by the people of Sheffield. Such places afford a cheap, healthful, and innocent amusement, and it is desirable that every town, but especially every manufacturing town, should possess them. ”

“ From this time we hear no longer of the manor of Hallam, but that spacious and once consequential manor becomes annexed to Sheffield, which is indeed always spoken of as the head of the whole barony of De Lovetot.
It is by no means certain whether the original castle of Sheffield was built by the first of the De Lovetots, or that he found one erected on that most convenient site by Sweyn the dispossessed Saxon lord, or some of his progenitors. On this point we have neither remains nor record to guide our inquiries. ”

“ It has been shown by unimpeachable evidence that Edward Turner, the great-grandfather of Edith Pope, was the son of a substantial citizen of York, who flourished in the reign of King Henry VII.; that, having advanced a step higher in the social scale, he maintained during great part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the rank of a gentleman, and associated upon a footing of equality with the best of the inhabitants of a city which was then “the glory of the North” ”

“ In the manor of Hallam three thousand acres had been redeemed and brought into cultivation: in Attercliffe three hundred, in Sheffield three hundred, and in Grimesthorpe, three hundred and fifty; making a total of little less that four thousand arable acres. In the rude state in which the art of agriculture was at the period before us, these would probably furnish employment to not fewer than three hundred persons, of whom thirty-six are particularly noticed as being of that class of tenantry called villani, a respectable class, the predecessors of our modern copy-holders and free-holders. ”

“ Sheffield is the little capital of adistrict familiarly known by the name of Hallamshire. Shire is share: a portion of territory shared or appropriated so some city, town, or castle. It does not always imply that there is any peculiar jurisdiction prevailing: for we find many instances in the northern parts of England in which the term is loosely applied to tracts of country merely, as it seems, because lying near some place of ancient note. This in the county of York we have North-Allertonshire, and Sowerbyshire ”

“ Literary biography owes much to the Wartons—more than the present writers in this department seem disposed to acknowledge; and it is to a Warton, not Thomas, but his brother, Dr. Joseph Warton, that we owe the hint upon which I have proceeded, and, as I believe, settled the question for ever.
Dr. Warton, we have seen, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1780, vol. ii., informs us, that he learned from Dr. Bolton, Dean of Carlisle, that he had heard from a Mr. Potenger, a cousin of Pope, that Pope’s grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England living in Hampshire. ”

“ The last of the male line of the Lovetots, lords of Hallamshire, died between the 22d and 27th years of the reign of Henry II. He left an only daughter, named Matilda, or Maud, then of very tender age. This lady was heir to his large possessions, and through her mother nearly allied to the great house of Clare.
The right of the chief lords to dispose in marriage the heiress of those who held lands of them is one of the most indefensible points of the feudal system. ”

“ While I write this, a gentleman is pursuing most successfully investigations of a Roman station on the Foss-road a few miles from Bath, which has been noticed by neither ancient nor modern topographers. And on the other hand, how many names of Romand stations in Britain are preserved by Ptolemy and the Ravenna geographer, which the most acute investigators of the Roman antiquities of Britain have failed to appropriate!—With respect to the second point, the objection presses with equal force against every other part of the Domesday manor of Hallam. ”

“ The philanthropist who has witnessed the wretched accommodations which the mills erected on the rivers in general afforded to the workmen employed in them, and the ill effect both upon their comfort and morals which is the consequence of their many unemployed hours, will excuse the large addition which the introduction of the steam-engine has made to the ancient smoke of Sheffield, and wish that the use of them might become more general. ”

“ The descent of the maternal ancestors of the illustrious Poet may be traced to a source whence many families among the present aristocracy of Yorkshire have originally sprung,—the trade or commerce of the city of York. ”

“ Of all the places in the immediate vicinity of Sheffield which formed the terra of their ancestor, Kimberworth is the only manor in which I have found the family of De Busli exercising acts of ownership. About the year 1160, Richard de Busli, with the consent of Emma his wife and his heirs, granted to the monks of Kirkstead in Lincolnshire sufficient land in that manor for the erection of four iron-works, forgias, two for smelting the ore, and two ad fabricandum, for forming it into bars, with liberty to dig the ore in any part of the manor [4] . ”