Nottinghamshire

“ Newcastle was appointed lord-lieutenant of Nottingham in 1809, a knight of the Garter in 1812, and on 4 April in the same year steward of the forest of Sherwood and of the park of Folewood, Nottinghamshire. He was a rigid conservative, and violently opposed the claims of the protestant dissenters, catholic emancipation, and parliamentary reform. On various occasions he laid himself open to the bitterest assaults of popular indignation. ”

“ No sweeter inn could be found in all Nottinghamshire than that of the Blue Boar. None had such lovely trees standing around, or was so covered with trailing clematis and sweet woodbine; none had such good beer and such humming ale; nor, in wintertime, when the north wind howled and snow drifted around the hedges, was there to be found, elsewhere, such a roaring fire as blazed upon the hearth of the Blue Boar. ”

“ Possibly some general rule had compelled all men who held less than a bovate or half-virgate to ‘add’ themselves to the manor of some lord. But the Nottinghamshire rule is rude and arbitrary. He who has seven houses against which geld is charged is a big man. On the other hand, it is probable that the Norman lords brought with them some notion, and not a very modest notion, of what a reasonably sufficient manerium should be. ”

“ The manufacture of tambour lace existed in Nottinghamshire in the 18th century, and was facilitated in the 19th century by the manufacture of machine-made net. From 1295 the county and town of Nottingham each returned two members to parliament. In 1572 East Retford was represented by two members, and in 1672 Newark-upon-Trent also. Under the Reform Act of 1832 the county returned four members in two divisions. By the act of 1885 it returned four members in four divisions; Newark and East Retford were disfranchised, and Nottingham returned three members in three divisions. ”

“ If Kent and Middlesex may be described as the counties of amateurs, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire should be called the counties of famous professionals. Between 1864 and 1889 Nottinghamshire was champion county twelve times Notts. and the county eleven was as a rule composed almost entirely of professional players, among whom have been many of the greatest names in the history of the game. ”

“ These removals become of serious consequence when the factories have been long established, because a population commensurate with their wants invariably grows up around them. The combinations in Nottinghamshire, of persons under the name of Luddites, drove a great number of lace-frames from that district, and caused establishments to be formed in Devonshire. ”

“ Nottingham enjoyed possibly the largest brewing and malting business in the country, and those trades were nearly wholly carried on in chambers and cellars and kilns cut out of the living rock. Mr. W. Stevenson, author of "Bygone Nottinghamshire," writes to me: "Last week I was with an antiquarian friend exploring an ancient passage in the castle rock, originally made as a sally-port to the castle, but at some later period when bricks came on the scene, converted or enlarged into a set of malt offices with malt kilns complete. ”

“ My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. ”

“ BERNARD, RICHARD (1567?–1641) , puritan divine, is described in a portrait (before his 'Threefold Treatise on the Sabbath,' 1641) as then aged 74. This gives us 1566-7 as the date of his birth. An incidental phrase in one of his Latin 'Epistles Dedicatory' designates Nottinghamshire as his native soil. This seems decisive ”

“ Cricketers all over the country had occasion to grumble at the weather in 1875. It was both wet and miserably cold the greater part of the year, and wickets everywhere were sticky and very often unplayable. Batting averages went down considerably, and bowlers got great break on the ball. Slow and medium round-arm bowlers had their opportunity, and improved to some extent, and batsmen who had only been used to straight fast were a little bit abroad in playing them. Alfred Shaw at times did what he liked with the ball; and I shall never forget his wonderful performance for Nottinghamshire v. ”

“ One may easily guess Nottingham to have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. ”

“ A fair sight was Nottingham Town on the day of the shooting match. All along upon the green meadow beneath the town wall stretched a row of benches, one above the other, which were for knight and lady, squire and dame, and rich burghers and their wives; for none but those of rank and quality were to sit there. At the end of the range, near the target, was a raised seat bedecked with ribbons and scarfs and garlands of flowers, for the Sheriff of Nottingham and his dame. ”

“ Fancy hosiery is knitted according to patterns, the setting up of which requires great skill. Vast amounts of lace are woven, and in the factories female labor preponderates. The upper town of Nottingham, clustering around the castle on the river-crag, has a picturesque aspect from the valley below. Among the features of the lower town is the market-place, a triangular area of slightly over four acres, where the market is held every Saturday, and where once a year is also held that great event of Nottingham, the Michaelmas goose fair. ”

“ Having made this deprecation on behalf of my own criminality in using such a word as 'genteel,' I go on to say that whilst Northampton was (and is, I believe) of all towns the most genteel, Nottingham for more than two centuries has been the most insurrectionary and in a scarlet excess democratic. Nottingham, in fact, has always resembled the Alexandria of ancient days; whilst Northampton could not be other than aristocratic as the centre of a county more thickly gemmed by the ancestral seats of our nobility than any beside in the island. ”

“ The Peoples’ Charter had its stronghold here, and all radical reforms are sure to find sympathy and support among the People of Nottingham. I should think no equal population in the kingdom would sing “Britons never, never will be slaves,” with more spirit, or, perhaps, with more understanding. Their plucky, English natures became terribly stirred up in the exciting time of the Reform Bill, and they burned down the magnificent palace-castle of the old Duke of Newcastle, crowning the mountainous rock which terminates on the west the elevated ridge on which the town is built. ”

“ The secret of the rapid development of Nottingham during the present century, the cause, direct or indirect, of the great blocks of buildings that rise high above the level of the houses on the hill, and have spread so widely over the meadows of the Trent and Leen, is the manufacture of hosiery and lace. ”

“ Walking on through some of the narrow streets which then formed the lower part of the good town of Nottingham, with the projecting gables of the upper stories shading them from the sun, and nearly meeting overhead, they at length reached a curiously carved and ornamented wooden house, small and sunk in amongst the others, so as scarcely to be seen by any one passing hurriedly along, like a modest and retiring man jostled back from observation by the obtrusive crowd. ”

“ Our run from Nottingham to Oxford was uneventful, for we roved rather at random for the day through the delightful Midland country. At Nottingham one will find the Victoria is quite up to the standard of station-hotel excellence in England and the rates refreshingly low. The city itself will not detain one long, for the great wave of modern progress that has inundated it has swept away most of its ancient landmarks. The old castle, once the key to the Northlands, has been superseded by a palatial structure which now serves as museum and art gallery. ”

“ Scarped cliffs of grey sandstone support the gardens and terraces of the castle, in the rear of which the town rises from the valley in alternating lines of trees and houses, broken here and there by the steeple or tower of a church. But in olden times, when the valley plain was free from railways, factories, and chimneys, Nottingham must have been a singularly picturesque town. Then the view from the valley of the Trent, especially from near the influx of the Leen, must have been a worthy subject for an artist. ”

“ The county or sheriff prison for Notts and Derby was, as far as can be traced back by records, half-way up the over ninety feet cliff of the town of Nottingham, and was entered from the King's hall at the top. Light holes were made in the face of the rock to the south. In these vaults, now closed, men and women were confined like wild beasts, on straw. The prior and monks were enclosed here in the time of Henry VIII., and were marched thence to the gallows. ”

“ Nottingham we arrived at after crossing the Roman road called Foss: it is a pleasant and beautiful town. They have a great manufacture here for stockings, which they weave in looms from the invention of a neighbouring clergyman. Their ale is highly valued for softness and pleasant 53taste: the cellars in the town are hewn out of the rock two or three story deep, to fourscore steps sometimes. The castle is a goodly building on a high perpendicular rock; seems to have been modelled after some of Inigo Jones’s draughts: many good pictures there: it commands a vast prospect. ”

“ Pancras parish in the month of August, 1799, make over to Messrs. Lambert's, cotton spinners, hosiers and lace men, of St. Mary's parish, Nottingham, our young orphan boy, together with seventy-nine other boys and girls as parish apprentices, till they arrived at the age of twenty-one years.
The poor deluded young creatures were so inflated with joy that they began to treat their old nurses with insolence, and refused to associate with children, who, from sickness, or being under age, had not been accepted. ”

“ I had such an impression of him hustling and bustling around at Notting Hill, searching cellars until he found one with newly arrived coal in it; ringing door bells, exciting a whole neighborhood, calling up to second-story windows, stopping people in the streets, hotter and hotter on the trail of a wretched impostor of a chemist's pupil. After his efficiency at Notting Hill, we'd expect to hear that he went to the station, and—something like this:
"It is said that clinkers fell, in your street, at about ten minutes past four o'clock, afternoon of July fifth. ”

“ May 29th.—After breakfast, this morning, I wandered out and lost myself; but at last found the post-office, and a letter from Mr. Wilding, with some perplexing intelligence. Nottingham is an unlovely and uninteresting town. The castle I did not see; but, I happened upon a large and stately old church, almost cathedralic in its dimensions. On returning to the hotel, we deliberated on the mode of getting to Newstead Abbey, and we finally decided upon taking a fly, in which conveyance, accordingly, we set out before twelve. ”

“ The industries also include bleaching, the dyeing, spinning and twisting of silk, the spinning of cotton and woollen yarn, tanning, engineering and brewing, while cycle works and tobacco factories are important, and the industries have the advantage of the close proximity of coal-mines. Besides the general market there is a large cattle market.
Nottingham received its style of a city and county of a city by letters patent of the 7th of August 1897. The parliamentary borough returns three members to parliament, being divided into W., E. and S. divisions. ”

“ I rode the whole night, and saw only from a distance, and by moonlight, Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s birth-place and family seat, now much neglected.
Besides the Gothic church (of which nearly every English town possesses one, more or less beautiful,) there is not much to be seen in Nottingham; a remarkable manufactory of net excepted, where the steam-engines do all the work, and only a single man stands by the machinery to take care that nothing goes wrong. ”

“ A dozen generations of Nottingham burghers had been ordering their own market, taking the rents of their butcheries and fish stalls and storage rooms, supervising their wool traders and mercers, and admitting new burgesses to their company by common consent, while the men of Reading were still trying in vain every means by which they might win like privileges from the abbot who owned the town. Everywhere the same story is repeated, with varying incidents of passion and violence. ”

“ The glory of Notting Hill in having achieved its independence, has been enough for me to dream of for many years, as I sat beside the fire. Is it really not enough for you, who have had so many other affairs to excite and distract you? Notting Hill is a nation. Why should it condescend to be a [Pg 274] mere Empire? You wish to pull down the statue of General Wilson, which the men of Bayswater have so rightly erected in Westbourne Grove. ”

“ The town of Nottingham is the neatest town I have seen, built of stone and delicate, Large and long Streetes much like London, and ye houses Lofty and well built. The Market place is very broad, out of wch runns a very Large Streete much like Holborn but the buildings ffine, and there is a Pyaza all 56along one side of one of the Streetes, wth Stone pillars for walking that runns the Length of the Streetes wch is a mile long. All the Streetes are of a good size all about ye town and well pitch’d, there are severall good houses in the town. ”

“ A little gust of wind brew through the night, and then the first voice answered—
"But in this world there are some, be they wise or foolish, whom nothing intoxicates. There are some who see all your disturbances like a cloud of flies. They know that while men will laugh at your Notting Hill, and will study and rehearse and sing of Athens and Jerusalem, Athens and Jerusalem were silly suburbs like your Notting Hill. They know that the earth itself is a suburb, and can feel only drearily and respectably amused as they move upon it." ”