in a place that began life, in the usual English fashion, under
the Britons and grew into municipal consciousness in the
fostering care of the Romans and the ruder nurture of the Saxons,
Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and the great line
of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield men
back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody
field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there
was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not
sure; but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other;
and it is certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen
days at Sheffield Manor just before he went to die at Leicester;
and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of sorrowful
captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield
Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil
War; but the famous industries of the place had begun long
before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his pilgrims,

"A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose."

Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from
Liverpool in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed
the best in the world. Manufactures flourished there apace when
England turned to them from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a
city of four hundred thousand or more. Apparently it has been
growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and adversity
always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued there
for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as
it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of