The Little History of Derbyshire E-Book

Julia A. Hickey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 237

Beschreibung

Derbyshire is a county of dramatic variations and contrasts created by millennia of geological change. Situated in the very middle of England, it is the furthest county from the sea. Its minerals, rivers and landscapes have guided the people of Derbyshire through the centuries, from its first Stone Age cave dwellers, Roman rulers and industrialists to more than 13 million people who visit its Peak District National Park each year. Discover the story of Derbyshire's prehistoric past, its feudal keeps and royal forests, and the fortunes of Bess of Hardwick, Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Florence Nightingale. From lead miners to revolutionaries, cotton mills to coal mines, iron foundries and quarries to motor cars, bouncing bombs and jet engines, learn how the men and women of Derbyshire have helped shape the history of a nation.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Julia A. Hickey, 2024

The right of Julia A. Hickey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 416 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologie

CONTENTS

About the Author

1   The Beginning of Derbyshire

2   Norman Derbyshire

3   Medieval Derbyshire

4   Tudor Derbyshire

5   Stuart Derbyshire: A Civil War

6   Georgian Derbyshire: Revolutions and Rebellions

7   Victorian Derbyshire

8   The World at War

9   Modern Times

Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia Hickey’s interest in the history of Derbyshire began more than twenty-five years ago when she first moved to the Peak District. She has worked in a variety of educational settings including Sheffield Hallam University and the Workers’ Educational Association, where she drew on Derbyshire’s rich and diverse past as a focus for teaching. She is currently a freelance tutor and blogger at thehistoryjar.com.

Julia has written five history books as well as short stories for magazines that often draw their inspiration from her surroundings. Julia loves exploring old churches, castles and museums. She enjoys walking and photographing Derbyshire’s spectacular views as well as discovering unexpected elements of the landscape, such as the 1,500 or so discarded millstones left where they were hewn from the rock.

1

THE BEGINNING OF DERBYSHIRE

About 340 million years ago, in an era known as the Carboniferous period, Derbyshire was covered by a warm, shallow sea and bordered by a series of coral reefs, beyond which lay deep water. The clear tropical expanse was teeming with life, including sharks and dolphins. Shelled creatures called brachiopods with two hinged shells, bivalve molluscs and forests of five-armed crinoids resembling modern sea urchins, covered the seabed. The latter are sometimes called sea lilies because their fossilised remains look more like plants than animals. When the marine life died, their remains (rich in calcium carbonate) drifted to the seabed, built up over millennia, and compacted to form limestone.

From time to time, volcanoes on the seabed south-west of modern Matlock and in the area around Tideswell exploded, ejecting ash and lava that solidified rapidly to create hard igneous rocks between the beds of softer limestone. Magma (molten rock), rich in minerals, forced its way into gaps and fissures in the sedimentary layers that crystalised as it cooled, forming veins of lead, copper, fluorspar and Blue John, among more than 100 mineral types to be found in Derbyshire.

Conditions changed very gradually but the seabed was forever altering. Great rivers flowed south from mountains pushed up in the north during the earlier Devonian geological period. The water slowed when it reached the shallows, creating a landscape of braided deltas. The currents were no longer able to carry their load of sediment and other materials when they reached the outer limits of the shallow sea. The deposits left on the reef boundaries created layers of millstone grit and shale on top of limestone in the region that would become Derbyshire’s Peak District. Finer silts and sediments continued on their journey into the deep seas to the east and west, beyond the reefs.

As the deltas expanded, they created a densely vegetated swamp. Trees and ferns thrived. When they died and rotted, they in turn became compressed, the land subsided, and the sea reclaimed the area as the cycle repeated itself, creating bands of compacted mud, clay and sandstones. Transformed plant remains formed a layer known as the Coal Measures running through the north-east of Derbyshire southwards to the Amber Valley, Erewash and into the Trent Valley.

Water continued to ebb and flow, sculpting the earth as it moved. The land buckled under enormous pressures and pushed up bands of rock laid down in earlier periods into a geological formation known as the Derbyshire Dome. The exposed layers were subject to the forces of wind, rain and ice that scoured away the sandstones, millstone grits and shale to create a plateau and to reveal the oldest limestone deposits of the modern White Peak, extending from Wirksworth in the south to Castleton in the north. Despite the erosion, the uplands in this area are between 250m and 400m above sea level today. The more elevated gritstones and shales are the foundations of the Dark Peak in the north-west of the county, of which Kinder Scout, 624m above sea level, is a part. The exposed gritstone that lay to either side of the Derbyshire Dome formed steep cliffs known locally as ‘edges’, including Stanage Edge, Curbar Edge, Gardom’s and Froggatt Edge to the east, and in the west the escarpment known as the Roaches.

Around 2.4 million years ago the first of a succession of Ice Ages covered the region with a sheet of ice hundreds of metres thick, carving out valleys and scouring the uplands. The ice advanced and retreated on at least four occasions as the climate cooled and then warmed again. In the south of Derbyshire, a landscape created from layers of sediment was covered by fertile glacial deposits carried south by ice sheets and then left behind as they retreated. Elsewhere, the ice left huge boulders, known as erratics, carried long distances from their source areas. Several of these can be found on the edge of Stanton Moor near Bakewell, including the Cat Stone and the Three Ships, found at Birchen Edge near Baslow.

Water draining from the uplands eroded the blankets of glacial sediment and cut through the sandstone beneath to create gently rolling hills. Today the landscape to the south-west of Derbyshire is characterised by the River Dove and pasture that extends across its wide valley. Further north, as the ice melted, rivers created valleys before disappearing underground through cracks and fissures, dissolving the limestone as it flowed, forming caves and caverns. Some dales still have streams running through them, but others are dry or seasonal.

A raging torrent of meltwater, which would become the River Derwent, moulded the gritstone edges with its erosive force before slicing through shale and mudstone deposits to create a wide valley. The river wound south, collecting water from within its catchment of smaller rivers, streams and channels until it met with the River Trent not far south-east of Derby. The process of water erosion and deposition created bands of undulating sand and mudstones on their floodplains. Over time, the water deposited sand and gravel, forming deep terraces on either side of the rivers to create a light loam-based soil that lends itself to farming. The lowlands remain an unambiguous contrast to the north-west of Derbyshire that form part of the chain of Pennine Hills described as the ‘backbone of England’.

EARLY DERBYSHIRE INHABITANTS

Between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago the region looked more like Siberian grassland tundra than the landscape of today. Fossil remains tell us that herds of woolly mammoth, rhinos, deer and bison came in search of food. Britain was not yet an island. It was joined by a wide land bridge to Europe. Sea levels were as much as 120m lower than they are today because water was locked into the ice sheets. The herds were followed by hyenas, lions and wolves.

Small groups of Neanderthal people advanced north in search of food and shelter from near-Arctic conditions. Their population was small and almost all traces of them have been obliterated by repeated glaciation. Neanderthals, who proceeded modern Homo sapiens, were physically adapted to cold environments. They made temporary homes in upland areas in Derbyshire’s brief summers. Archaeological evidence shows that they visited Creswell Crags and other caves. When winter tightened its grip and the herds migrated south along the Trent Valley in search of fresh grazing, the men and women who hunted them followed. On occasion, plummeting temperatures and sheets of ice up to a mile thick in places made Derbyshire far too inhospitable for anything to flourish.

The nomadic population returned whenever the ice retreated. They camped near rivers or on hills overlooking valleys. Evidence of windbreaks, hearths and stone tools have been found at Wetton Mill and Broomhead Moor in the Peak District. Families revisited the same sites over a long period of time, following established seasonal routes to places they knew to be rich in wildlife, berries and edible plants. Other groups found shelter in the limestone cave systems in the Manifold Valley; at Ravensdale, between Wardlow and Cressbrook, where a 40,000-year-old flint scraper was discovered; and at Creswell Crags in the north-east of modern-day Derbyshire, on the border with Nottinghamshire.

The men and women who lived at Creswell and other cave systems hunted their prey at close range with spears before returning to their caves or camps, where they butchered the meat in the light of fires built for warmth and to drive off animals. Bears, lions and hyenas presented a danger, but their skins provided clothing and blankets while their teeth and claws were worn as decoration. The people who lived in Robin Hood Cave at Creswell Crags made chopping and scraping tools from quartzite, or chert, a local stone harder than flint. Inhabitants of the crags crafted tools from bones and antlers as well as knapping flint from cores they carried with them into Derbyshire to make hand axes, scrapers and arrow heads.

Evidence for Neanderthal occupation anywhere stops about 36,000 years ago. It is unclear why the species became extinct. It has been suggested that they could not adapt to the warming climate at the end of the last Ice Age. More significantly, perhaps, their disappearance from the archaeological record coincides with the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe from Africa. It is uncertain whether early modern humans brought new diseases with them or if the two groups competed for limited resources.

Homo sapiens migrants began to use the caves that the Neanderthal inhabited at Creswell and elsewhere about 29,000 years ago. Excavations have uncovered spear heads, scrapers, knives, bone needles, awls and borers. Hunters started using bows and arrows for the first time. The herds of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros had not returned as the ice retreated. Instead, deer, bison and smaller mammals including hare and lemming were on the menu. Around 12,500 years ago, at Robin Hood’s Cave, someone spent time carefully engraving a wild horse’s head onto a piece of bone. Another engraving, on a piece of reindeer rib, found in Pin Hole Cave also at Creswell, depicts what appears to be a human wearing a mask and holding a bow. Whoever lived in the row of limestone caves also created Britain’s only known cave art, depicting the herds of bison, horse and deer that roamed the land around Creswell as well as a bird, carved into the ceiling, with a long, curved beak like an ibis.

Derbyshire is rich in prehistoric rock art. Its existence and range of sites where it may be found helps to show that as the climate became more temperate, migrant hunters extended their range to the north-west and north-east of Derbyshire. Artists carved patterns into rock surfaces that include rings, spirals, arcs, zigzags and hollows known as ‘cups’. The shapes are difficult to date as some of the designs are thought to have originated in the later Bronze Age. It is impossible to know what the symbols may have meant. Their outdoor location and the use of horizontal surfaces for the decoration suggests some astronomical significance. A carved boulder at Ashover dates from between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago, although the best-known rock art can be found at Gardom’s Edge.

As the planet warmed, the climate became milder and wetter and the ice sheets continued their retreat, releasing water as they melted. Sea levels rose, filling the area of the North Sea and the Channel with water. Britain became an island. Around 4,000 BC men and women began to take up permanent residence in Derbyshire, which was almost completely covered in forest.

Most people chose to live in places that were good vantage points for hunting the herds of deer and wild pig that roamed the hills. They caught birds and fish and also gathered crab apples, hazel nuts, edible berries and plants. The hunters used arrow tips made from shards of triangular flint or chert called microliths that were set in rows with resin. They began to clear the forest with burning so that they could catch the game that came to feed on new growth. As well as making hunting more predictable, it also had the effect of eroding the thin upland soil. When the weather became wetter, the ground became waterlogged and moorland peat started to form.

LISMORE FIELDS AND DERBYSHIRE’S FIRST FARMERS

One group made their home near the River Wye at Lismore Fields, Buxton. It is described as one of the most important Neolithic settlements so far found in Britain. Excavation revealed post holes and timber floors that were all that remained of two neolithic longhouses, as well as a later Mesolithic roundhouse. The site also contained stone tools, worked flint and pottery.

The Lismore Pot, a shouldered pot which is about 5,500 years old, is one of the oldest pots ever discovered in Britain. Analysis of residue attached to the inside of the bowl and other pottery shards found at the site showed that the people who lived at Lismore reared cattle for meat and for milk, ate honey taken from wild bees, and gathered apples.

Cereal stores were also discovered. Archaeologists believe that Lismore Fields could be the site of the earliest cereal farming yet discovered in the whole country. Analysis of food residues also indicated that Lismore’s population ate emmer wheat. Emmer wheat is a wild grass that was gathered and cooked as a porridge. Farming is thought to have been introduced to Britain in around 4000 BC. It is also possible that, rather than growing it themselves, the wheat was being gathered from the wild, or even that it was being traded along a network that extended across the seas.

In about 3500 BC the hunters and gathers who lived in Britain began to change their habits. There were still large numbers of wild animals roaming Derbyshire’s forests, including aurochs and deer, but the larger animals of earlier times were replaced by wild boar, foxes, hares, squirrel, beavers, bears and wolves. As well as hunting and gathering, the people of Derbyshire started to farm the land. They wanted to keep cattle and to help edible herbaceous plants and roots to grow. They were already clearing trees to encourage herds of deer to graze on new growth to ensure good hunting, but now they began to clear more trees, using polished stone axes, to create fields for pasture and for crops.

HIGHS AND LOWS

At about the same time that the people who lived in Derbyshire began to farm, they also began to build barrows on top of hills and ridges where they buried their dead. Place names ending in ‘Low’ in Derbyshire often indicate the site of burials or cairns. In total, there are more than 500 barrows across the region, dating mainly from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age. The word comes from the Old English ‘hlaw’, which means a rounded hill. In Derbyshire these summits are the high points upon which burial mounds were often built and which still dominate the landscape today.

The first burial chambers were chambered tombs formed from immense stone slabs and lengths of dry stone walling incorporating a central passageway to the burial chambers. The structures were covered with a mound of earth, but they were not closed once an interment took place. People could access the corridor through a narrow stone-lined entrance so that they could revisit the bodies of their ancestors. There is evidence that they rearranged or even removed the bones on occasion. Many generations might be buried in one tomb or their cremated remains placed there.

The cairns were a reminder that the ancestors were never far away. They may also have made a statement about landownership and belonging. Minninglow is Derbyshire’s largest tomb and can be seen for many miles. The tree-capped hill dominates the horizon between Parwich and Elton. It began as a small mound but developed into a long mound with four or more burial chambers. Later still, it was enlarged again with the addition of two bowl barrows. These new earthworks and the addition of an encircling dry stone wall created a huge circular mound, approximately 40m in diameter. Like most of the other burial mounds in the Peak District, it demonstrates evidence of repeated use at different times. Excavation revealed Roman pottery and coins as well as fragments of earlier bones.

In common with most of the barrows in the Peak District, it was excavated during the Victorian Period by Thomas Bateman, who discovered that its contents had been robbed by earlier treasure hunters.

THE BARROW KNIGHT

Thomas Bateman, born in 1821 in Rowsley near Bakewell, was raised after his father’s death, when Thomas was 14, by his grandfather at Middleton Hall in Middleton-by-Youlgreave. He became enthralled by the number of burial mounds that dotted the Peak District and by his grandfather’s antiquarian collection of finds and books.

As a young man Bateman was introduced to archaeological excavation when a medieval church in Bakewell was demolished. In 1844 he joined in the excavation of prehistoric graves in Kent supervised by the British Archaeological Association. The following year, Bateman excavated thirty-eight barrows in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, earning the nickname ‘The Barrow Knight’. During his life he excavated more than 200 burial mounds and kept records of his work, writing two books, which included beautiful illustrations of the finds that he excavated. His methods, although disapproved of today for their speed and use of labourers without formal archaeological training, were good for the time. He kept accounts of what he was excavating, unlike many others who dug into Derbyshire’s ancient barrows and left no record of what they found. He also left a brass token labelled ‘T. Bateman’ in place of the finds he removed and kept in his collection at his home.

He died, aged 39, at Middleton-by-Youlgreave and was buried, according to his wishes, in a field behind the chapel rather than in the local churchyard. His tomb includes a stone replica of a Bronze Age collared urn like the ones he unearthed from Derbyshire’s barrows.

THE BRONZE AGE (C. 2300 BC–800 BC)

A new group of settlers, possibly originating from the area of modern Spain, began to spread across northern Europe. The Beaker people, named after the drinking vessel associated with archaeological finds where they lived and which were often buried with their dead, arrived in Derbyshire around 4,500 years ago but populations continued to be concentrated in the upland areas. People adopted new cultural practices as the two groups merged.

At about the same time as the Beaker people became a part of Derbyshire’s DNA, its inhabitants began to build henges constructed from a stone circle surrounded by a massive ditch and bank. They built one at Arbor Low, south-west of Bakewell, and another about 10 miles to the north-west at Dove Holes called the Bull Ring. Both lie on the same prehistoric trackway, suggesting ideal meeting points for both ritual and for trade.

THE STONEHENGE OF THE NORTH

The most important henge in Derbyshire is at Arbor Low. It sits on an exposed limestone ridge 373m above sea level close to Gib Hill long barrow. The burial cairn, one of the few in the Peak District not to be round, was already old when work on the henge first began. Excavations in 1901 showed that Arbor Low’s 3m-deep outer ditch was dug with the aid of antler tine picks and shovels made from ox bone. As the channel was quarried, other labourers transported the soil to a bank inside the ditch with wicker baskets. It probably took several years and an entire community’s labour to complete.

An inner earth bank, when Arbor Low was first built, stood 3m high and 8–10m wide. The bank and ditch are interrupted by two entrances; one to the north-west and the second to the south-east. Inside the bank there was a 43m-wide circle of fifty lime stones, now flattened and eroded. There is also a small group of four fallen stones at the middle of the ring called a ‘cove’. Archaeologists believe that this confined space, hidden from view by the stones that enclosed it, was where religious rituals or ceremonies took place, out of sight of the majority of the people who gathered at the henge.

It has been argued that the location of the henge is significant to the rising of the midwinter sun. It is also plausible that it might have some relation to the setting of a full moon at midwinter and in midsummer. Whatever the possible associations, astronomical alignments and cultural significance, it is certain that people came together from across the uplands and perhaps beyond to celebrate special times of the year.

BRONZE AGE INDUSTRY

The Beaker people knew how to work metals. Excavation of a burial chamber at Staker Hill near Buxton revealed a skeleton adorned with bronze ear clips, while another barrow at Haddon, near Bakewell, yielded a bronze awl. At first smiths used copper, but they soon learned to make bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. Bronze tools and weapons began to appear more frequently, although they remained luxury items used by elite members of society. Most people continued to use stone tools. Barbed and tanged arrow heads and polished axeheads have been found across Derbyshire dating from this period.

At first, the smiths who created new metal tools mimicked earlier stone ones, but gradually the metal workers improved upon the designs they created. Flat axes were cast by pouring molten metal alloys into simple, single, flat stone moulds. Later, axes were cast using two-part moulds, and by the end of the Bronze Age smiths were able to produce an axe head with a hollow socket at its base so that a wooden haft could be inserted.

Underground, the county’s first mining industry was beginning to take shape. Miners at Ecton Hill, to the south-west beyond the Manifold Valley near Warslow, extracted copper and lead ore with bone and red deer antler picks, as well as hammer stones, following mineral veins uphill by means of shallow drifts.

BRONZE AGE BURIALS

Burial practices had changed. Communal mounds fell out of use. Many of the smaller mounds that dot high ground in the Peak District originate from the Bronze Age. Cairn builders began to create stone boxes known as ‘cists’ at the base of the tomb, where a single body or urn containing cremated remains was placed carefully. Mounds were enlarged if required or new mounds created. They cluster together in the landscape, often near other prehistoric monuments.

Two new circular burial mounds were superimposed on the older landscape at Arbor Low and Gibb’s Hill, making it more prominent in the landscape. A burial mound was created from the bank at Arbor Low with a small internal stone chamber containing food pots, a bronze pin and a cremation. At Beeley Moor, near Chatsworth, an area inhabited throughout the Bronze Age, there are three joined mounds that are part of a system of burials, stone circles and field structures. The best known is Hob Hurst’s House at Harland Edge, but its rectangular shape has led to some speculation that it might be Iron rather than Bronze Age. When Bateman excavated it in 1853, he found evidence of a cremation. Pots were often placed with the dead or they were buried as containers for cremated remains. As in earlier times, it is thought that the burial mounds reinforced a connection to the land for the living where their ancestors were buried.

Small stone circles sprouted on the moorland uplands. The circles are often associated with urns containing cremation burials. They could have been built by extended families rather than entire communities. The Wet Withens stone circle, built on a rubble bank on Eyam Moor, looks towards Higger Tor. The stones, which are up to a metre tall, are almost invisible during the summer months because of the long grasses and heathers. More accessible, the Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor contains a ring of stones, each upright and less than a metre high. According to legend, the nine standing stones on Stanton Moor and their accompanying ‘King Stone’ were revellers petrified by an outraged priest when he caught them dancing on Sunday. In reality, the stones are part of a more complicated network of standing stones and prehistoric circles that cover the moor.

On a clear day the hill at Minninglow with its Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs can be seen across the area, joining communities together as well as marking boundaries.

A LEGENDARY TOWN

Potential Bronze Age settlements have been identified to the north-east of Derbyshire near Dronfield, and at Totley Moor near Sheffield. Legends also persist about a sunken town at Leash Fen, 305m above sea level between Chesterfield and Baslow. Today the area is a boggy stretch of heather and gorse. A well-known local rhyme states:

When Chesterfield was gorse and broom

Leash Fen was a market town;

Now Chesterfield is a market town,

Leash Fen is but gorse and broom.

Occasionally pieces of pottery and worked oak are excavated during drainage work, suggesting that there is some truth to the story.

A CHANGE IN WEATHER

Botanical evidence shows that life became more difficult for Derbyshire’s Bronze Age inhabitants as the climate became increasingly wet and unpredictable. Much of the Stone and Bronze Age archaeology of the Peak District lies beneath peat, which forms in waterlogged conditions. Farmers, like those who lived at Leash Fen, were no longer able to grow their arable crops in the highest upland areas. It is also possible that the shallow soils associated with the limestone plateau and gritstone edges was exhausted after centuries of cultivation.

As the weather continued to deteriorate, crops failed and the soil became unworkable, the Peak District’s climate refugees sought out new land to call their own and the peat blanketed once thriving prehistoric settlements. Some communities moved from the uplands to lowland river valleys, where they deforested the land and began to rebuild their lives.

IRON AGE DERBYSHIRE (800 BC to AD 50)

Immigrants from Western Europe travelled north and west along the river routes that heralded the arrival of earlier settlers into Derbyshire, joining the existing population in the valleys and uplands. Genome sequencing shows that they intermarried with the people who were already here and shared their new iron working skills. At Burbage Brook, near Hathersage, evidence of iron smelting has been uncovered. As well as weapons, iron ploughshares meant that more land could be planted.

People often continued to live as they had done for generations, in timber roundhouses with their doors facing south-east to benefit from natural light and warmth. They settled in the Trent Valley, dividing the land into field systems with ditches and paddocks. In the upland areas, fields were laboriously cleared of stone so that more land could be cultivated. Stones were left in small piles or along the edge of the field boundaries. At Big Moor, an enterprising family used stone to foot the walls of their home.

Excavation at Ravencliff Cave in Cressbrook Dale unearthed Neolithic axe blades and flint scrapers, as well as pottery from the Iron Age. Harborough Rocks, near the village of Brassington, sits 379m above sea level. It has provided a home for people since the Ice Age. Excavation in 1889 by J. Ward and C. Gregory uncovered potsherds, charcoal and animal bone. At the time it was concluded that the finds belonged to the Iron Age, a view that was confirmed by twentieth-century excavations and analysis of finds.

As the population grew, more land was cleared and people formed themselves into tribes to defend their territories. The earliest written evidence of the so-called Ancient Britons who spoke a Celtic language is from Greco-Roman writers, who described tribal groups tied together by language, culture and religion. The Brigantes, which translates to