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& picture of tfjc Evou ftvatrc, 



(In the Seventeenth Century). 



By Sir George R. Sitwell, Bart. 



MONGST the MSS. at Renishaw is a letter book kept 

 by George Sitwell, of that place, between July, 

 1662, and August, 1666, and containing nearly five 

 hundred letters besides accounts. Such of these as relate to 

 domestic life or to public events I hope this winter to print at 

 my press at Scarborough, in a large collection of letters of 

 my own family and of the Sacheverells. But the owner of this 

 book was not only a country gentleman. In company with many 

 squires in the counties of Derby, York, and Nottingham, he 

 added to his fortune, and repaired the breaches in it made by the 

 fines of the civil war, by the manufacture of iron. We have 

 here a complete picture of the iron trade, and so thoroughly has 

 the rather dry and dull subject of the growth of British industry 

 and commerce been neglected by our historians, that I have 

 thought it worth while to gather from this source some of the 

 materials of history. Heavy and technical my article must 

 necessarily be, and it must also be cramped, from the difficulty of 

 forcibly compressing such a mass of material into a narrow and 

 limited space, which forbids the drawing of deductions and of 

 inferences ; but it will have served its purpose if it suggests these 

 to some future writer on commercial England. 



First, as to the writer. He was born in 1600, and had a 

 minority of about ten years, during which time his mother re- 

 married Henry Wigfall, Esquire, who became his guardian. He 

 was high collector of a subsidy for the hundreds of Scarsdale and 





