TO THE MOST NOBLE WILLIAM SPENCER CAVENDISH, Duke of Devonshire, MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON, EARL OF DEVONSHIRE, BARON CLIFFORD, AND BARON K. G. K. A. LORD LIEUTENANT AND HIGH STEWARD OF THE COUNTY Of Derby, HIGH STEWARD OF THE CORPORATION OF DERBY, D. C. L. &c. &c. MY LORD DUKE, A HISTORY of DERBYSHIRE has necessarily a claim upon the patronage of your Grace; because that extensive influence, with which philanthropy, munificence, patriotism and love of the liberal arts, endow rank and opulence, is, my Lord Duke, your own; and this County is happily the seat of its power. Its beneficent spirit is felt in Ireland; and wherever your Grace possesses domains, there, as from a centre, it expands-does good within its immediate sphere, and spreads wide around it the ascendant im vii pulse of example. A History of Derbyshire will be, for the most part, a record of such examples: it cannot but narrate the patriotism of your Grace's ancestors, to whose public spirit we owe the preservation of the British Constitution; and it must endeavour to speak, although in inadequate terms, of that munificence by which your Grace preserves and increases to your tenantry, and to every place politically or personally connected with you, my Lord Duke, the blessings that emanate from the British Constitution. When we look around us through the County which this Volume describes, we see the benignant effects of liberality in its greatest Landowner; and when a general agricultural calamity of the nation has, at times, checked any of those effects, we have had here the gratification of observing, that over the Derbyshire domains of your Grace, those calamities passed with mitigated, if not with forceless, injury. The personal friendship of the Sovereign, and the anxiety of your Grace to introduce the energy of liberality into the councils of the State, are the necessary results of that beneficence of heart, which induces you, my Lord Duke, to regard the poor with charity; to extend your care to the progress of education and to the increase of knowledge; to afford your patronage on every occasion to the cultivation of the Arts and Sciences; to enrich your splendid mansions with paintings and statuary ;—in a word, at once to dispense comforts to the industrious labourer, and to stimulate and invigorate the intellectual energies of the aspiring. viii With these impressions, my Lord Duke, this History and Gazetteer of Derbyshire, in which it has been attempted to comprise general information with practical knowledge, and to form a work equally suited to the Gentleman, the Student, and the Man of Business, is most respectfully DEDICATED to your GRACE by Your GRACE'S most obedient, and most devoted humble Servant, Derby, February 28, 1829. STEPHEN GLOVER. |