“Their Heritage a Sunless Day”: A Case Study Investigation into the Transformation of Sheffield (1700-1900)

Who owns England? At first seems like a fairly straightforward question - the Crown? The government? Members of the landed aristocracy? But as Guy Shrubsole has investigated, it is, in fact, far more complicated, with much of the land ownership of England buried, and very intentionally so. We, Finn, a history student, and Eva, a law student, have sought to use Shrubsole's approach towards industrial Britain, tracing back individual land and property owners and the complex laws which governed their conduct.

When wilt Thou save the people?

O God of mercy! when?

Not kings and lords, but nations!

Not thrones and crowns, but men!

Flowers of Thy heart, O God, are they!

Let them not pass, like weeds, away!

Their heritage a sunless day!

God save the people!

Written by Ebenezer Elliot, a Victorian political activist and poet from Rotherham and well known to the Sheffield area, in 1884, in the middle of our period, it helps sum up the feeling of the time held by the many: ordinary people desperate for change. During our research into the historical and legal transformation of Sheffield during its rapid industrialisation between 1700 and 1900, we found evidence of this desperate feeling. The change that Elliott was in pursuit of, with the aim of bringing brightness to the “sunless days”, was in opposition to the traditional systems of power and possession that underpinned the city at the time.

As part of the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience scheme (SURE), Eva and I have collaborated to investigate the transformation of Sheffield through the lens of the changing legal landscape in regards to land and ownership rights. Through our research we hoped to not only uncover from the archives what happened legally in terms of the piecemeal reforms affecting land ownership, but how this fitted within, and in some regards countered, the historical perspective of Sheffield's transformation.

The Sheffield City Archives served as the setting for the large bulk of our research. The place where we requested countless documents only to be informed that they are held off site so could at the earliest be here mid-August. The place where we had countless conversations with the endlessly helpful and patient archivists about the documents that we had requested and how best for us to record them. The place where we learnt to hear the other out, to see the document not only as a legal one, showing how leases and deeds were conducted, and not just a historical one, outlining the people and places they were involved in.

The interdisciplinary nature of our research was central to our process. The conversations fostered trying to balance our differing approaches and ways of seeing and understanding. This difference in perspective is really what made our research both so successful in terms of learning from the previously uncovered documents from the archives but also in terms of the process of researching that intrinsically brought out discussion from us both.

Our research hinged on the collaboration of law and history, enabling us to make the most from the archival documents, challenging our own individual subjective lens we approach documents with. This enabled us to uncover and delve into areas of the archival documents which would have otherwise gone amiss to each of us individually.

We explored three case studies from the Sheffield archives, each relating to a differentaspect of legal and social transformation, coming together to paint a fuller picture of Sheffield.

These records serve to demonstrate the climate of Sheffield at the time, as a wide variety of people had their livelihoods devastated including steel workers, farmers, widows, factory owners, and in the case of the Ship Inn, pub landlords. All these people, alongside their address and livelihoods were recorded when claiming for the Great Sheffield Flood, in turn painting a picture of the social character of Sheffield at the time. This serves as a perennial snapshot of Sheffield during the peak of its industrialisation, demonstrating the extent that Sheffield was transformed entirely over a relatively short period.

Our second case study looked at Don Cutlery Works located just round the corner from the Ship Inn and home to Southern & Richardson Cutlery Works from 1851. Don Cutlery Works allows us to zoom in on an example of the progressive stripping of communal land rights and the private commodification of such land which was a key dynamic of Britain's industrial transformation. This example of a leasehold plot that was mortgaged, assigned and controlled through legal aspects such as covenants, clauses built within land leases that heavily limited the use of the land.

This type of private commodification is especially indicative of Sheffield’s industrial transformation as there was a rapid movement towards large works with smaller workshops accompanying them, replacing the earlier industrial landscape consisting of substantially family-based workshops with larger industrial companies often with a few works across the city. Covenants on land usage, which largely worked to protect wealth through ensuring land was well used, was a key mechanism of Sheffield's industrial transformation, culminating in the city's land being effectively capitalised and subsequently expanded and the land further capitalised. This expansion cannot only be seen through land hold records and covenants uncovered in the archives, but also through maps including from the Fairbank Collection, and can be seen all over the city itself through boundary lines and the demographic makeup of each area.

The case of Don Cutlery Works links closely to our third case study where we investigated the wider scale, rapid industrial transformation of Sheffield through the example of the Furnace Hill area, just up the road from our previous case studies. The Furnace Hill area went through three stages of substantial development and redevelopment, first developed between 1700-1850, then redeveloped in the early 20th century, with plans currently in motion for its redevelopment.

Its initial period of development from 1700-1850 serves as a clear example of just how rapid Sheffield’s industrial transformation was, turning from a series of enclosed fields in 1637 to a fully developed area of quickly built houses and multiple Iron Works by 1850. This transformation demonstrated just how rapid Sheffield was transformed and grew significantly from the 18th to the 19th century, ballooning from a population of 45,748 in 1802 to 185,157 in 1861.

The Case studies were chosen as we hoped to uncover and investigate a wide number of social and legal transformations in Sheffield over the period. We showed the variety of economic stakeholders in Sheffield at the time of the Great Flood, we highlighted industrial transformation using the example of the Don Cutlery Works and we used Furnace Hill to show the speed of expansion. However there is much that our six weeks of research could not answer. But it is tantalising to think how many other stories remain in the archives, untouched and waiting for the next researchers.

Finn Bosnell is a third year History undergraduate student in the School of History, philosophy and Digital Humanities and Eva Bowen is a Law undergraduate student in the School of Law. Thank you Dr James Shaw and Peter Odell for supervising the project. Thank you to the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections and Archives as well as the Sheffield City archives for providing the basis of this research. We would also like to thank Dr Anwesha Roy for her suggestions and additions to this article.

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