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
the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there, as
elsewhere in England, was fain to
"broaden slowly down
From precedent to precedent."
Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor
troubles must, but leisure has always been equal to their
pacification, and now Sheffield takes its adversity almost as
quietly as its prosperity.
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