336 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

chap, remember the time when the first brick house, then and long

■-after called the Red House, was built. They boasted loudly

of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales of clothwhich took place in the open air on the bridge. Hundreds,nay thousands of pounds, had been paid down in the courseof one busy market day. The rising importance of Leeds hadattracted the notice of successive governments. Charles theFirst had granted municipal privileges to the town. Oliverhad invited it to send one member to the House of Commons.But from the returns of the hearth money it seems certain thatthe whole population of the borough, an extensive districtwhich contains many hamlets, did not, in the reign of Charlesthe Second, exceed seven thousand souls. In 1841 there weremore than a hundred and fifty thousand.*

Sheffield. About a day’s journey south of Leeds, on the verge of awild moorland tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich withcultivation, then barren and uninclosed, which was known bythe name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded there; and, from avery early period, the rude whittles fabricated there had beensold all over the kingdom. They had indeed been mentionedby Geoffrey Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales. But themanufacture appears to have made little progress during thethree centuries which followed his time. This languor mayjierhaps be explained by the fact that the trade was, duringalmost the whole of this long period, subject to such regula-tions as the lord and his court leet thought fit to impose. Themore delicate kinds of cutlery were either made in the capital,or brought from the Continent. It was not indeed till thereign of George the First that the English surgeons ceasedto import from France those exquisitely fine blades which arerequired for operations on the human frame. Most of theHallamshire forges were collected in a market town which

* Thoresby’s Ducatus Leodensis; Whitaker's Loidis and Elmete;Wardeli's Municipal History of the Borough of Leeds.