p. 15 In Sheffield, a unique brand of radical politics was evident from before the French Revolution, whilst the Sheffield Register, under the editorship of Joseph Gales, was one of the most famous radical provincial newspapers during the 1790s.

p 19 the effect of piecemeal development in Sheffield caused one commentators to remark that “as its commerce was extended, and the population increased, streets were lengthened and new ones added in every direction, without any attention to uniformity and order.” (Joseph Hunter, 1819)

p 30 “there is evidence that a regional pattern of advertising was emerging in the late 18^th century, in which nearby towns were used as points of reference and indicators of trustworthiness. Thus in Leeds and Sheffield adverts appeared for Elliot’s Family Cordial from Huddersfield, Lignum’s Healing Tincture and AntiscorbuticDrops from Manchester, ‘Moxon’s effervescent magnesian aperient’ from Hull and ‘cordial balm of gilead’ produced by Samuel Solomon of Liverpool.”p…31 Foreign influences also loomed larges … advertisements for Johnson and William’s American Soothing Syrup, Dr Brodum’s botanical syrup from Denmark, Venetian blings, French corsets and brocades, Genoa silks, Indian muslin, Persian carpets, Italian crapes, French bonnets, Tuscan hats and Oriental ointment and cordial.”

p35 “Horace Walpole described Sheffield as “one of the foulest towns in England, in the most charming situation in 1760. In 1798, a London visitor noted: “shops all shut, place extremely dull and not a person to be seen of a tolerable, decent appearance”. Morover, he complained that the town was “completely dirty and strewed with Nutshells from one end to the other, as if all the inhabitants had been eating them the whole day”. Around the same period, and after a somewhat abortive shopping trip there, Lady Caroline Stuart-Wortley wrote that “I never was in so stinking, dirty and savage a place”.

p65 In Sheffield .. after 1774, women involved in the three main sectors varied between 61 and 77 per cent [clothing,food and drink and shopkeeping] , while manufacturing – although it showed a remarkable decline in 1828 – was a consistently large area of female employment throughout the period. Here women such as the filemaker, Alice Corker, the button mould manufacturer, Ann Allcar, and the razor manufacturer, Hannah Dewsnap, were a constant feature of economic life…. The manufacture of metalwares appeared from the directory lists to be a greater employer of lower middling women in Sheffield than were the cotton trade in Manchester or woollen manufacturing in Leeds.”

p68 the majority of women active in manufacturing in all three towns were … in a large range of trades connected to the diverse requirements of consumer-orientated urban economies.. the jeweller Sarah Bowman, who ran a shop in Queen Street in Sheffield… Elizabeth Saynor of High Street Sheffield, who made umbrellas and parasols…. The pocket-book maker Ann Paul, of Silver Street in Sheffield.”

P 77 “In Sheffield, the Gale sisters, Ann and Elizabeth, advertised their bookselling and stationery business on a weekly basis during much of the 1790s and up to at least 1817. In common with many booksellers of the period, the Gales not only sold books and pamphlets but also medicines such as Spilsbury’s Antiscorbutic drops, Dr Bodrum’s nervous cordial and Dr Arnold’s pills for the treatment of venereal complaints

p107 succeeded their brother Joseph … after he had been forced to flee to America.. the sisters chose not to continue the paper, leaving their friend, James Montgomery, to set up the Sheffield Iris … which was also prosecuted and attacked by government agents.

p. 80 In 1828 … advertisement … placed by … the improbably named Madame Paris, who sold winter fashions from her ‘show room’ in Sheffield”

p87 In an advertisement announcing her intention to carry on her husband’s business in 1797, Ann Mearbeck decribed herself as ‘PLUMBER AND GLAZIER, Bank Street, SHEFFIELD’ and thanked the public for ‘the friendship of her deceased husband, JOHN”

p109 the widow of the buttonmaker Josef Cofin, a member of one of the few Jewish families in late 18^th-century Sheffield, took over his business in the Park district of the town when he died some time before 1787. Another Sheffield button maker, Sarah Holy, inherited her business from her husband in 1758 and ran it until her own death ten years later … she was soon emeshed in the local Methodist community; so much so that she lent money to the Mulberry Street chapel to pay for new pillars during the 1760s. … her personal effects spoke of a comfortable, middling lifestyle, mahogany chairs, a writing desk, card table, china, silverware and Delft plates.

p111 “a Mrs Garnett, the widow of Mr Bryce Garnett … announced in the same year [1817] that she intended to continue his hairdressing business in York Street, Sheffield, with the assistance of her son.

p. 150
Libertinism remained a minority pursuit, but a disproportionately influential one, because out of the libertins would evolve the Enlightenment philosophers of the following century. They gave Montaigne a dangerous yet positive new image, which would stick. They also spawned a less radical breed of salon socialites,: aphorists such as La Bruyere and La Rouchefoucauld whose Maximes gathered together brief, Montaignean observations on human nature:
At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.
The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.
Chance and caprice rule the world.
And, as it happens, one La Rochefoucauld maxim provided a neat comment on Montaigne’s own 17th-century predicament:
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

p. 174
According to Giovanni Botero, an Italian political writer living in France in the 1580s, the French countryside of that decade was so rife with thieves and murderers that every house was obliged to keep “watch of the vineyards and orchards: gates, locks, bolts and mastiffs’. Apparently Botero had not visited the Montaigne estate: there the only defender was a person whom Montaigne described as ‘a porter of ancient custom and ceremony, who serves not so much to defend my door as to offer it with more decorum and grace’.
Montaigne lived this way because he was determined to resist intimidation, and did not want to become his own gaoler. But he also believed that, paradoxically, his openness made him safer … Locks made a place look valuable, and there could be no sense of glory in robbing a household where one was welcomed by an elderly doorkeeper. Also, the usual rules of fortification hardly apply in a civil war, ‘your valet may be of the party that you fear’ … far better to win the enemy over by behaving with generosity and honour.
,, once travelling through a forest in a dangerous rural area, he was attacked by 15 to 20 masked men … “I owed my deliverance to my face and the freedom and firmness of my speech’… this was the kind of confrontation that could happen at any time, to any person, and Montaigne often wondered about the best way of dealing with it. Is it wiser to face up squarely to your enemy and challenge him, or should you curry favour by showing submission. Should you throw yourself on the aggressor’s mercy and hope that his sense of humanity will make him spare you? Or if that foolhardy?”

p. 179 “For Montaigne, all humans share an element of their being, and so do all other living things … ‘There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation’….
We owe other beings the countless small acts of kindness and empathy that Nietzsche would describe as ‘goodwill’ … Montaigne added this remark about his dog: “I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.”

p. 291 “Marie le Jars de Gournay, Montaigne’s first great editor and publicist … was a woman of extreme enthusiasm and emotion, all of which she uninhibitedly threw at Montaigne on their first meeting in Paris … her family, minor provincial nobles, lived partly in Paris and partly at the Picardy chateau and estate of Gournay-sur-Aronde, which her father bought in 1568. In adulthood, Marie took her last name from this estate. Such a right was normally reserved for sons, but it was typical of her to ignore this rule … By 1580, Marie was confined to a provincial world … she did what she could to educate herself using the books in the family library. By reading Latin works alongside their French translations, she gave herself the best classical ground she could. The result was a patchy knowledge, unsystematic but deeply motivated.”

p. 1 “one of the features of the Frankish world in the 10^th century which distinguishes it clearly from the 9^th-century heyday of the Carolingian Empire. The Carolingian kings and emperors of the 9^th century had always married social inferiors, usually aristocrats from families within their own kingdoms with whom they wished to strengthen an alliance. Some of these queens were powerful; some left little more on the historical record than their names. But after the end of the empire in 888, one of the strategies used by kings representing the new dynasties struggling to project themselves as authentically royal was precisely to seek marriage with women from more prestigious royal families in neighbouring kingdoms. A practice which had in the early 9^th century been expressly forbidden by Carolingian rulers anxious to limit the size of the royal family became, in the 10^th, a routine dynastic strategy.” The historian Richer of Rhems in the early 990s claimed it was a matter of principle.

p. 2 Richer’s comment on the appropriate status of West Frankish queens was certainly informed by the spectacular power of the Ottonian empresses of his own day, whose careers and posthumous reputations mark them out as some of the most famous queens in medieval history. The Byzantine princess Theophanu, widow of Otto II, was in effect the ruler of the kingdom in place of her inant son between her husband’s death in 983 and her own in 991 – such was her status that we have a document of 990 dated to the years of her reign as ‘Theophanius imperator’”… her mother-in-law the Empress Aldelheid, was not only Otto I’s second wife but also a daughter, sister, mother, and widow of kings. She presided over three generations of Ottonian power in east Francia and Italy before her death in 999.”

p. 97 “The London draper’s wife, Katherine Fenkyll, had her own views on the subordinate position of wives, which she made very plain. A few years after she was widowed, in 1499, her ‘familiar and old acquaintance’ Joanne Johnson, a wealthy widow, came to visit her on confidential business. It was, she admitted, a delicate matter, since she had agreed to marry a gentleman, Robert Long of Windridge, but there was the small matter of both her personal effects and her debts. She had, she believed, around £500 in goods, including furniture, plate, money and jewels, which Long was anxious to acquire as his own property on their wedding day. Nonetheless, the widow wanted to protect herself.  She agreed with Katherine, as well as two other friends, that they would hide away £300 of the goods, intending to ‘cloak and colour the same’ from her husband so that she ‘might give and have or otherwise bestow the same at her liberty and pleasure. Instead of acquiring his new wife’s fabulous jewels, Long therefore found himself liable for her existing debts of more than £200. This was a bad bargain, and he was furious, rushing to the courts … Joanna Johnson, however, as a wife, could not be sued in court independently of her husband.She got off scot free.”

p. 100 “At the end of the Tudor years, in 1604, the aristocratic Eleanor, Lady Fettiplace, compiled a book of more than 200 recipes, complete with her marginal notes and amendments indicating that she had tried and tasted them herself. Inexperienced housewives of sufficient means could also make use of published texts, with Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife being particularly influential in the early 17th century. He considered that the first step to gaining a profound understanding of cookery was to ‘have knowledge of all sorts of herbs belonging to the kitchen, whether they be for the pot, for salads, for sauces, for servings, or for any other seasonings, or adorning. This the young wife should learn through her own labour and experience. She must know what to sow in her garden, and when to sow it.”

p. 102 “In 1511, two years into the reign of King Henry VIII, the widow Dame Katherine Fenkyll arrived at the Guildhall in London, accompanied by a young man named Henry Lenton … she confirmed before witnesses that she had taken him on as an apprentice… Two years later, Katherine Fenkyll returned again to the Guildhall, this time with Raynold Love in tow, who had also come to learn a trade from her.”

p. 103 “There was normally nothing in the way of legality to stop women taking the Freedom too – but very few did. One draper who, in 1570, arrived in the company’s hall with a female apprentice, seeking her Freedom, was turned away…This case caused much murmuring, since many in the company suspected that the woman did indeed have the right to be enrolled – but it was not a trend they wanted to encourage. Indeed, only 73 women are known to have been enrolled as apprentices in 16th-century London, among the many thousands of men… Girls could sometimes have their apprenticeships secured by charitable institutions: the destitute Margaret Gyllam, for example, who had been a patient at London St Thomas’s Hospital, was sent after her discharge to learn needlework and button-making with one John Delow and his wife in 1564.

p. 118 “Many of the more modest buildings occupied a small area of just one small room, before rising precariously high above the street. At ground level, there was usually a shop of some kind; on the floor above a hall, and then sleeping quarters higher still. Those people who were lucky enough to have a small yard squeezed into their property’s tiny footprint could keep the privy a reasonable distance from the main living quarters. For others, with no outside space, there was only the attic, leaving residents with a long trek upstairs to answer the call of nature. The inhabitants of these poorer dwellings though, did have one advnatge over the residences of their social superiors: the single chimney stack running up through the house, like a spine, allowed fireplaces in every room. .. a well in the yard behind the house meant that the well-to-do had a private water supply, rather than relying on the nearest street pump or conduit.”

p. 320 “The London hospitals not only took in women: they were staffed, in many respects, by women. Elizabeth Collston, possibly the wife of St Bartholomew’s hospital porter, was employed for more than 25 years as its matron, from 1597. She held a position of some authority, being in charge of all the women and children, as well as overseeing most of the female staff. The matron also took delivery of necessaries brought to the hospital, such as blankets and clothing for the inmates. The role of matron seems to have attracted capable, dedicated women. The first known matron was a widow named Rose Fisher, first appointed as a ‘sister’ of the hospital in 1551.. She was a no-nonsense woman, prepared to get her hands dirty. In 1552, for example, an order was given that all the ‘very feeble and sick’ inmates should eat in her presence, ensuring that she could monitor their sustenance. She also supervised the making of bed coverings for patients and the interrogating of pregnant inmates as to the father of their children, as well as being entrusted with money, collecting in bequests from charitable benefactors.”

p. 321 “Some forms of paid work could be a form of charity in themselves, and in this respect elderly women were often employed by their parishes to undertake work such as nursing care. One Mistress Peirson was paid by the parish of St Botolph’s in London to oversee the maid’s gallery in the church: she remained in office for at least 20 years and even after she had become blind… Older women, too, could find employment in the parish as ‘searchers,’ who were deputed by the parish clerk to view the bodies of the newly dead and make an appraisal of the cause … readily known to be susceptible to bribery and induced with ale, making their judgements hazy.”