[81] These estates were considerable in the reign of Elizabeth. In the Derbyshire subsidy roll of 1596–7 Robert Sytwell is assessed at £20 a year in lands, John Curzon of Kedleston, the ancestor of Lord Scarsdale, at £21, William Cavendish, the first Earl of Devonshire, at £30, and John Manners of Haddon, the ancestor of the Duke of Rutland, at £40. Robert was sixth in descent from John Sitewell, who had a good estate at Eckington in the fourteenth century, as may be seen by a curious entry on the court roll for January, 1386–7. [82] In the winter of 1661–2, 1,181 tons of sow iron valued at £6 a ton were made at these furnaces. This amount may be compared with the ten thousand tons which, according to Macaulay, represented the total annual output of iron in England at the close of Charles the Second’s reign. The loyal Duke of Newcastle, who is said to have been the wealthiest subject in Great Britain at the outbreak of the Civil War, had a rental of only £22,000 a year. After the Restoration, the greatest estates in the kingdom hardly exceeded £20,000 a year, and in 1669 the average income of peers, taken one with another, was estimated at £3,000, of knights at £800, and of esquires at £400 a year. Mr. Sitwell, with a revenue of £1,600, was therefore possessed of a fortune above the common; he pleads guilty, in one of these letters, to having a “good estate,” and it is clear that in his own country he had the reputation of being a very wealthy man. His house, “the capital messuage called Renishawe”—situated some six miles from Chesterfield, then a walled town and the “fayrest in all the Peake Cuntrie”[83]—had been rebuilt out of the savings of his minority shortly before his marriage in 1627. It stood (and yet stands, for the old hall is the centre of the new) on the summit of a rocky hill projecting into the vale of Rother, which here narrows to two or three hundred yards, and commanding fine views towards the north and south. On the latter side, a richly cultivated country, cut up into innumerable inclosures by hedgerows, and scattered with forest trees, formed a pleasing contrast to the wild and rugged moorland by which Eckington was approached; and beyond it, to the south and south-east, rose that beautiful ridge upon which Barlborough, Bolsover Castle, and Hardwick stand. The turrets and battlements of these three famous houses, towering up on the hillside above the groves and woodland which surrounded them, were all visible from Renishaw; and to the south-west the country rolled on in successive ridges of meadow land and common towards the faint blue line which marked the edge of the Chesterfield moors in the far distance. From the north front of the house, Mosborough Hall could be seen across the green valley through which the Mosbecke flows to its union with the Rother; on the left, beyond the church and village, lay the ancient woods and picturesque manor park of Eckington in a deep cleft between the hills, and to the right the