Derbyshire

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Old Halls, Manors and Families of Derbyshire
by Joseph Tilley

Volume I, The High Peak Hundred - Cover Page

Transcriber's Notes:
21st Century readers may be interested to know that this book - The Old Halls, Manors and Families of Derbyshire - was on sale originally (in 1899) as a rather splendidly gilt-edged edition priced one guinea (£1.05 sterling). In comparison the book Three Weeks in the Devonshire Hospital (Buxton) written by an ex-patient cost one old penny (of which there were 240 to the pound!) and had reached its 77,000th copy of publication; and Manchester Grammar School's fees for pupils were 4 guineas a term. [Source: Local News - April 1899. Article published in The Peak Advertiser 19th April 1999, p1.]

In today's terms, according to Measuring Worth, a website providing information about the Purchasing Power of British Pounds (1264-2007) one guinea would be around £85 in 2007, and it would have bought just the first of 5 Volumes. Compare this with the cost of Gladwyn Turbutt's History of Derbyshire, published 100 years later in 4 Volumes, price £120 (Merton Priory Press Ltd).

Nicholas Pevsner in his Buildings of England series for Derbyshire (1978) refers to Old Halls Manors and Families as "an irritating book singularly devoid of architectural information", with which I tend to agree. The style is certainly irksome but it does nevertheless contain much information of interest to the family historian, if not to the architect, which I have yet to discover in other sources, so we do nevertheless have cause to be grateful (I think) for the copies which were then purchased for such a princely sum. [Source: Google Books]

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