A History of Sheffield

The city of Sheffield has long been synonymous with cutlery and steel, and most previous books have understandably concentrated on the momentous changes which industrialization wrought on the area over the last two hundred years. The figures are astonishing: as early as the seventeenth century three out of every five men in the town worked in one branch or another of the cutlery trades and, in all, Sheffield had a smithy to every 2.2 houses; a hundred years later there were as many as six wat…