In 1584, following disagreements with her husband, Bess of Hardwick moved from her home at Chatsworth to Hardwick where she had purchased the Old Hall from her brother. Within a few years she undertook a major redevelopment of the old family house and, from April 1588 onwards, the building accounts record in considerable detail the expenses involved in glazing the windows of the new structure.

The name of one man, Richard Snidall [c.1555-1611], consistently appears as the principal glazier employed on site, with entries such as:

“The 18th of Julij [1588] To Snidall the glazier in full payment for all the glasse in the gallerij which doeth come to three hundredth Fyffty and foure footts at five pence the Foot seven pounds ten shillings and six pence payed to hime before of that some five pounds 2 - 7 - 6”¹D N Durant & P Riden [eds.], The Building of Hardwick Hall, Part 1: The Old Hall, 1587-91, Derbyshire Record Society Volume IV, 1980, 39.

By December 1589 Richard Snidall is listed amongst those retained craftsmen who received a quarterly wage of five shillings, in addition to any payments agreed upon for specific contracts. His quarterly wages are recorded until 25 March 1591, but he continued to receive payments until 10 November that year when work to make the windows of Hardwick Old Hall weather-tight finally drew to a close. In July 1591 the Hill Great Chamber - the top-floor state room at the west end of the house - was nearing completion. A drawing made in 1773 by Samuel Hieronimus Grimm shows the vast scale of the windows in this apartment, and the accounts record on 31 July 1591:

“payd to Snidall the glassier in Full payment for glase for the great chamber next to the hill 6 windose which cometh by measure to seven and Twenty score foots of glasse with assler 5d the foot is £11 5s Recevid by Snidall of that some 4 Casses of glasse which cometh to £5 6s 8d and 40s before the payment and nowe in Full payment £3 18s 4d he is payd for the casments and most sett them up 3 18 4”²Ibid., 145.

When in 1590 Bess of Hardwick determined to build the New Hall at Hardwick, not far from the Old Hall, Richard Snidall remained as her principal glazier. Until his contract was complete in November 1598, he was in constant employment there each year throughout the summer months and beyond. References and payments to ‘Snidall’s boy’ [September 1597- November 1598] and ‘Snidall’s man’ [May 1594 - April 1598] clearly indicate that he did not work alone, although the names of his assistants are not recorded. However, the vast scale - both in window size and quantity - of the glazing required at Hardwick Old Hall and then the New Hall meant that there was far more work than a single glazier could accomplish even with assistants and when spread over a number of years. Consequently, other glaziers were employed in addition to Snidall, although the accounts suggest that he was regarded as the main contractor for the glazing.Thomas Bracks, who appears in the accounts from November 1590 - September 1591, had to be taken on to glaze the windows of the Forest Great Chamber and several service rooms in the Old Hall, whilst a glazier called only by his surname, Jury, features in the accounts for the New Hall intermittently from December 1594 - May 1597.³D N Durant & P Riden, [eds.], The Building of Hardwick Hall, Part 2: The New Hall, 1591-98, Derbyshire Record Society, Volume IX, 1984.

Bess moved into Hardwick Hall in 1597 before all the building work was complete and by 1598 there was great urgency to finish all the glazing. The accounts of William Cavendish record that in May 1598 a servant was sent “to Lichfield…with a letter to Jury,⁴He is probably the Robert Jerrye buried at Lichfield on 15 March 1619/20. ‘Katharine Jurie widdowe’, was buried at Lichfield on 20 April 1635. the glazier to come hither”⁵P Riden [ed.], The Household Accounts of William Cavendish, Lord Cavendish of Hardwick, 1597-1607, 3 vols., Part 2, Derbyshire Record Society, Volume XLI, 2016, 40.. He responded to the request, as he - together with ‘Jury’s Man’ - appears in the Hardwick Hall accounts from June - August 1598.

The expanse of windows at Hardwick Hall is its outstanding architectural feature, and the jingle, “Hardwick Hall more glass than wall”, is well known. Despite the expense, in order to maintain visual symmetry, windows were glazed even when blocked internally. Such vast windows filled by huge quantities of expensive glass proclaimed the wealth and status of Bess of Hardwick, although Francis Bacon later warned of the drawbacks: “You shall have sometimes fair houses so full of glass, that one cannot tell where to become, to be out of the sun or cold”.⁶Francis Bacon, Of Building, Essay 45 in The Essayes or Counsels, Civil and Morall, of Frances Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, London, 1625. For the large amounts of glass required, Bess had set up her own glassworks at South Wingfield from where cases of crown glass were sent to Hardwick. Snidall cut the glass into diamond-shaped quarries which were then held in place in the windows by lead cames made from lead smelted at Barlow, Derbyshire, in the mill operated by Bess’ sons, William and Charles Cavendish.

In 1593, well before Hardwick New Hall was complete, Bess had begun another residence for her second and favourite son, William Cavendish, at a place variously called Oldcotes or Owlcotes.⁷Pamela Kettle, Oldcotes: The last Mansion built by Bess of Hardwick, Cardiff, 2000. The new house, which was added onto an earlier building, no longer exists but it was situated about two miles north of Hardwick Hall on the other side of the valley. Unfortunately, household accounts which detail building expenses do not survive before 1597, by which time the work was nearing completion. In that year the [unnamed] glazier received payment of £13 15s 7d in July; £3 16s 7d in August; 13s 4d in September; and 30s in October ‘for casements’. Thereafter, from September 1599, the accounts make reference to various small jobs for which the glazier was needed, with several references to servants being sent to Chesterfield to fetch him: September 1599: “To the glazier of Chesterfield for making a casement in the nursery & finding the glass 2s” and November 1599: “To the glazier for mending a glass window in my master’s closet 6d”. August 1600: “Spent by Parker in going late at night for the glazier to Chesterfield 3d” By April 1605 the accounts record: “Paid at Owlcotes 6 April: glazier and his boy four days at mending the old and new house 6s, 1lb of solder 6d” Significant early winter storm damage to the windows at Hardwick Hall probably accounted for the entry in November 1606: “To the glazier for his man and himself at Hardwick 11 days 7s 4d” and for the December 1606 entry: “The glazier at Owlcotes two days 12d, his man four days 8d, solder 8d.”

The glazier from Chesterfield is never named in these entries. Only in September/October 1603 is his identity revealed: “To Snydall for setting glass into three new casements at Owlcotes, viz. In the kitchen, scullery and wet larder, and setting them and finding solder to them, himself and his man a day and more 20d.” Without doubt, Richard Snidall was the long-serving reliable glazier from Chesterfield who was on call for repairs to Cavendish family properties at Hardwick, Oldcotes, Woodthorpe and elsewhere. William Cavendish, as lay rector of the church at Sutton in Ashfield, was responsible for the upkeep of the chancel there. When the windows needed repair he called on Richard Snidall. So, the September 1603 accounts record: “To Snydall for glazing 12 foots of glass in the chancel at Sutton in Ashfield and for mending the rest that needed by great 5s 10d”.

When “Richard Snydall of Chesterfeild in the countie of Darbie glazier” made his will⁸Derbyshire wills were proved in the Lichfield Diocesan Probate Court. Wills, inventories and letters of administration are now on deposit in the Staffordshire Record Office and are available online on the ‘Find My Past’ website. on 17 September 1611, he was still working for William Cavendish as shown by the following:

“ Imprimis I give to my sonne Richard all my tools viz: towe vices the one in my house th’other in my lords in my Lord Cavendysh his house w’t’ all such tools as doeth be longe to a glasier.”

Richard Snidall was buried at Chesterfield on 11 November 1611, and an inventory of his goods was drawn up on 21 November. He was not a wealthy man: he rented his house which consisted of two rooms downstairs and two chambers above, with a kitchen and a workshop attached. The total value of his goods was £16 13s 2d, which was reduced by £7 12s which he owed to others, including 10s ‘for halfe a case of glasse’ and a further 10s to ‘John Smyth of Ashburow for glasse’. The contents of his workshop were valued at £2 10s 8d:

“In the shoppe Item one vyce vij Cresinge yrons ij sothringe yrons wt other necessaries belonginge to a glasiers trade xls Item xij wispe of glase & six b……… xs Item hafe a stone of lead vjd Item one lead pane ijs”

In addition, he had glass ‘in the house’ valued at 3s 4d and glass ‘in boothe chambers’ valued at 2s 8d, though it is likely that these were valuations of the actual glass in the windows rather than of glass stored in these rooms.

Richard Snidall’s son, Richard, who was left all his father’s glazier tools in 1611, was only 12 years old when his father died. There is no trace of him thereafter, and he was too young to have been Snidall’s apprentice ‘boy’ of the 1605 Oldcotes accounts, mentioned above. However, references to ‘Snidall’s boy’ in the Hardwick Hall accounts for 1597 and 1598 evidently relate to an apprentice, just as references to ‘Snidall’s man’ in 1594, 1595, 1598, 1603 and 1606 refer to his assistant. The identity of ‘Snidall’s man’ can be revealed through an exploration of Richard Snidall’s family history in relation to references in the Sheffield churchwarden’s accounts of 1621 & 1622 to glaziers from Chesterfield who, in 1622, are mentioned by name:

“1622 To Geo: Walker & Tho: Slater the glassers of Chesterfeld for amending the Church windowes £1 0s 0d”⁹Quoted by J R Wigfull, Local plumbers and glaziers, Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 4, 1937, 335.

This reference is important, not only for naming the Chesterfield glaziers, but also for indicating that there were evidently no glaziers based in Sheffield who could have undertaken the work.

The Chesterfield parish registers begin in 1558, and from 1559-1579 the baptisms of six daughters and one son of Roland Snidall [c.1530-1587] are recorded. Richard Snidall was probably the eldest son whose baptism took place c.1557, before the registers begin. It is not known with whom he trained as a glazier but by 1578 he would have served his 7-year apprenticeship. He married Anna More at Chesterfield church on 22 May 1581, but seems to have had only one child, Richard, who was baptised 1 September 1599. His wife, Anna, died in 1606 and was buried on 18 April, but Richard quickly married again on 25 June 1606 to Margery Fryth. Five years later, Richard Snidall died, but his widow, Margery Snidall [nee Fryth] re-married a man called Thomas Petty [c.1550-1628] on 19 June 1613.

Thomas Petty’s first wife was called Margery Slater, whom he had married on 23 June 1577. She was sister to Francis Slater [c.1550-1609], whose will of 22 November 1609 describes him as “ffrancis Slater of Chesterfelde in the County of Derby glacyer”. The main witness to Francis Slater’s will was Thomas Whitehead [1564-1616], who was also witness to and overseer of the will of Richard Snidall and one of the appraisers of his inventory. When Thomas Whitehead died in 1616, one of the appraisers of his inventory was Thomas Petty.

So, the close connections between these four men is abundantly clear, and there seems to be little doubt that Francis Slater ‘glacyer’ can be identified as ‘Snidall’s man’.

Francis Slater was born c.1550, and may be the man of that name who married Grace Owdam on 12 August 1576 at Darley Dale. He had 4 daughters baptised at Chesterfield between 1584 and 1590 and an only son, Thomas, baptised 16 May 1594. Francis Slater was buried on 23 November 1609. In his will dated 22 November 1609 he reminds his wife, Grace, to make sure she obtains the ‘somes of money wch are owinge and due to me’ - a total of 21s 8d - to be offset against the 30s which he owed ‘Mr Bamforth of pingle hill in the County of yorke for a Case of glase’. His inventory, drawn up on 4 December 1609, describes a small house of four rooms with contents valued at £14 10s 8d, and a workshop:

“Item in the shope one vice wth moulds sotheringe Irons grosing Irons & a lead ladle xs Item glasse in the saide shope viijs Item lead & files in the saide shope ijs”

When Francis Slater died in 1609 his son and heir, Thomas Slater [1594-1668], was only 15 years old. He may have been apprenticed to his father or, possibly to Richard Snidall, who did not die until 1611. Whilst he would have inherited his father’s tools and materials, he was too young to work as a glazier in his own right, so he must have completed the remaining years of his 7-year apprenticeship with someone else.The most likely candidate to have taken him on was the man with whom he was to forge a lifelong partnership in a few years’ time, George Walker [1588-1637]. By May 1615 Thomas Slater reached the age of 21 and would have completed his apprenticeship. A month later, on 25 June 1615 he married Alice Bestow at Chesterfield church, and his first son, Francis, was baptised on 16 March 1615/16, followed by a son, Thomas, baptised on 6 July 1618, and a daughter, Grace, baptised on 28 November 1622. In 1621, the Sheffield churchwardens accounts record: “To the glasser of Chesterfeld for worke about the church windows £4 9s 6d”.

As George Walker of Chesterfield was the older man, this entry would suggest that he was the ‘glasser of Chesterfeld’ referred to. However, the following year Thomas Slater was working alongside him and together they were referred to as “the glassers of Chesterfeld”.

George Walker was baptised on 23 April 1588, the son of John Walker [c.1560-1621] and his wife Elizabeth Nayler who had married on 7 November 1585. He may have been ‘Snidall’s boy’, in the Hardwick Hall accounts of 1597 & 1598 but, if so, he was too young to have been formally apprenticed. He married Margaret Corker on 19 February 1613/14 and their eldest daughter, Elizabeth Walker, was baptised on 9 October 1614. George Walker seemingly died unexpectedly in 1637, as he left no will. However, letters of administration were granted on 17 October 1637 to his widow, Margaret, and ‘Thomas Slater de Chesterfeld, Glasier’, suggesting a close relationship which went beyond that of mere work colleagues. Indeed, a significant outcome of their lifelong friendship was the marriage on 27 October 1639 of George Walker’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to Thomas Slater’s eldest son, Francis [1616-1655], at Chesterfield church.

Not only did Thomas Slater help administer George Walker’s probate, he was also one of the appraisers of George Walker’s inventory which was drawn up on 29 September 1637. One of the other appraisers was his cousin, Humphrey Petty [1584-1666], son of Thomas Petty, whose first wife had been Margery Slater. George Walker’s property comprised 2 chambers over a ‘house’ and little parlour with a cellar beneath, and a kitchen and workshop attached. The contents of the dwelling, together with that of the stable and fold, amounted to £18 1s 4d. The workshop entry reads:

“In the Shopp Impr. one Vice & a payre of iron moulds, & an Iron ladle £1 6s 8d Item Glasse wrought £1 0s 0d Item Glasse unwrought 13s 4d Item ffyve sothering Irons and all other tooles Belonging to the Shopp 5s 0d”

With George Walker’s death in 1637, and no son to follow him in the trade, Thomas Slater was left as the only working glazier in Chesterfield. He did not die until 1668 [bur.13 April 1668], but left no will, nor do any probate records survive. However, his second son, Thomas Slater [1618-1666], baptised 6 July 1618, followed him into the glazier’s trade. He pre-deceased his father, and was buried 19 November 1666. He made his will on 15 November 1666, in which he left ‘Thomas Slater my deare & loving father all my aparell….and that the said Thomas my father shall live in my now dwelling house with the saide Dorothy my wife she alowing him sufficient meate and drinke washing and lodging firelight and candle light and all other nessisarys meete and befitting him to have during his naturall life’. He made financial provision for his sons to be apprenticed to [unspecified] trades, but left materials relating to the glazier’s trade to his nephew, Thomas Slater [1640-?]. The will reads: ‘I give and bequeath unto my cosen Thomas Slater halfe a casse of glasse Tenn stone waighte of leade and three pound weight of old peuter towards seting him up of his trade’: ‘cosen Thomas Slater’ was, of course, the son of Francis Slater who had married Elizabeth Walker. So, the family business continued into a fourth generation. Thomas Slater’s inventory of 11 December 1666 shows him living in a house with 9 rooms and a cellar, and with contents valued at £88 8s 2d. ‘In the Shopp’ he had ‘Glasse, sande, sauther one vice & other materials’ valued at £16 0s 0d. As a glazier he had become far more prosperous than any of his forebears.

What became of ‘my cosen Thomas Slater’ is not known. No marriage of anyone of that name appears in the Chesterfield area parish registers, and whilst burials of a Thomas Slater are recorded in 1717 and again in 1718, neither of these left probate records which might have identified either of them as a glazier.

From the late 16th century through to the later 17th century, the region around Chesterfield and Sheffield is notable for the large number of houses built by wealthy manufacturers, merchants and traders involved in the Derbyshire lead industry and the cutlery industries of Hallamshire. There was plenty of work for skilled glaziers such as George Walker and Thomas Slater and, whilst traditional diamond quarries were the norm for domestic glazing, other more complex designs were occasionally desired - particularly to enrich the windows of dining parlours and great chambers.

In 1615, a small booklet of designs gathered together by Walter Gedde was published as “A Booke of Sundry Draughts Principaly serving for Glasiers: And not Impertinent for Plasterers, and Gardiners: be sides sundry other professions”.¹⁰W. Gedde, A Booke of Sundry Draughts Principaly serving for Glasiers: And not Impertinent for Plasterers, and Gardiners: be sides sundry other professions, London, 1615. A copy of this was probably known by the Chesterfield glaziers, as several instances of designs from this booklet are found in the region. The design shown in Plate 1 of the booklet is of a cross window with the ubiquitous diamond-shaped glass quarries, but far more complex and striking designs follow.

Haddon Hall near Bakewell, home to the Manners family, still has diamond-quarries of the 16th & 17th centuries surviving in many windows. The parlour, however, has a great west-facing window with stained glass armorials set within a glazing pattern based on Plate 21 in Gedde’s booklet.

Further afield, high on the moorland north-west of Sheffield, lay Wigtwizzle Hall, demolished in 1936. Photographs show 2 panels of glazing in an upstairs window seemingly copied from Plate 18 of Gedde’s booklet.

The glazing was probably installed in 1623 when John Ibbotson upgraded his house to provide fashionable rooms for his newly married daughter Mary and her husband, Christopher Wilson.¹¹Christopher Wilson was a great friend of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and before his marriage had spent much time in Strafford’s home at Wentworth Woodhouse. The Wentworth Woodhouse muniments in Sheffield Archives preserve a copy of Walter Gedde’s ‘Booke of Sundry Draughts’, indicating that the booklet was, indeed, known within the region. Remarkably, when Wigtwizzle Hall was demolished the 2 panels of glazing were saved and still survive locally in private ownership.

In the parish of Norton, now part of Sheffield, but originally in North East Derbyshire, lies Bishops’ House at Norton Lees. This half-timbered building, dating from 1554, was home to several generations of the Blythe family, whose wealth came from the manufacture and marketing of scythe blades. Photographs from as early as 1864 show mullion and transom windows in the parlour and parlour chamber inserted in 1632-34 as part of a programme of improvements made by William Blythe shortly after he inherited the property. There were no glaziers based in Sheffield, as shown by the Sheffield churchwardens needing to employ glaziers from Chesterfield in 1621 & 1622, as noted above. So, William Blythe would similarly have sought glaziers from Chesterfield for the work at Bishops’ House.

The parlour window had glazing in the upper panels which appears to have been based on Plate 28 in Gedde’s booklet. As early as 1818 a correspondent to The Northern Star noted its rarity: “The long range window in its principal apartment, so curiously formed of the dimunitive [sic] lozenge, deserves delineation, or a more certain preservation than its brittle material can ensure”.¹²Letter from M.M.M.[Mrs Sterndale] to The Northern Star or Yorkshire Magazine, 21 April 1818, 348.

Such early concern for this glazing went unheeded in later years and, by 1937, photographs show that it had been replaced by ordinary diamond quarries.

However, it was not the only Sheffield-area house to have such glazing. A drawing of a nearby property, Whirlow Hall, demolished in 1842, shows precisely the same design in its parlour window.¹³An illustration of Whirlow Hall appeared in The Sheffield Independent, 18 December 1886, p.4 Whirlow Hall was built by the Bright family and displayed inscribed dates of 1619 and 1652. The Brights were ‘cousins’ to the Blythes of Norton Lees - a circumstance which may account for this similarity of glazing.

One other local instance of a design from Gedde’s booklet occurs at Cartledge Hall, Holmesfield, in a house improved in the early 17th century for Thomas Burton, a wealthy lead merchant. There, the ogee-patterned glazing design of Plate 34 is perfectly formed in decorative plaster ribwork on a vaulted chamber ceiling. As the title-page of Gedde’s work announced, the designs were ‘not impertinent for plasterers’. In the same room at Cartledge Hall other plasterwork can be seen cast from moulds that were also used at Haddon Hall, where one of Gedde’s designs for the parlour glazing has already been noticed.

Building records do not survive for any of the above-mentioned properties which might have revealed who was responsible for making the decorative glazing. However, Chesterfield was the major market town of the region, where trading and financial transactions took place. So, it seems likely that the glaziers, George Walker & Thomas Slater, whose workshops were located there, would have been sought out by local house-owners when wishing to beautify their homes.

David Bostwick - 3rd May 2022