The
Unofficial Website
Chesterfield
Chesterfield is an old market town on the Derbyshire side of the border. Chester is from the Latin castra meaning camp and field is field so the name simply means
the camp in the field. A Roman auxiliary fort was established here in the time of Agricola's governorship (78 – 85AD). The remains of the fort were not discovered until 1973 on a site in
Church Lane overlooking the valleys of the rivers Rother and Hipper. It was abandoned some time before the end of the Roman Occupation. I'm not sure that there is much to see.
I'm sure the vicus or civilian settlement remained even when the armies had gone and that eventually the Saxons settled down here instead of just raiding. The town was mentioned in the Domesday Book and in the Middle Ages became an important market town. Industrialisation has since taken its toll.
In the 21st Century Chesterfield still has a fine old street market but for how much longer who can say? I have been nattering with a former stall holder who says that she and many others have been driven out by the steep increases in rent coupled with a sharp fall in customers, both in number and the amounts purchased. She briefly rented a shop but this was no more successful as high rent and rates pared her profit margins to the bone. She now does car boot sales at weekends.
Traffic in Chesterfield is the usual queuing disaster all round town, but I must say that we have always managed to park no more than a few minutes from the town centre without any trouble. The town has the usual share of concrete but if you look you can still find some interesting old alleys and buildings, some dating back to Tudor times. Here are a few sites that will enable you to take a closer look at Chesterfield.
In 2004 Chesterfield held a number of events to mark the 800th Anniversary of its Charter.
The parish church of St. Mary and All Saints Parish Church is the largest church in Derbyshire. The present church was dedicated in 1234 but not completed until the middle of the Fourteenth Century. The church stands on the site of an even older church and I expect that before that there was a preaching cross.
There are almost as many theories about the Crooked Spire of Chesterfield Parish Church (St Mary and All Saints) as there are people in the town. The most prosaic answer which is probably the right one is that the timbers used to build the spire were green and warped as they dried out after construction.
There are of course more romantic tales. Some say that it was kicked by the Devil, others that the spire craned round to watch a particularly beautiful bride and was locked into shape. Yet another version has Old Nick sat on the spire and the heat of Hell flowing through his body warped the spire! Everyone's favourite is the story that the builders worked their way round all the pubs in town during construction and there are a lot of pubs to work your way around.
Chesterfield is a town that produced 'the Beast of Bolsover' (Dennis Skinner) and elected Tony Wedgwood Benn as its MP. From this you can see that the good folk of Chesterfield don't do things the conservative way. Thus it is proud that some of the conspirators bent on overthrowing the Catholic king James II fomented their plot at the thatched cottage now called Revolution House in Old Whittington but was an inn called the Cock and Pynot (magpie) in 1688. The house is in the care of Chesterfield Borough Council and open to the public.