About Sheffield

Country: England
Region: Yorkshire and the Humber
County: South Yorkshire
Established: 12th Century
Area: 122.5 km2 (47.3 sq mi)
Population: 556,500

Sheffield is the largest settlement in South Yorkshire.

The name Sheffield comes from the river Sheaf, which comes from the Old English word for divide or separation. The second half of the name Sheffield refers to a field, or forest clearing. Combining the two words, it is believed that the name refers to an Anglo-Saxon settlement in a clearing where the River Don and the River Sheaf meet.

The City of Sheffield is believed to have been inhabited since at least the late Upper Paleolithic, about 12,800 years ago.

The earliest evidence of human occupation in the Sheffield area was found at Creswell Crags to the east of the city.

In the Iron Age the area became the southernmost territory of the Pennine tribe called the Brigantes. It is this tribe who are thought to have constructed several hill forts in and around Sheffield.

Following the departure of the Romans, the Sheffield area may have been the southern part of the Brittonic kingdom of Elmet, with the rivers Sheaf and Don forming part of the boundary between this kingdom and the kingdom of Mercia.

Anglian settlers pushed west from the kingdom of Deira. Deira was a northern Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Britain which stretched from the Humber to the Tees River.

Evidence of Britonnic presence within the Sheffield area are two settlements called Wales and Waleswood close to Sheffield. The settlements that grew and merged to form Sheffield. They were originally of Anglo-Saxon and Danish origin. In Anglo-Saxon times, the Sheffield area straddled the border between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Eanred of Northumbria submitted to Egbert of Wessex at the hamlet of Dore (now a suburb of Sheffield) in 829, a key event in the unification of the kingdom of England under the House of Wessex.

After the Norman conquest of England, Sheffield Castle was built to protect the local settlements, and a small town developed that is the nucleus of the modern city. By 1296, a market had been established at what is now known as Castle Square, and Sheffield subsequently grew into a small market town. In the 14th century, Sheffield was already noted for the production of knives, as mentioned in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

By the early 1600s it had become the main centre of cutlery manufacture in England outside London, overseen by the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire. From 1570 to 1584, Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor.

During the 1740s, a form of the crucible steel process was discovered that allowed the manufacture of a better quality of steel than had previously been possible.

Around the same time a technique was developed for fusing a thin sheet of silver onto a copper ingot to produce silver plating, which became widely known as Sheffield plate. These innovations spurred Sheffield's growth as an industrial town.

The population of the town grew rapidly throughout the 19th century; increasing from 60,095 in 1801 to 451,195 by 1901.

The Sheffield and Rotherham railway was constructed in 1838, connecting the two towns.