Rotherham, United Kingdom

Fossard's successors, the De Vesci family, rarely visited the town, but maintained a Friday market and a fair. In the mid 13th century, John de Vesci and Ralph de Tili gave all their possessions in Rotherham to Rufford Abbey. The monks from the abbey collected tithes from the town and gained rights to an extra market day on Monday and to extend the annual fair from two to three days.

The townsmen of Rotherham formed the "Greaves of Our Lady's Light", an organisation which worked with the town's three guilds. It was suppressed in 1547 but revived in 1584 as the feoffees of the common lands of Rotherham, and remains in existence.

In the 1480s, the Rotherham-born Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham, instigated the building of a College of Jesus in Rotherham to rival the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. It was the first brick building in what is now South Yorkshire and taught theology, religious chant and hymns, grammar and writing.

The college and new parish of All Saints Church made Rotherham an enviable and modern town at the turn of the 16th century. The college was dissolved in 1547 during the reign of Edward VI, and its assets were stripped by the crown. Very little remains of the original building in College Street. Walls of part of the College of Jesus are encased within number 23 and Nos 2, 2A, 4 (later for a time Old College Inn, a beerhouse), 6 and 8 Effingham Street. A doorway was rescued from demolition and relocated to nearby Boston Park in 1879. Sixty years after the college's dissolution Rotherham was described by a wealthy visitor as falling from a fashionable college town to a place of gambling and vice. The history of Thomas Rotherham and education in the town are remembered in the name of Thomas Rotherham College.

Mary, Queen of Scots stayed in Rotherham for two nights at the end of January 1569. It has been suggested that she stayed in the college building. Two men, a Mr Lete and Mr Bayley, were paid for guarding her.

The Rotherham area had been used for iron production since the Roman occupation of Britain. Toward the end of the 18th century, coal seams near the town made Rotherham an important settlement in the Industrial Revolution. Coal was exported from the town by river, and this led to infrastructure improvements in the River Don's navigability. The River Don eventually became an artery of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation system of navigable inland waterways.

During the early Industrial Revolution, iron, and later steel, became the principal industries in Rotherham, surviving into the 20th century. The Walker family built an iron empire in the 18th century, their foundries producing high quality cannons, including the majority of guns for the ship HMS Victory, and cast iron bridges, one of which was commissioned by Thomas Paine.

Rotherham's cast iron industry expanded rapidly in the early 19th century, with the Effingham Ironworks, later Yates, Haywood & Co, opening in 1820. Other major iron founders included William Corbitt and Co; George Wright and Co of Burton Weir; Owen and Co of Wheathill Foundry; Morgan Macauley and Waide of the Baths Foundry; the Masbro' Stove Grate Co belonging to Messrs. Perrot, W. H. Micklethwait and John and Richard Corker of the Ferham Works. G & WG Gummer Ltd exported brass products across the world, supplying fittings for hotels, hospitals, Victorian Turkish baths and the RMS Mauretania. Their fittings could also be found on battleships used in the Second World War and HMS Ark Royal.

The Parkgate Ironworks was established in 1823 by Sanderson and Watson, and changed ownership several times. In 1854, Samuel Beal & Co produced wrought iron plates for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's famous steamship the SS Great Eastern. In 1864, the ironworks was taken over by the Parkgate Iron Co. Ltd, becoming the Park Gate Iron and Steel Company in 1888. The company was purchased by Tube Investments Ltd in 1956 and closed in 1974. Steel, Peech and Tozer's massive Templeborough steelworks (now the Magna Science Adventure Centre) was, at its peak, over one mile (1.5 kilometres) long, employing 10,000 workers, and housing six electric arc furnaces producing 1.8 million tonnes of steel a year. The operation closed down in 1993.

The first railway stations, Holmes and Rotherham Westgate, both on the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway, opened on 31 October 1838. Holmes station was located close to the works of Isaac Dodds and Son, pioneers in the development of railway technology. Later stations included Parkgate and Aldwarke on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, which opened in July 1873; Parkgate and Rawmarsh on the North Midland Railway, and Rotherham Masborough also on the North Midland Railway.