Sheffield, United Kingdom

After the Norman conquest of England, insurrection by the populace led to the devastation of the Sheffield area during the Harrying of the North and Sheffield Castle was built to control the ruined local settlements. 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.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey stayed at Sheffield Manor for 16–18 days in 1530 when travelling to London to stand trial for high treason. He was hosted by George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury. The cardinal was in disgrace about the annulment of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon's marriage.

From 1570 to 1584, Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor by George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, the husband of Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury. The Earl is buried in Sheffield Cathedral.

Sheffield by the early 1600s became the main centre of cutlery manufacture in England outside London, overseen by the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire.

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.

In about the same period, 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, but the loss of some important export markets led to a recession in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The resulting poor conditions culminated in a cholera epidemic that killed 402 people in 1832.

The population of the town grew rapidly throughout the 19th century; increasing from 60,095 in 1801 to 451,195 by 1901. The growing population led to the construction of many back-to-back dwellings that, along with severe pollution from the factories, inspired George Orwell in 1937 to write: "Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World". The Sheffield and Rotherham railway was constructed in 1838, connecting the two towns.

The town was incorporated as a borough in 1842, and was granted city status by letters patent in 1893. The influx of people also led to demand for better water supplies, and a number of new reservoirs were constructed on the hills to the west of the town. The collapse of the dam wall of one of these reservoirs in 1864 resulted in the Great Sheffield Flood, which killed 270 people and devastated large parts of the town.

Sheffield has an international reputation for metallurgy and steel-making. The earliest official record of cutlery production, for which Sheffield is particularly well known, is from 1297 when a tax return for 'Robert the Cutler' was submitted. A key reason for Sheffield's success in the production of cutlery lies in its geographic makeup. The abundance of streams in the area provided a source of water power and the geological formations in the Hope Valley, in particular, provided sufficient grit stones for grinding wheels. In the 17th century, the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire, which oversaw the booming cutlery industry in the area and remains to this day, was established and focused on markets outside the Sheffield area, leading to the gradual establishment of Sheffield as a respected producer of cutlery. This gradually developed from a national reputation into an international one.

Playing a crucial role in the Industrial Revolution, the city became an industrial powerhouse in the 18th century, and was dubbed "Steel City". Many innovations in these fields have been made in Sheffield, for example Benjamin Huntsman discovered the crucible technique in the 1740s at his workshop in Handsworth. This process was rendered obsolete in 1856 by Henry Bessemer's invention of the Bessemer converter. Thomas Boulsover invented Sheffield plate (silver-plated copper) in the early 18th century.