Transcriber's Notes:
21st Century readers may be interested to know that this book - The Old Halls, Manors and Families of Derbyshire - was on sale originally (in 1899) as a rather splendidly gilt-edged edition priced one guinea (£1.05 sterling). In comparison the book Three Weeks in the Devonshire Hospital (Buxton) written by an ex-patient cost one old penny (of which there were 240 to the pound!) and had reached its 77,000th copy of publication; and Manchester Grammar School's fees for pupils were 4 guineas a term. [Source: Local News - April 1899. Article published in The Peak Advertiser 19th April 1999, p1]

In today's terms, according to Measuring Worth, a website providing information about the Purchasing Power of British Pounds (1270-1970) one guinea would be worth around £68.21 in 1999, and it would have bought just the first of 5 Volumes. Compare this with the price of £120.00 for all four volumes of Gladwyn Turbutt's History of Derbyshire, published by Merton Priory Press Ltd. the same year (1999).

Nicholas Pevsner in his Buildings of England series for Derbyshire (1978) refers to Old Halls Manors and Families as "an irritating book singularly devoid of architectural information", with which I tend to agree. The style is certainly irksome but it does nevertheless contain much information of interest to the family historian, if not to the architect, which I have yet to discover in other sources, so we do nevertheless have cause to be grateful (I think) for the copies which were then purchased for such a princely sum.

But even so, a Word of Caution:
It is my opinion that Tilley was writing for a particular audience - those who were wealthy enough to buy his books, and in particular, those who may still have owned the Halls under scrutiny. So he would have wanted to present their lineage in an agreeable way - Mills & Boon might even have learned a few lessons from him in his presentation of Dorothy Vernon's supposed elopement with John Manners! As such his accounts may well contain information on the various pedigrees which owes a lot to Tilley's imagination, which with the benefit of 21st century hindsight we can disprove, or dismiss.

But I still think it's a useful source of reference!