This engaging and beautifully illustrated book takes us back to the domestic world of the landed gentry in seventeenth-century England. Relating countless stories and case histories drawn from a wide range of primary sources, the book describes the physical environment, staffing, and functioning of gentry households, the inhabitants and their activities, and the role of these houses in the social and economic life of their localities. J. T. Cliffe begins by exploring the exterior and interior of houses and the outbuildings, parks, and gardens that surrounded them. He then investigates the people who lived in the country houses and the relationships between them. He provides colorful details about the responsibilities of the squire and his wife; the duties, remuneration, food, clothing, accommodation, and treatment of servants; and the special duties of estate stewards, coachmen, chaplains, and tutors. Cliffe explains various aspects of housekeeping, such as the tradition of hospitality and the factors militating against it. He also discusses other kinds of activity: religious practices; outdoor sports and indoor pastimes, including music and billiards; and such intellectual pursuits as antiquarian research, poetry, and scientific experiments. He concludes with a fascinating survey of scandal in the world of the gentry, telling of domestic strife, financial disaster, lunacy, and other disasters that marred this idyllic existence.

A rollicking tour of the English country home after World War II, when swinging London collided with aristocratic values As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, its mansions fell and rose. Ancient families were reduced to demolishing the parts of their stately homes they could no longer afford, dukes and duchesses desperately clung to their ancestral seats, and a new class of homeowners bought their way into country life. A delicious romp, Noble Ambitions pulls us into these crumbling halls of power, leading us through the juiciest bits of postwar aristocratic history—from Mick Jagger dancing at deb balls to the scandals of Princess Margaret. Capturing the spirit of the age, historian Adrian Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of the British elite in an era of monumental social change.

Cedar Grove, The Cliffs, Grumblethorpe, Mount Airy, Bartram's House and Garden: Accommodation of the Vernacular

The fascinating story of the evolution of the country house in Britain, from its Roman precursors to the present The Story of the Country House is an authoritative and vivid account of the British country house, exploring how they have evolved with the changing political and economic landscape. Clive Aslet reveals the captivating stories behind individual houses, their architects, and occupants, and paints a vivid picture of the wider context in which the country house in Britain flourished and subsequently fell into decline before enjoying a renaissance in the twenty-first century. The genesis, style, and purpose of architectural masterpieces such as Hardwick Hall, Hatfield House, and Chatsworth are explored, alongside the numerous country houses lost to war and economic decline. We also meet a cavalcade of characters, owners with all their dynastic obsessions and diverse sources of wealth, and architects such as Inigo Jones, Sir John Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Sir John Soane and A.W.N. Pugin, who dazzled or in some cases outraged their contemporaries. The Story of the Country House takes a fresh look at this enduringly popular building type, exploring why it continues to hold such fascination for us today.

This volume provides a wide-ranging account of the development and importance of private libraries and book ownership through the seventeenth century, based upon many kinds of evidence, including examination of thousands of books, and a list of over 1,300 known owners from diverse backgrounds. It considers questions of evolution, contents and size, and motives for book ownership, during a century when growing markets for both new and second-hand books meant that books would be found, in varying numbers, in the homes of all kinds of people from the humble to the wealthy. Book ownership by women, and by non-professional households, is explicitly explored. Other topics include the balance of motivation between books for use, or for display; the relationship between libraries and museums; and cultures of collecting. While presenting a wealth of information in this field, conveniently brought together, this volume also advances methodologies for book history, and makes extensive use of material evidence such as bookbindings. It challenges received wisdom around priorities for studying private libraries, and the terminology which is appropriate to use. In addition, the list of owners, detailed in the Appendix, make this book a work of permanent reference, alongside its value in advancing book history.

This study explores the consumption practices of the landed aristocracy of Georgian England. Focussing on three families and drawing on detailed analysis of account books, receipted bills, household inventories, diaries and correspondence, Consumption and the Country House charts the spending patterns of this elite group during the so-called consumer revolution of the eighteenth century. Generally examined through the lens of middling families, homes and motivations, this book explores the ways in which the aristocracy were engaged in this wider transformation of English society. Analysis centres on the goods that the aristocracy purchased, both luxurious and mundane; the extent to which they pursued fashionable modes and goods; the role that family and friends played in shaping notions of taste; the influence of gender on taste and refinement; the geographical reach of provisioning and the networks that lay behind this consumer activity, and the way this all contributed to the construction of the country house. The country house thus emerges as much more than a repository of luxury and splendour; it lay at the heart of complex networks of exchange, sociability, demand, and supply. Exploring these processes and relationships serves to reanimate the country house, making it an active site of consumption rather than simply an expression of power and taste, and drawing it into the mainstream of consumption histories. At the same time, the landed aristocracy are shown to be rounded consumers, driven by values of thrift and restraint as much as extravagant desires, and valuing the old as well as the new, not least as markers of their pedigree and heritance.

On the Parish? is a study of the negotiations which took place over the allocation of poor relief in the rural communities of sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. It analyses the relationships between the enduring systems of informal support through which the labouring poor made attempts to survive for themselves; the expanding range of endowed charity encouraged by the late sixteenth century statutes for charitable uses; and the developing system of parish relief co-ordinated under the Elizabethan poor laws. Based on exhaustive research in the archives of the trustees who administered endowments, of the overseers of the poor who assessed rates and distributed pensions, of the magistrates who audited and co-ordinated relief and of the royal judges who played such an important role in interpreting the Elizabethan statutes, the book reconstructs the hierarchy of provision of relief as it was experienced among the poor themselves. It argues that receipt of a parish pension was only the final (and by no means the inevitable) stage in a protracted process of negotiation between prospective pensioners (or 'collectioners', as they came to be called) and parish officers. This running theme is itself reflected in a series of chapters whose sequence seeks to mirror the experience of indigence, moving gradually (and by stages) from the networks of care provided by kin and neighbours into the bureaucracy of the parish relief system, emphasising in particular the importance of labour discipline in the thinking of parish officers. By illuminating the workings of a relief system in which notions of entitlement were both under-developed and contested, On the Parish? provides historical perspective for contemporary debates about the rights and obligations of the poor in a society where the dismantling of the welfare state implies that there is, once again, no right to relief from cradle to grave.

Lady Alice Le Strange of Hunstanton in Norfolk kept a continuous series of household accounts from 1610-1654. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths have used the Le Stranges' rich archive to reconstruct the material aspects of family life. This involves looking not only at purchases, but also at home production and gifts; and not only at the luxurious, but at the everyday consumption of food and medical care. Consumption is viewed not just as a set of objects owned, but as a process involving household management, acquisition and appropriation, a process that created and reinforced social links with craftsmen, servants, labourers, and the local community. It is argued that the county gentry provide a missing link in histories of consumption: connecting the fashions of London and the royal court, with those of middling strata of rural England. Recent writing has focused upon the transformation of consumption patterns in the eighteenth century. Here the earlier context is illuminated and, instead of tradition and stability, we find constant change and innovation. Issues of gender permeate the study. Consumption is often viewed as a female activity and the book looks in detail at who managed the provisioning, purchases, and work within the household, how spending on sons and daughters differed, and whether men and women attached different cultural values to household goods. This single household's economy provides a window into some of most significant cultural and economic issues of early modern England: innovations in trade, retail and production, the basis of gentry power, social relations in the countryside, and the gendering of family life.

This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses encompassing philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion – evoking travel beyond England’s shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. Simultaneously, philosophers and other authors argued for the first time that, paradoxically, the blur of motion immobilised an inherently restless viewer into social predictability and so stability. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this narrative is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history yet whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare's reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world - their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location - to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare's posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognise Shakespeare.