Adellijke echo’s? De invloed van de adel op de ontwikkeling van buitenplaatsen langs de rivieren van het Amstelland en de Oude Rijn

Abstract

This article claims that the influence of the nobility on the temporal and spatial development of the country house landscapes in the areas of Amstelland and the Oude Rijn was stronger than has previously been argued and remained visible long after the nobles themselves had left. In Amstelland the economic, social and cultural focus of the Catholic nobility that still owned land here shifted at the end of the seventeenth century to the southern part of the Netherlands and abroad. It offered the merchant elite of Amsterdam the opportunity to buy their prime locations and turn them into modern dairy farms combined with the first country houses in Amstelland. Along the Oude Rijn river many locations carried various noble connotations, which seemed to attract the status-sensitive members of the urban elite of both Amsterdam and Utrecht. They used the location – formerly a noble seat – and name of the place so as to associate themselves with a (true or fabricated) noble past.