The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption

Abstract

For some years now, social historians of early modern Britain have been making imaginative use of inventories to draw up an increasingly detailed picture of consumption patterns, principally but not exclusively amongst the middling sort. At its best, this handsomely illustrated and neatly presented volume extends this approach to wealthier families to show the ways in which country houses, especially in the ‘long eighteenth century’, were important centres of consumption drawing on local, regional and national markets. In doing so, the contributors bring together the social history of consumption with the social history of the aristocracy, two literatures that have been largely distinct, though to some extent previously connected in the work of Amanda Vickery on gentry women and Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley on the building and decorating of the country house. Some of the contributors make particularly good use of the richer body of sources available for dynastic, elite families: for example, Jane Whittle’s study of the Le Strange family of Hunstanton Hall, Norfolk, benefits even for the early seventeenth century from the survival of detailed household and kitchen accounts kept by the owners; Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery can draw not only on account books but also a large mass of receipted bills for their case studies of two Warwickshire country houses in the eighteenth century, Stoneleigh Abbey and Arbury Hall; Susan Jenkins’ close examination of the Adam library at Kenwood House, Middlesex, matches tradesmen’s bills with a 1796 inventory, many surviving drawings, and archaeological analysis of the surviving fabric.