The Symbolic Hall: Historical Context and Merchant Culture in the Early Modern City

Abstract

The purpose of the open or large hall in the larger town house of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries is here reassessed. The historical context provided by inventories, wills and other documents for houses in London, Bristol and elsewhere is used to suggest that the value of the hall was increasingly a symbolic one, that this was already so by the late fifteenth century, and that the hall remained a potent symbol of individual and civic status and identity until the late seventeenth century.