The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England

Rating:
Summary: A flawed but essential survey
Review: Cliffe presents an extensive survey of family and public records from a number of sources. The Public Record office is the source of many of the more interesting tidbits, but no less significant are the private records of descendants of his subjects, for example, the Earl of Verulam, Lord Cobbold, Lord Daventry and a Major J. R. More-Molyneux. He shows very little inclination to editorialise, preferring to let the sources speak for themselves. Where he dare to conject, the impression is that it is on the basis of the wealth of detail that he has not managed to fit in rather than imagination. This is all very well and properly academic, but it does mean that there are many gaps and unanswered, or poorly answered questions that arise.

He deals with the first such in his introduction. Here he explains his aim, "a study of the country houses of the gentry, their inhabitants, including servants and other employees, and the activities which went on around such houses" (vii). This is a laudable endeavour, after all, as he points out, the nobility have had their fair share of historical attention already. The question is, who are the gentry? We all know who and what the nobility are and there is a legal status conferred upon the nobility (such that the duelist Lord Mohan could expect to be judged by his peers rather than a court of law). There is no similar legal definition for the gentry, as one contemporary lawyer, John Seldon once observed, "What a gentleman is, 'tis hard with us to define" (vii).

Cliffe's definition is "families owning landed property which were headed by baronets or knights or men described as 'esquire' or 'gentleman' in such official documents as heraldic visitation records, subsidy rolls and hearth tax returns." (vii) This is a workable, if broad definition but it is a conclusion that Cliffe reaches after only one paragraph. In later chapters he hints at arguments and court cases concerning the definition of gentlemen and it seems to me there might have been material enough for a whole chapter on the subject.

This task is not made any easier by Cliffe's decision to "limit" his study to the seventeenth century. Historians always wrestle with ways of defining period of time and this book highlights the problems that often lead them to focus on the reign of one monarch. Even if a King or Queen rules over a period of incredible social change (like good king Harry) one can rest assured that life at the end of their reign is going to bare a least some resemblances to life when they came to the throne. Perhaps some centuries are similarly blessed with social stability, but surely the least stable must have been the seventeenth? In my uneducated (but intuitive) opinion I'm willing to bet that there was less social change between William III's reign and George IV's than the huge upheaval between James I's and William's. A book that makes a narrative of the upheaval, telling the story of how the world of the country house changed over this period would be an interesting read in it's own right, but Cliffe's book is not it. In fact I'm surprised that Cliffe has not dedicated a chapter to it at least. What we have instead is a book that does not even drawn from its sources in chronological order. The scholar must work through every chapter sifting out the items relevant to their period and being careful not to to use sources from twenty or eighty years before their period to make inaccurate generalisations. That said there are plenty of nuggets of considerable interest.