Rank, Manners and Display: The Gentlemanly House, 1500-1750 Author(s): Nicholas Cooper Source: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 291-310 Published by: Royal Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679349 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 11:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rhs
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679349?origin=JSTOR-pdf
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
Transactions of the RHS 12 (2002), pp. 291-3IO ? 2002 Royal Historical Society DOI: Io.IoI7/Soo8o44oio2ooolI7 Printed in the United Kingdom

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY: THE GENTLEMANLY HOUSE, 1500-1750

By Nicholas Cooper

ABSTRACT. In the early modem period the amenities of the upper-class house provided for approved modes of polite behaviour, while the initial, piecemeal display of antique ornament in the sixteenth century expressed the status and the education of the governing class. In the seventeenth century a more classically correct architecture would spread in a climate of opinion in which approved behaviour was increasingly internalised and external display less favoured. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in superseding archi- tectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not.

THE last few years have seen the rapid growth of what may be called ‘country house studies’. There has been an increasing synthesis of a number of discrete study areas – architectural history, studies of power structures, of estate management and the economics of landowning, of family relations and upper-class recruitment, of household evolution, of education and of the concept of privacy, and country house literature. However, the architectural, economic and social dimensions of the country house are perhaps better established than the ways in which houses express their owners’ aspirations and education, and the image of themselves as members of a elite that owners wished to project. While the culture of the class evolved as the corollary of its wealth and responsibilities, its expression in the country house paralleled other displays of manners in advertising the possessors’ education, refinement and social distinction. While the appearance of the house was the public expression of its owner’s status and culture, its plan evolved in response to the evolving demands of privacy, to the changing needs of household, community and peer-group relations, and to its owner’s wish for cultural self-expression in the house’s furnishing and decoration. The house was not only the scene where ideals of gentility and manners could be realised: it provided an essential display of gentility in itself.

The earliest printed plan of an English house is not in any archi- tectural publication but in Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman

291

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
292 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

aisle

1EE

‘ : . . . .. .

. . .. .. . .. …..

: . . .

”

. .. . . … . .. .. … .. … .. . … .-,; .

:. . .. . . . … .. … .. : .. . .. .. . . .. . . . . . . .. .

Plate I ‘A Plain Man’s Country House’,from Gerwase Markham, The English Husbandman (1613). Reproduced by permission of the British Libray.

of 1613 (Plate I).’ It shows a house with which his readers will have been very familiar and which remains widespread. One wing has polite rooms for entertaining, and the other, rooms for everyday functions and services; the layout is essentially hierarchical, and at the centre is a hall which mediates between the house’s two ends. The rooms are those one would have found in any house of a rich yeoman farmer or of the lesser gentry, but in the accompanying text Markham carefully distinguishes between the two classes. He calls his plan ‘the model of a plain man’s country house’, but describes in some detail how the outside might be embellished with turrets and decorative gables and other architectural ornament. ‘But the scope of my book’ he concludes ‘tendeth only to the use of the honest husbandman, and not to instruct men of dignity.’ It is clear that what is significant for Markham is that gentlemen’s houses are distinguished visually from those of the lesser ranks of society, however prosperous individuals might be.

Architectural display based on rank is in any case well documented in the era when Markham was writing. Some Lancashire gentry have ornamental gables to their houses while their farming neighbours do

‘Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (1613), sig. A4-B.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 293

not.2 In areas of timber building, gentry houses are often marked by an excess of structural ornament – itself a form of conspicuous con- sumption, and as such a display of rank that was the right and even the duty of the governing class in a well-ordered society. On the southern edge of the Cotswolds, the houses of village gentry have been noted as having stone window mullions, while yeomen’s houses have mullions of wood.3 The widespread occurrence of such examples demonstrates the widespread acceptance of the principles of class-based display that Markham implied.

Concurrent with the growth in the numbers of the governing classes in sixteenth-century England was the increasing recognition on the part of the members of these classes of their duties as well as of their powers. Concern with the duties and privileges of rank and with recruitment to its higher echelons was of course pervasive, and if in the course of the seventeenth century social mobility came to be seen as less of a threat to civil order, there was no lessening of concern for the manners, behaviour and modes of display that were seen as appropriate to the classes of society. And while medieval codes of courtliness were gradually superseded by a humanist ethos of civility, ultimately civility would itself become frozen as rules of politeness and good breeding. What the owners of grand houses wished to express externally, and to realise in the internal arrangements of these houses, was their membership of a class that was distinguished by its behaviour, its growing responsibilities, its increasing education and its members’ awareness of belonging to a recognisable and exclusive elite.

The desire for architectural display was not new. Under the Yorkists and the first Tudors, architectural display had reached formidable levels of excess. Such display implies recognition that political status demanded visible expression, whether through squads of liveried retainers or through the impressiveness of the magnate’s seat of power, and was justified by a sense of the magnificence appropriate to the great man.4 Both in England and abroad, the greatest houses of the late fifteenth century were inspired by chivalry as they recalled the genuinely fortified castle. But in the course of the sixteenth century, a growing concern for the character of display followed from the changing character of the ruling class itself – from one in which power was the consequence of military might or feudal lordship, to one in which power comprised

‘Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Rural Houses of the Lancashire Pennines, 156o-176o (1985), 46-9.

3Linda Hall, ‘Yeoman or Gentleman? Problems in Defining Social Status in Seven- teenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century Gloucestershire’, Vernacular Architecture, 22 (1991), 2-19.

4 Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England [hereafter Thurley] (New Haven and London, 1993), 11-13.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
294 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the wise exercise of responsibilities and privileges bestowed by the state. Such exercise still deserved visible distinction, but rather a display of the qualities appropriate to the possessors of these powers. And in such a display, the introduction of classical ornament played a significant part.

‘Antic’ ornament was appearing on luxury goods, in interior dec- oration, on coats of arms and on tombs from the 1520S onward, in contexts where it was immediately associated with the individual concerned. In the furnishing and decoration of the house, its expense and its association with alien products and craftsmen linked it clearly with wealth, with comfort and hence with elite status.5 It is tempting to see the English use of classical ornament on a par with other types of intellectual symbol: with the heraldry that proclaimed lineage and gentility, and with imprese, the personal and often cryptic devices expressive of private circumstances and values, the very reconditeness of which could be seen to increase their value. When classical architectural details first appear in England, they seem to be seen as cultural statements, not as architectural forms. Not infrequently, classical and more personal symbols are combined, as at Lyveden New Build where the triglyphs of a Doric frieze alternate with the instruments of the passion, placed there by the recusant owner, Sir Robert Tresham; or at Moreton Corbett in Shropshire where a riotous conjunction of classical, heraldic and personal emblems in part defies analysis.

With the demand for an educated ruling class, it is tempting to believe that classical ornament was seen as appropriate to the sophisticated ruler who could not only afford to keep up with fashion but had studied the exemplars of society, of public duty and statesmanship to be derived from Plato and Cicero, and modern writers such as Castiglione and Sir Thomas Elyott. No contemporary English statement explicitly identifies classical ornament with the house of the governor, but it is at least implicit in the introduction to John Shute’s First and Chief Groundes ofArchitecture of I554. Recounting how he had been sent to Italy by the duke of Northumberland to study architecture there, Shute describes how in doing so he was ‘as it were stirred forward to do my dutie unto my Countrie wherein I live and am a member’.6 The sentiment of duty to the commonwealth is conventional, but none the less real; the introduction of classical forms drawn from the fountainhead is here presented as a patriotic service. John Shute died with little to show from his visit, but sources of such ornament were coming to be available, both through the recruitment of foreign craftsmen – a very few Italians, more French – and through continental engravings and such writers

5 Maurice Howard, The Early Tudor Country House (1987), 120-35; Thurley, 207-46. 6John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1554), sig. Aiii.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 295

as Alberti and the commentators on Vitruvius that only the rich and the educated could either afford or understand. When comparing the elaboration of late Elizabethan houses to the austere correctness of Palladian, it is perhaps difficult to see both as manifestations of an essentially classical culture. But on the portico of Hardwick Hall, of the 1590s, two lines from Ovid appear in contemporary graffiti, by which the house is compared to a heavenly palace,7 and one must see Hardwick against a background where even grammar school boys will have known great chunks of Ovid by heart.

In the sixteenth century, polite attitudes towards the building craft were ambivalent. It is clear that too close a knowledge of the skills of the artisan was considered inappropriate for members of the upper classes.8 Yet from the middle years of the century onwards, increasing numbers of the aristocracy were taking an active interest in the form and detail of their houses, and it is significant that those at the forefront of such interest were among the most highly educated and the most prominent of their time: men such as Sir John Thynne of Longleat, the most revolutionary house of its age; William Cecil, the creator of the barrel-vaulted, stone stair at Burghley, without English precedent or parallels and possibly imported ready-made; Cecil’s brother-in-law the diplomatist Sir Thomas Hoby who placed a line of precocious, pedimented windows along the front of his brother’s medieval house at Bisham; travellers such as Sir Robert Corbet of Moreton Corbet, whom Dugdale described as ‘carried away by the affectionate delight of architecture’;9 and Sir Thomas Smith who owned six editions of Vitruvius. Smith’s nephew described his uncle’s house, built in the

I56os and among the most architecturally advanced of its day, as having been ‘answerable to that honourable estate and calling wherein he served under the Queene’s most excellent majesty’.'” It was proper that the house of the governor should be suited to his place in the commonwealth, and that its ornament should satisfy the ideas he had derived from his learning. The Vitruvian rules for the hierarchical composition of the classical orders were a paradigm of other ideals of civic virtue and civil order, while for those who could master Pythag- orean proportional systems, architecture was assimilated to the har- monies of the universe.

7’Hic locus est quem si verbis audacia detur / haud timeam magni dixisse palatia caeli’, Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk I lines 175-6.

8Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 148o-68o [hereafter Cooper] (New Haven and London, 1999), 27-51-

9William Camden, Britain … Translated into English by Philemon Holland (1637), 594- ‘o Quoted in Paul Drury, ‘A Fayre House, Buylt by Sir Thomas Smith: The Devel-

opment of Hill Hall, Essex, 1557-81′, British Archaeological Association Journal, 146 (1983), 116.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
296 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Neither Vitruvius nor foreign renaissance models had any great impact on the overall form of the house until the seventeenth century; Gervase Markham’s house is still traditional in its layout, with the hall mediating between the high and the low ends. Neverthless, the period between 152o and I580 saw a fundamental change in what upper-class houses looked like which was to have the most profound consequences for architectural development thereafter. The late medieval house was essentially an accretive one, which expressed externally the relative importance of each of its parts. By 1580 the most modern upper- class house was wholly symmetrical, and its internal arrangements undetectable by the outside viewer. The reason for this repudiation of external distinctions was not in itself stylistic, but rather lay in the image of its owner and of a changing household community that the house was intended to project. The late medieval household had been one of structured grades of service and dependency, and it may seem paradoxical that the rapid decline of external marks of status in the appearance of the house should coincide with Tudor sumptuary legislation and with other attempts to define the privileges of different ranks of society. But whereas the house had once expressed by its disparate parts the structure of the community it served, the whole building was now coming to express the status and cultivation of its owner in a way comparable to the use of classical ornament. The layout of the medieval, hierachical house can be read from the outside; the undifferentiated house could not be. The solution to this paradox is another paradox: that the symmetrical, undifferentiated house can be seen as expressing the cultivation of its owner by making a public display of privacy and exclusivity. And in a society that made extensive use of symbolic languages, the integrated, visually balanced house can itself be seen as a species of device, a symbol of harmony. External marks of differentiation could be sacrificed for the sake of an alternative image of gentility.

By the achievement of symmetry and the abandonment of the principal of hierarchical distinction as a basis for design, the appearance of the house could now be determined by purely formal and archi- tectural considerations. And while the requirements of knowledgeable owners were increasing, the craft-based expertise of masons was declin- ing with the collapse of gothic church building, further contributing to a shift in craftsman-client relationships, while novel requirements both in the layout and in the ornament of the house made demands on craftsmanship that traditionally trained workmen were less able to supply. The example of prominent builders, and Vitruvian claims for the standing of architecture that linked it expressly with mathematics and the classics rather than being the province merely of the artisan, were increasingly licensing a knowledge of it on the part of a class

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 297

whose education was advancing in both areas. The huge amount of new house building from the middle years of the sixteenth century – remarked on by contemporaries and clear in any analysis – was the result of the rapid increase in the numbers and wealth of the gentry class, but the inevitable prominence of these new houses itself drew attention to them, and must in itself have provoked thought about the form and appearance of the house on the part of a competitive and increasingly educated group. A further incentive for a reconsideration of the form of the house was the need to accommodate rooms and relationships between social spaces that were themselves the consequence of evolving manners.

Within the house, evolving civility showed itself in the desire for greater privacy and in the need for more rooms – in other words,in the provision of rooms with more specialist uses, and in developments in the plan that made for a clearer distinction betwen private and public spheres.” Such distinction was in any case explicitly prescribed by Vitruvius.’ In a sample of some 200 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inventories, Figure I shows the first occurrence of some of these rooms and, equally import- antly, of other cultural goods such as books and pictures. The sample is not large enough to take account of significant regional differences, or those ofwealth within the ranks of the upper classes, but sixteenth-century innovations that it shows include the progressive removal of beds from rooms of entertainment, and the appearance of rooms described as studies. In the seventeenth century the process continues, and both great chamber and dining parlour are superseded by dining rooms, so called, as names change to correspond to changing functions. The different functions of chambers would themselves become distinguished and their occupants’ privacy further provided for, with the provision in the seven- teenth century of separate dressing rooms.

The figure does not show how the decline of the hall both as a functional and as a symbolic space made it the more acceptable to reduce its height to a single storey only and to place chambers – most frequently the great chamber, the principal room of polite entertainment – above it, in order to meet the demands of entertainment and hospitality by which the growing numbers of the gentry consolidated their position and their alliances. Nor does it show the process whereby the hall itself would become purely a room for formal entrance into the house or a saloon for the polite entertainment of visitors of equal rank with the owner, while servants’ eating would be removed into a separate servants’ hall. Indeed, in some seventeenth-century great houses there would be separate halls for upper and lower servants.

“Cooper, 273-316. 2 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Bk 6, ch. 5.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
Parlour Parlour with bed Great chamber Great chamber with bed 015% of ccurrences in the decadeer Dinin5%-50% oarlourrences in the decade Dining50%100% of roomccurrences in the decade Study

Pictures

Books (>5)

0-15% of occurrences in the decade 15%-50% of occurrences in the decade 50%-100% of occurrences in the decade

Figure i Selected entries in 200 upper-class inventories, i5oo-68o

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 299

Until well into the seventeenth century the upper-class house still retained essentially the traditional, hierarchical layout shown by Gervase Markham, its appearance regularised almost as a species of intellectual conceit, enhanced by classical detail that expresses the credentials of its owner, and its plan progressively elaborated by comparable demands for more specialised and private space. However, demands for additional rooms and novel functional relationships were difficult to meet within the layout and the form of the traditional, hierarchical plan. The increase in rooms for entertainment could be met by building upward, as at Chatsworth, Worksop and Hardwick where the grandest rooms were on the second floor. The elaboration of the plan that was the result of these demands for more specialised spaces had been among the reasons for such vast, sprawling, late Elizabethan and Jacobean prodigy houses as Burghley, Holdenby, Theobalds, Hatfield and Audley End. These aristocratic houses retained tall, great halls; the wealth and status of their builders led them to perpetuate a form that had a traditional association with lordship, but the great hall was ceasing to be useful even as a symbol. The fact that after Audley End there were no more of these monstrous houses was not only because of their ruinous cost and because in inflating the traditional, hierarchical house to so huge a size it had expanded beyond what was practical; two of the greatest, Theobalds, Holdenby and half of Audley End were pulled down less than a century after they were built. Behind these demolitions lay not only economics and the obsolescence of the layout; underlying them also was an evolving attitude to display. Both the layout and the appearance of the house continued to reflect the need for accom- modation commensurate with the status, manners and way of life of the owner and for a house that appeared suitable to his rank; however, both the form and appearance of the house would change with a decline of the old-fashioned, hierarchical household of graded ranks of service, and with changes in the sense of what it was right to display.

The revolution of the seventeenth century was the appearance of novel, more compact forms of plan, and of simple silhouettes that made a total contrast with the extravagant outlines that had characterised the most ostentatious of Jacobean houses. Although the expense of these prodigy houses was one reason for their abandonment, and the fact that there were no longer statesmen like the Cecils to build them was another, it is clear that from the I620os there was a change in attitudes away from the demands of Aristotelian magnificence, towards a greater reticence. Whereas Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century would praise ‘a middle-class person who is generous in spirit and who spends most of his money on his house’,’3 Henry Peacham in 1622 would quote

‘3Myra Nan Rosenfeld, Serlio on Domestic Architecture (Mineola, 1996), 50.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
300 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

with approval Macchiavelli on Cosimo de Medici, whose ‘buildings … were princely … yet so governed by wisdom that he never excelled the bounds of civil modesty’.’4 While Hatton and Burghley had com- miserated with each other about the huge sums they were both spending on their houses, Fuller’s injunction of the 1650s is well known – that it was better to build a house that was too small for a day than one too large for a year.

The social credentials of the house with an unconventional hall had already been established in the aristocratic lodge, essentially a house for polite recreation away from the large and structured household of the principal seat. The most significant model for the new, compact house was, however, in the polite houses of London, the acknowledged centre of fashion and civility. London households were very different from those of the country estate, where the household was larger and where there was a constant fluidity at its edges where it interacted with the broader community. The upper-class, London house was less concerned with community – which did not exist in the sense of the rural estate – and more concerned with polite entertainment. Here, plan forms had already been developed that accommodated different patterns of social behaviour and a more sharply polarised household than that which had been accommodated by the hierarchical layout of the country house. The town house that made the most of a constricted site by having a plan of two rooms deep and in which the hall was no longer at the centre of a hierarchical layout provided a model for a house with a deep, rectangular plan without wings, a form that could be readily transplanted from the town to the suburbs and then to the country beyond.’5 The rapid growth in the numbers of the upper classes frequenting the capital, which led James and Charles I to issue increasingly frantic and largely futile proclamations ordering their return to their estates and duties in the provinces, had exposed ever more of them to the allurements of the City and to the architectural innovations of the inner suburbs – to the conveniences, both social and physical, of the compact, rectangular house that was being evolved there.'” And in admiring aspects of London houses and in due course reproducing them in the countryside, those who did so would adopt the setting for novel modes of elite behaviour.

The London house provided a formula which could be expanded to almost any size. The deep, compact plan is known to architectural historians as a ‘double pile’, a term derived from Sir Roger Pratt who

‘4Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Chicago, 1962), 17. ‘5 Cooper, i55-94. ‘6 Lawrence Stone, ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the

Seventeenth Century’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. B. Malament (Manchester, 198o), 167-212.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 301

around 166o summed up its practical advantages as economy and regularity.’7 Pratt’s arguments in its favour have sometimes been taken as explaining how it originated; that is not the case, but they were a powerful recommendation once London had established its acceptability for the houses of the upper classes. Aesthetically, too, the rectangular plan had much to recommend it. Already by 1580 a form of house had emerged that had a strictly symmetrical facade, but whereas the emergence of the symmetrical house may have been prompted by symbolism, once achieved, regularity had rapidly become a basic design formula, capable of almost infinite variation. Symmetry was a …

Read more
Applied Sciences
Architecture and Design
Biology
Business & Finance
Chemistry
Computer Science
Geography
Geology
Education
Engineering
English
Environmental science
Spanish
Government
History
Human Resource Management
Information Systems
Law
Literature
Mathematics
Nursing
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Reading
Science
Social Science
Home
Homework Answers
Blog
Archive
Tags
Reviews
Contact
twitterfacebook
Copyright © 2021 SweetStudy.com