Gentlemen and shopkeepers: supplying the country house in eighteenth-century England

Abstract

The country house is well recognized as a site of elite patronage, an important vehicle of social and political ambition, and a statement of power and taste. Yet we know relatively little about the networks of supply and purchasing patterns of rural elites, or about how their practices related to broader changes in material culture. Drawing on a large sample of bills and receipts of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, this article recreates the processes through which the material culture of the family home was constructed. These reveal London as the source for many highquality goods, although the pattern of supply was not a simple dichotomy of localeveryday and metropolitan-luxury purchases. They also show the large number of shopkeepers patronized as the Leighs spread their purchases through choice, convenience, and expediency. Relating this to wider conceptions of consumption, the Leighs emerge as engaging in layered and sometimes conflicting consumer cultures. They were concerned with fashion as novelty and a marker of rank; but they also valued traditional markers of status. Social distinction was achieved through a continued emphasis on title and lineage as much as fashion or taste-value systems that were unavailable to the middling sorts.e hr_562 885..904 I n recent years, consumption has emerged as a meta-narrative of historical enquiry, especially for the eighteenth century where it has eclipsed production and industrialization as the dominant explanatory framework for social, cultural, and economic transformation. 2 Part of this growing domination comes from the broad and malleable nature of consumption as a concept and process. It has been variously portrayed as the ownership and meaning of goods, the use of leisure time, and the means by which goods were acquired and ideas about goods were formed. 3 Yet all of these interpretations link consumption with the construction of material culture, defined broadly to encompass both the built environment and material artefacts.Within this growing corpus of research, relatively little attention has been paid to the aristocracy as consumers or the country house as a site of consumption. Of course, an enormous amount has been written about the country house. One well-established line of enquiry has taken an economic-based view, focusing on the management of the estate, the balance sheet of income and expenditure, and the 1 This research is linked to the project 'Consumption and the Country House', funded by the AHRC (AH/H008365/1). I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Cultural and economic discrimination by the Great Leveller

“…Further theoretical work and empirical evidence for the tunnel effect is provided in the work of leading cultural economists (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2010Alesina & Fuchs-Schuendeln, 2007;Benabou & Tirole, 2006, 2011Passarelli & Tabellini, 2013), political economists (Scheve & Stasavage, 2006) and other high-profile contributions (see Kerr, 2014).…”

“…Our study identifies which places are likely to experience further increases in perceived grievances from being left behind, this time not only because of policy but also in front of the COVID-19 death toll. Beyond the moral implications of the latter, growing economic inequality is known to be associated with social unrest (Benabou & Tirole, 2006, 2011, 2016Hirschman & Rothschild, 1973), and therefore urgent spatially aware policy measures are needed to support and alleviate the economic loss and psychological trauma for left-behind places if we are going to avoid aggravated inequality and growing social unrest.…”

Luxury and Country House Sales in England, c. 1760–1830

“…This could be highly personal and was often personalised, the Leigh family in Warwickshire, for example, invariably paid for newly-acquired silverware to be engraved with the family crest. 43 Again, however, there is little sign of personal items in the sales catalogues. Silverware and plate mostly comprised cutlery and other tableware, with more personal items appearing only rarely: the 'larger two-handled cup and cover' at the Wollaston Hall of 1805 being exceptional.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2011

“…His own work, which uses probate inventories from sample areas in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire, shows that the consumer revolution was a later eighteenth‐century phenomenon that was unevenly spread across the country and varied within geographical areas and social classes. Stobart ( Economic History Review ) uses the bills and receipts of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire to examine the purchasing patterns of eighteenth‐century elites. He finds that the Leighs were concerned with fashion as a marker of rank but that fashion was not the only consideration.…”

“…Social distinction was achieved as much through an emphasis on title and lineage as through fashion or taste. As Stobart points out, these value systems may have allowed the elites to eschew the call of fashion but they were not available to the middling sorts. Bailey, in Midland History 's prize‐winning essay for 2010, considers the consumption habits of the Gibbard family of Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire during the early nineteenth century.…”