Country Houses and Their Owners in Hertfordshire, 1540-1879

LAWRENCE STONE AND JEANNE C. FAWTIER STONE

The Problems

This essay is part of a larger study which is designed to apply statistical methods of analysis to data of varying quality, in order to test some subjective impressions and traditional assumptions about English social structure and social mobility in the Early Modern and Modern periods. It is generally agreed that England was historically the first of the modernizing societies of the world, and in particular that she was the first to industrialize and the first to evolve a stable and broad based constitutional structure. For over a century it has been part of conventional wisdom that these phenomena can be partly explained in terms firstly of the slow growth of the middle class of business and professional men, and secondly of the ease with which this middle class could move upward through the social and political systems. So far, however, there is no reliable body of statistical information with which to check and evaluate the truth of this bold and far-reaching hypothesis. This particular study is narrowly focused on a single aspect, namely the degree of interpenetration of the landed and the merchant/professional classes as tested by the changing composition of the local rural elites. Samples will eventually be taken from three different areas at varying distances from London, in order to obtain some sense of the variety of the national experience. This interpenetration can best be studied by examining the ownership and transmission of the key type of property, namely the country house, which formed the residence of the family and was the main center of the family patrimony. The degree to which these buildings changed hands by marriage, by inheritance, or sale, and the origins of the families who acquired them, should throw a good deal of light on this process.

The second and relatively independent problem is concerned with the building and rebuilding of these country seats. It is safe to say that no other country possesses so many of these large country houses, built, rebuilt, and added to century after century. Their construction, together with that of the ancillary outbuildings, gardens, parks, plantations, and lakes, must have demanded very large capital investments, certainly larger than what was put into industrial development before the nineteenth century, and also must have employed a very large labor force. At present, however, nothing is known about the trends in the number, size, and phases of construction of these houses over time, and nothing about the motivation or background of the builders. If a quantitative study of building activity at the time could be made, it would then be possible both to construct a "house building investment index," and also to chart the number, size, and geographical location of houses at different periods of time. This information in turn could be used to throw light on the houseowners and thus on the size and composition of the local elite at any given time. A study of builders would also throw light on the life experiences that made it likely that a man would embark upon such an enterprise. This article is concerned firstly with describing the sources and methods of such a study, and secondly with providing answers about the houses and their construction. The owners will be the subject of a further article.

The Geographical Limits of the Sample the county

The sampling unit has necessarily to be the county, if only because it was around the county that landed society tended to be organized. There were two reasons why the sixteenth century saw the slow growth of a sense of county identity among the gentry of the shires. The first was the decline of the family or household community of "good lordship," by which the late medieval gentry had been attached to the families of great magnates, crossing county boundaries, splitting counties, and creating personal rather than geographical loyalties. The decline of the aristocratic magnate household freed the gentry for new psychological and political orientations, and made way for new patterns of education at school and university. The second was the growing burden placed on the local gentry by the state, as it expanded its statutory social and economic controls without setting up a paid local bureaucracy of its own to handle them. The result was the development of county justices as administrators and judicial authorities, who slowly began to attach a political identity to their membership. This development was greatly fostered by the growth in numbers of the resident gentry in the countryside, and by marriage patterns showing a very high endogamy within the gentry of each county.

This local particularism was in part offset by a parallel growth of interest in national politics, as shown in increasing competition for a seat in the House of Commons; of loyalty to the national community, as expressed in increasing devotion to the Commonwealth and the Monarch; and of increasing involvement with London, as expressed by visits to the city and dependence on the city for supply of information and specialized services and commodities. This last was of course felt with a special force in Hertfordshire, which was probably more exposed to the pull of London than any other county except Middlesex and perhaps Surrey.

Close personal relationships between the gentry of the county were established at regular meetings of the quarter sessions and assizes, and local power struggles were focused on county offices such as Deputy Lieutenant, Member of Parliament, and so on. It must be remembered that there was an inverse correlation between status and wealth on the one hand and county particularism on the other. The baronets and knights had more contacts outside the county, were more involved in national affairs, and were more inclined to find their partners in a regional marriage market. The small parish gentry, on the other hand, were more narrowly locked into their county particularism by the restricted nature of their education, property holding, marriages, and aspirations for office. Despite these differences of emphasis, it is none the less true that by the early seventeenth century the county had become, even for the elite of the local gentry, the main area of administrative action, political conflict, social intercourse, economic investment, and marriage connections.

HERTFORDSHIRE

Hertfordshire is one of England's smallest counties, consisting of only 630 square miles between 10 and 40 miles to the north of London. It was chosen partly because of the excellence of its local records, and partly because it was thought likely to provide the most extreme case of mobility between land and trade, since it is already known that through all periods it has been a favorite area for the purchase of a landed estate by successful London merchants. It is situated very close to the capital, with good road communications, and yet even today much of it is rolling country of woods and fields of great natural beauty and offering an extraordinary sense of rural peace. The special quality of Hertfordshire was recognized at the time, and in 1704 Robert Morden wrote with pardonable hyperbole — "this County has an incredible number of Pallaces and fair Structures of the Gentry and Nobility. From Totteridge where the County begins and East Barnet to Ware are so many beautiful houses that one may look upon it almost as a continual street. The rich soil and wholesome air, and the excellence of the County have drawn hither the Wealthiest Citizens of London." It has been this combination of proximity with rusticity that has made it so attractive to generation after generation of wealthy Londoners. It is no coincidence that the only regular coach service in the country in the 1630s ran through Hertfordshire from London to Cambridge, that the only three wagon-cum-coach services in the country ran between London and the Hertfordshire towns of Saint Albans, Hertford, and Hatfield, and that there were also regular carrier delivery services several times a week to four other Hertfordshire towns. The ties that bound the county to the city were exceptionally close even before the middle of the seventeenth century.

Some clear evidence for the exceptional rapidity of turnover of land in Hertfordshire is available for the leading gentry of the county who took one side or another at the outbreak of the war in 1642. Less than 10 per cent of them had been settled in the county before 1485, compared with 18 per cent for Essex, 13 per cent for Suffolk, and 42 per cent for Norfolk. For all the gentry, large and small, the figures are 75 per cent for Kent and 40 per cent for Yorkshire and 25 per cent for Northamptonshire (see Fig. 1). Another test is the proportion of leading gentry who took sides on the war whose families had only settled in the county since 1603. For Hertfordshire, the figure is as high as 43 per cent, compared with 26 per cent for Essex, 18 per cent for Suffolk, and 14 per cent for Norfolk, while only 12 per cent of all Kentish gentry were newcomers. Thus Hertfordshire had the lowest proportion of pre-1485 gentry and the highest proportion of post-1603 gentry of any county for which we have record so far (see Fig. 1).

Another indicator of the unusually mobile and open character of Hertfordshire society as early as 1640 is the degree to which its gentry was endogamous. Only 31 per cent of knights and baronets in the county married within the county, as compared with 28 per cent in Essex, 43 per cent in Suffolk, 44 per cent in Norfolk, and about 60 per cent in Kent. The figures for untitled gentry are even more striking; 37 per cent for Hertfordshire, 43 per cent for Essex, 69 per cent for Suffolk, 72 per cent for Norfolk, and 82 per cent for Kent (see Fig. 1). Only Essex is remotely comparable on the scale, and the other counties are completely different in their marriage patterns, primarily because of the striking difference in their ties to London. Twenty per cent of Hertfordshire gentry married Londoners, as compared with only 3 per cent of Suffolk and Norfolk.

A third way in which Hertfordshire is unusual is in the number of substantial country houses of which it could boast. This is demonstrated by comparing the number of houses assessed at 20 hearths or more in this and other counties in the Hearth Tax of 1662 to 1673, which reveals a direct relationship between density of houses and proximity to London. Surrey, which is adjacent to London on the south bank of the Thames and also upriver toward Richmond, has the highest density of houses, closely followed by Hertfordshire. Calculated in terms of thousands of acres per house, the density in Hertfordshire is two and a half times greater than in Suffolk or Warwickshire, about four times greater than in Dorset, and about eight times greater than in Shropshire (see Fig. 2). Seventeenth-century Hertfordshire was thus a demonstrably atypical county in the extraordinarily large number of houses which it contained.

A rather similar comparison between Hertfordshire and other counties can be made 200 years later, in 1873. It was then second only to Essex in the proportion of acreage (excluding waste) owned by small to medium-sized landowners. No less than 34 per cent was owned by men holding between 300 and 3,000 acres each. In counties farther from London those in the 300 to 1,000 acre bracket would probably only count as yeomen, but in Hertfordshire they were usually small gentry living gentlemanly lives in gentlemanly houses, on the strength of an income derived partly from the high rental per acre in the county, but more from investments in business companies and in the Funds. The social structure of mid-Victorian Hertfordshire thus forms a striking contrast on the one hand with Cumberland, with its huge and dominant small freeholder population and its relative absence of gentry; and on the other with Rutland, the bulk of which was in the hands of the great magnates (see Fig. 3).

Despite these unusual features, it would be a great mistake to imagine that the landowners of Hertfordshire did not possess a sense of community. Although the degree of mobility and of access to non-landed sources of income may have been exceptionally great, the vast majority of landowners in the county were at all times resident on their estates and owned property exclusively within its boundaries. An examination of all the manors in the county in 1640 shows that 86 per cent of them were owned by residents within the county, and only 14 per cent by residents elsewhere. This figure is much the same as those for Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, although it is likely that the causes are somewhat different in the more remote counties of Norfolk and Suffolk than in counties close to London like Hertfordshire and Essex. In the former the non-residents were probably mostly landowners with estates elsewhere; in Hertfordshire, and to some extent in Essex, very many of them were Londoners buying into the county with a view to later retirement.

This situation did not change significantly before the middle of the nineteenth century when the railways opened up the southwestern parts of the county as easily accessible weekend dormitories for London business and professional men, and when the suburbs of London began encroaching upon the southernmost edges of the county. But as late as 1873, of the 146 inhabitants of Hertfordshire houses who also owned over 2,000 acres of property and a rent-roll of over 2,000 pounds a year in or out of the county, only 19 (13 per cent) held a seat elsewhere, and only 36 (25 per cent) held more than 1,000 acres elsewhere (and this was usually in an adjacent county). There are thus compelling historical reasons why the county should be the geographical unit of study.

THE EVIDENCE FOR HERTFORDSHIRE

Hertfordshire has certain special advantages in respect to the wealth of its printed records. In the first place, the county is almost unique in possessing no fewer than five large-scale county histories published between 1700 and 1914. These massive surveys in numerous folio volumes contain a huge amount of information about the owners of the houses and to a lesser extent about their building activities, particularly since two of the authors, Chauncy (1700) and Clutterbuck (c. 1820), were themselves minor gentry who enjoyed some familiarity with most members of this elite world. Several of these dedicated antiquaries went to the pains of transcribing and publishing in extenso the monumental inscriptions they found in the churches, many of which have now vanished, and which are often the only source from which can be traced the owners of seats and their genealogical connections. These nuggets of information are particularly valuable since the Victoria County History, in its myopic obsession with manorial descents, studiously ignores the history of all non-manorial properties, regardless of their size or the importance of their owners or the houses built on them.

England is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, rich in the records of the upper classes, partly because its archives, and particularly its private archives, have never suffered the disruptions and destruction of a social revolution, partly because the persistently aristocratic nature of its society has encouraged the collection of genealogies and family histories. It is not that the upper ranges of English society have remained impervious to lower-class infiltration. On the contrary, this widespread passion for genealogy has been stimulated precisely because of this infiltration, partly to establish degrees of antiquity in family origins, partly to trace the incorporation into traditional society of new elements, many of which were laying claims to ultimate gentry origins. If the historian is aided in his work by filiopietism, he is handicapped by the relative absence of helpful official records. Because of the perennial weakness of the central government, it is only at two widely separated points in time that comprehensive government surveys become of real value to him. These are the already mentioned assessments for the Hearth Tax of 1662 to 1673 and the Survey of Landowners of 1873. By combining and collating the various returns, the Hearth Tax can be made to provide coverage of all but 6 of the 135 parishes in the county. The assessment, which was made to form the basis for a tax on chimneys, records the number of hearths of all houses in the county over a minimum poverty level and therefore should include all the country houses extant at that time. The tax lists only identify the taxpayer (who was the resident and not necessarily the owner) and the parish; the identification of the house has to be done from other sources. For houses of the size we are here concerned with, this represents little difficulty in most cases, although there are a few big houses listed whose residents cannot be identified, and a few big houses which are known to have existed but are missing owing to lacunae in the data.