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....