ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one strategy used by the English nobility in the seventeenth century to assert their authority, affluence, and legitimacy: the commissioning and building of country houses. It mediates the renegotiation of social and economic relationships, frequently through the articulation of modes of power, legitimacy, status, and authority. The chapter analysis the seventeenth-century country-house poetry and attempts to show how the English nobility attempted to make the image of the house and the land a visible domain of property and of identity. The revenues from these properties allowed the nobility to use their households for the purposes of display and authority. The building of spectacular country houses and commissioning poems to celebrate these architectural marvels was a social, psychological, and cultural assertion of authority and affluence on their part, but simultaneously it may be viewed as a distinctly 'English' form of claiming noble rights in the face of radical economic and political change.
