ABSTRACT
As the rhetoric of Tudor protests and descriptions suggests, definitions of noble status, origins, and authority were undergoing reassessment, driven by economic revolution as well as by humanist and reforming reflections on the legitimacy of social orders. Because the performance of legitimacy demanded a fitting stage-the country house–it was in large part these recent arrivals on the scene who made up the social cadre that built the "prodigy houses" or "power houses" of the sixteenth century. But the very fact of aristocratic flight from the country made such an insistence on one's country house connections crucial. Aristocratic dress, buttressed by sumptuary laws whose very purpose was to distinguish noble–and legitimate–rule from mere wealth, was indubitably a feature of country house discourse. The great hall has a long history in literature as well as architecture, the linchpin of both articulations of country house discourse.
