ABSTRACT
The poets who wrote country house poems took the platitudes about hospitality that had been repeatedly deployed by social critics throughout the sixteenth century and used them to engage the pressing issues of legitimacy that occupied the seventeenth century. In the poems of Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew, by contrast, the hospitality of the great hall is depicted in traditional terms. To a certain extent, hospitality or housekeeping subsumes all the other categories. As the rule of social interaction that preserved ancient ways, it was at the same time the justification for aristocratic power and the ultimate expression and the seeming purpose of life on the estate that the country house poem celebrated. But James I and Charles I both deployed country house discourse in the service of royal as opposed to aristocratic empowerment, particularly in their use of "repastoralization" proclamations ordering the landed elite to return to the country.
