ABSTRACT

An archaeologist working with standing, intact, country houses may appear to be looking in the wrong place for data. The housing of the British elite has been left as the preserve of architectural historians, art historians and occasionally of social and economic historians. For the purposes of this discussion, English country houses are defined as owned by the gentry and aristocracy, used as their rural places of residence, surrounded by their private land which may extend to an estate of thousands of acres, and with a permanent household of domestic servants, distinct from any agricultural employees. They are products of a peaceful nation state, unfortified, and found from the sixteenth century onwards, although few have been built since the early twentieth century. They have the potential to be economically self-sufficient, rooted in the local economy, but they are also linked by their socio-political networks of owners and their culturally national or international built forms and contents. This latter, national, characteristic has been the focus of analyses based on art styles, to the extent that these houses in the landscape are often presented as the self-evident embodiment of English cultural history:

finally, the great house itself comes into sight: sometimes a jumble of towers and gable, roofs and dormers, looking like a whole medieval village; sometimes a central block with giant portico and spreading wings like an Italian palazzo set down in the vivid green of English lawns; sometimes a towering mass of wall and window reflecting the sunlight from a thousand diamond panes, with gatehouses, garden walls and gazebos around it, like a great ship surrounded by tugs.…What can they have in common, these superhuman dwellings which seem not to have a standard plan like the monasteries and cathedrals which preceded them, but which look as if they have grown, organically, out of the English countryside?… And how can these battlements and statues, mullions and sashes, domes and cupolas, tell a coherent story of taste and connoisseurship, when they seem as various as their creators, and as wayward as human nature itself?

(Jackson-Stops and Pipkin 1993: 13)