GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Summary

Bedfordshire Inventories

This volume contains eighteen inventories relating to sixteen Bedfordshire country houses, made between 1714 and 1830. The value to social and architectural historians of inventories has been known for many years and a number of historical societies have published selections of them. The Bedfordshire Historical Record Society has published some too, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Although most of the surviving inventory series from the Archdeaconry of Bedford have been published, unpublished inventories in the Bedfordshire County Record Office include inventories attached to wills and inventories held in individual archives. At the Public Record Office is a considerable group, part of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury archive, dating from 1650. Any of these could have been used to make a substantial volume.

Why were inventories relating only to country houses chosen for the volume? One of the weaknesses of editions of inventories already published is the failure to identify an inventory with a specific building. Country houses are readily identifiable and often have a considerable data of other information so that the inventory can be used to its full advantage.

Selection of inventories that list most rooms in detail has meant that many of the PCC inventories have had to be left out. Fairly short inventories of Bilberry, the Old House Aspley Guise and Cockayne Hatley Hall have been omitted. Regrettably, the very long Southill inventory of 1816 could not be included on grounds of space.

It is hoped that architectural historians will be able to look in a new light at the country houses discussed and that the social historian will have sufficient data to analyse the contents of a country landowner's house. Design historians will be interested in the changing fashions in fittings, furniture and decoration. These changes have to be seen in their Bedfordshire context - of a county under a hundred miles away from London, greatly influenced by her but still able to lead a provincial life of its own. Change is more obvious in the principal rooms but considerable detail is given to the service areas of kitchen, pantry and brewhouse as well as to the bedrooms of the servants who worked there.

The General Introduction is designed to bring these themes together while the specific history of each house is discussed before its relevant inventory. The Glossary attempts to explain some of the more obscure words.