RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY: THE GENTLEMANLY HOUSE, 1500–1750

Abstract

In the early modern period the amenities of the upper-class house provided for approved modes of polite behaviour, while the initial, piecemeal display of antique ornament in the sixteenth century expressed the status and the education of the governing class. In the seventeenth century a more classically correct architecture would spread in a climate of opinion in which approved behaviour was increasingly internalised and external display less favoured. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in superseding architectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not.