Some social and economic aspects of country house building in England, 1500-1640

Country houses have long been subject to the attentions of architectural historians. As a result of their labours a considerable amount of information is known about the architectural and functional developments of the period with which this study is concerned, and a beginning has been made on the biographical investigation of some of the principal craftsmen involved. But the history of the country house cannot be written solely in terms of its architecture. This is especially true of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when country houses were built in such large numbers that even today there is hardly a rural parish in England which does not exhibit some evidence for a manor building of the period. The building of a country house was not just an important stage in the creation of the man-made landscape. It was equally important as a social and economic activity whose influences cannot simply be confined to the man who commissioned it, but must be extended to the artisans who built it, and indeed, to the community in which it was built. Continued in thesis ...