University of Dundee DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Vanished comforts locating roles of domestic furnishings in Scotland 1500-1650 Pearce, Michael Award date: 2016 Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 1 Vanished comforts: locating roles of domestic furnishings in Scotland 1500-1650 Michael Pearce PhD History University of Dundee 27 January 2016 2 Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 7 1.1 This thesis 1.2 Historiographic areas 1.3 Objects, agency and anthropology 1.4 Inventories as a source Chapter 2 Buying for the Home 32 2:1 Introduction 2.2 Gender, furnishing and inventories 2:3 Home production 2:4 John Clerk: import and retail strategies 2:5 Conclusions Chapter 3: Hall furnishings in the sixteenth century 59 3:1 Introduction 3:2 Essentials of Hall furnishing 3:3 Conclusions Chapter 4: Beds, Bedchambers, and suites 91 4:1 Introduction 4:2 Reading the bed in Scottish inventories 4:3 Beds at the Bog o’Gight 4:4 The bed chamber suite in Scotland 4:5 Conclusions Chapter 5: Court Style after 1603 119 5:1 Introduction 5:2 Mary Dudley: an Anglo-Scottish union 5:3 Italian chairs, paintings, and marble tables 5:4 Furniture for Edinburgh and London 5:5 Conclusions Chapter 6: Recreation and Privacy, Games and Washing 149 6:1 Introduction 6:2 Indoor Games 6:3 Music 6:4 Health and washing 3 6:5 Conclusions Chapter 7:Closets and knowledge 176 7:1 Introduction 7:2 The Closet and Leisure 7:3 Making medicine 7:4 Science in the closet 7:5 Conclusions Chapter 8:Couches in early seventeenth-century rooms 204 8:1 Introduction 8:2 Couches and reception rooms 8:3 The virtuous couch 8:4 Conclusions Chapter 9: Visiting Moray House 223 9:1 Introduction 9:2 Four suites or clusters of reception rooms 9:3 Conclusions Chapter 10: Conclusions 252 Appendix: Moray House inventory 1631-1646 263 Bibliography 308 List of diagrams, tables, and illustrations Table 3:1 Linen for the Earl of Mar 1572 Fig. 3:1 Hall Dining , Histoire de Regnaud de Montauban (BNF) Fig. 3:2 Hall dining , Histoire de Regnaud de Montauban (BNF) Fig. 4:1 corner of a ‘close bed’ front, Scottish, 17 th century, (NMS) Fig. 4:2 Sight , Edmund Marmion, (British Museum) Fig. 5:1 Banqueting house at Moray House (RCAHMS) Fig. 5:2 Dummy board portrait of a boy with an arrow, (V&A) Fig. 5:3Chairs at Petworth, (National Trust) Fig. 5:4 Chair associated with Francis Cleyn (V&A) Fig. 5:5 Gilded room at Holland House, (V&A) 4 Fig. 6:1 Trou Madame , Matthieu Merian, c.1630 (V&A) Fig. 6:2 Lady at her toilet , Utrecht School (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) Fig. 6:3, Le Clystère , Abraham Bosse (British Museum) Fig. 7:1 Caritas Romana , Rubens (Rijksmuseum) Fig. 7:2, Rubens (workshop), David & Abigail (Getty Museum) Fig. 7:3 Tobias, Raphael and the Fish, Wencelaus Hollar(British Museum) Fig. 8:1 The ‘Knole sofa’ (National Trust) Fig. 8:2Caerlaverock Castle(RCAHMS) Fig. 8:3 Moray House (RCAHMS) Fig. 9:1 Diagram of the principal suites at Moray House Fig. 9:2 James Skene, Moray House , 1827 (Capital Collections) Fig. 9:3 Sketch plan of Moray House by John Sime (1844), (RCAHMS) Fig. 9:4 Layout of reception rooms and stairs at Moray House. Abbreviations used BM British Museum. BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France. CSP Calendar of State Papers. DOST Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue . ECA Edinburgh City Archives. HES Historic Environment Scotland. HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission. NLS National Library of Scotland. NMS National Museums of Scotland. NRAS National Register of Archives for Scotland. NRS National Records of Scotland. OED Oxford English Dictionary . PSAS Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland . RCAHMS Royal Commission on Ancient Historical Monuments Scotland (now HES). SNPG Scottish National Portrait Gallery. TNA The National Archives. SHR Scottish Historical Review . TA Accounts of the Lord High Treasurers of Scotland. V&A Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 5 Acknowledgements I am indebted to the late Charles McKean for seeing me through my MPhil, setting up the Vanished Comforts project with David Caldwell and for unstinted encouragement, advice and inspiration. Many thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding; Charles Wemyss for discovering so many inventories; Louise Stewart for discussing sweetmeat closets; Lee Prosser and Edward Town for discussions on inventories; Jennifer Rabe on agency and the early modern outlook; Emily Cole, William Napier, and Rob Thomson for kind encouragement; Lord Moray for help and hospitality;and my supervisors Alan MacDonald and Stephen Jackson for great patience and good advice. Many thanks are also due to Sara Grainger for continual support. Declaration I Michael Pearceam the author of the thesis; unless otherwise stated, I have consulted all references cited; I have done the work of which the thesis is a record, and it has not been previously accepted for a higher degree. 6 Abstract Household inventories recordobjects that can be compared with surviving artefacts contributing to the study of material culture and social history. However, this thesis shows how heterogeneous inventories found in early modern Scottish sources resist quantification and aggregation. Instead, qualitative use of inventory evidence is advocated. Inventories can contribute information on the locations of activities in the home. These activities may be preferred to the object as evidence of historical change and as units of international comparison. Furnishing a house was cultural activity, and a construction of culture. In this study,objects are regarded as participants in cultural activities, strategies, and the construction of values. Sixteenth-century inventories are often impersonal and tend to show similarities in content, encouraging mechanistic interpretations of domestic life. The seventeenth century saw a proliferation of household equipment and furnishing for elites throughout Europe due to changes in production and consumerism. Some of this new furnishing was bought in London, some in France. While national difference was apparently maintained in architecture, new furnishings may have effaced distinctions within elite rooms. Scottish and English culture was merged by aristocratic intermarriage. This new culture is seen in the inventories of Mary, dowager Countess of Home. She maintained houses in England and Scotland.Some of her furnishings represented the style of an inner circle at court. Her inventories are also significant because they detailed equipment for a range of activities. She personally prepared medicines and sweetmeats, and had a number of scientific instruments. Pursuits reconstructed from the detail of later inventories can illuminate other domestic situations where clues are more subtle or absent. The level of autonomy Lady Home and her daughters exercised over their homes is a reminder of the agency exercised by women over furnishings, gardens, architecture, and estate policy. 7 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 This thesis Houses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish aristocrats had public roles in shaping, disseminating and reproducing social values and belief. Occupants and visitors were reminded of their statusby verbal, visual and architectural cues in relation both to hierarchy with the monarch at the apex and to regional networks.Perceived differences in architectural planning and manners between countries may mask essential similarities in strategy: national differences are revealed in nuances of expectation, familiarity and formality, which exist in balance with the architectural framework. Inside the home furnishings reinforced such messages and directed actions. An understanding of the furnishing of elite homes and its purposes ought to illuminate an historian’s understanding of society. This understanding is crucial to the presentation and interpretation of heritage buildings. Approaches to objects that focus on their symbolic communication and role in identity formation have become usual, even hegemonic. 1 Beyond their apparent function and utility, the role of objects furnishing these houses was more than mirroring society. Objects are not merelyparticipants in, or symbols representing a perception of social order, but construct that order by exercising agency, mediating with and transforming their surroundings, and by interacting with other objects and people. Objects acquire agency from their makers, their owners, function, position, and develop by their relation with other objects and people. In recognising this agency, a stronger relationship between people and material culturebecomes apparent. More than a passive symbol of a social relationship the object or assembly constructed the relationship, in cooperation with other furnishings and human agents. Alfred Gell described art objects as ‘devices for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they enmeshed’. Artefacts and people for Gell could 1 F. Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’ Journal of British Studies , vol. 48, no. 2 (April 2009), pp. 283-307, 288. 8 alternately be agents and patients , the objects of agency. 2The thesis takes as its starting point that objects andthe assembly of objects in elite interiors was (and is) just such an interactive art object. These rooms operated on their intended recipients to inspire recognition or awe or other appropriate responses to their agency.