Homes are collections of objects amassed over time, some in daily use while others sit on shelves undisturbed for years. The eighteenth century is often characterised as a period of proliferation and diversification of the material world. Household inventories – lists of objects organised room by room – first gave historians the insight they sought into the longer-term changes in home comfort over this period and the role of material acquisition in that process.¹ Eighteenth-century homes were complex spaces through which people, things, materials and knowledge circulated. Masters and servants alike exercised a wide range of technical competencies and material literacies in the activities they conducted at home – using minds and hands to achieve work of both a necessary and a more exploratory nature.

By examining the circulation of materials that provisioned the home, domestic space can be seen as connected with other domestic, commercial and artisanal spaces. Through the countless people (servants, visitors, traders) and materials (fuel, foodstuffs, linen, ash) that moved through this space, the home was integrated with other local environments but also with the sprawling networks of global trade and empire. Thinking of the home as a networked and dynamic space casts a different light on the work of the home. Far from being a discrete space set apart from the main action, the home framed people’s engagements with other spheres. Moreover, the household produced varied kinds of interrelated labour. This chapter shows the connections between these different forms of domestic work and argues that they created the conditions for scientific enquiry.

The archive reveals this period as one of avid household record-keeping. Manuscript collections abound with account books, recipe books and bundles of household expenses, offering an intricate record of this ubiquitous social and economic unit in eighteenth-century life.² The thorough recording of incoming and outgoing goods, services and money was a visible sign of orderly and thrifty household management.³ Countless advice manuals attest to the social weight placed on achieving a shrewd use of domestic resources, a weight not evenly felt by individuals charged with this task, but a weight nonetheless. Here the evidence of the inventory and account book is crucial to assessing the affordances and demands of home on the people who lived and worked there.

To better understand the material flows of the eighteenth-century home, a range of English, Irish and North American households are examined. Whilst there were significant continuities in the material lives of elite homes across these different locations, more modest households reveal the particularities of the regions. Moreover, by examining the material culture of households with divergent local environments and supply chains, the flexibility of domestic space to facilitate and prioritise some activities over others is revealing.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the experience of everyday life, and a focus on the household offers compelling insight into this realm. However, accessing the sensory and the affective in the documentary record poses challenges. The analytical terrain is complicated by the way that different fields understand ‘experience’, with cultural historians tending to emphasise ideas and discourse whilst social historians apply themselves to the detection and articulation of day-to-day practices.⁴ Historians of science have also focused on networks of practice in their engagement with questions of eighteenth-century society, but have done so with a sense of a ‘future-oriented’ ‘social imaginary’ comprised of the beliefs and expectations borne out of everyday experience.⁵ Nonetheless, the surviving primary evidence speaks not only to the material realities of life lived at home, but also to the energy householders committed to carefully documenting, coordinating and appraising this facet of their existence for the present and future. This chapter and the next aim to highlight household record-keeping as an important lens on a wide range of domestic practices in this era and a genre of knowledge-making in its own right.

Home ‘oeconomy’

When discussing the activity and management of the eighteenth-century home, the most useful term is ‘oeconomy’, which referred not only to the careful stewardship of material resources but also to the virtue of running an orderly home – a unit that was often understood as a microcosm of the nation-state.⁶ This linking of the household with the polity was conceptually and symbolically powerful. Meeting domestic needs in a prudent and upstanding manner thereby had meaning that reached far beyond the confines of home. Whilst the connection between oeconomy and ‘improvement’ has been recognised, historians of science have stressed that oeconomical productivity was always tethered to other social and moral imperatives and did not imply the maximisation of profit at the expense of these considerations.⁷ In this way, surviving household accounts reveal the remnants of an interesting network of related concerns, concerns that focused on the everyday management of material resources but which had the rather larger aspiration of generating new knowledge and national prosperity.

Household record-keeping helped men and women to manage domestic production and consumption, mitigate periods of material scarcity, rein in expenditure and generate a sense of order from an unendingly busy schedule of activity. In terms of provisioning the household, account books, lists of expenses, recipe books, diaries and letters all provide insight. Even the humble list can be considered in this light, an absolutely ubiquitous form of record-keeping – whether it was used for ingredients in cooking, furniture in an inventory or sightings of birds in the garden.⁸ The title page of many an eighteenth-century book reels off a lengthy, sometimes alphabetised, list of inclusions – a style that would later fall out of fashion with printers and publishers. In its mundane and ubiquitous nature, historians have overlooked the simple but effective ordering power of the list.⁹

The precise technique and format for household accounts varied widely in this period and extant examples represent a diverse written form. Even dedicated account keepers often lacked the training to produce consistent records.¹⁰ Whilst double-entry accounting was a highly valued skill in this era, single-entry was the more common approach at home.¹¹ Practices of household accounting were bolstered by the ‘quantitative culture’ that was growing alongside rising rates of numeracy. Older concerns of reciprocity and hospitality were gradually overtaken by numerate reckoning and precepts of debit and credit in the domestic sphere in this period.¹² Household accounting can be seen as a powerful ‘mode of writing’ and ‘representing hours of careful labour over years and years or over a lifetime’ a way in which individuals represented their domestic environment and themselves.¹³

Table 1.1 shows an extract from the Household Book of Dunham Massey Hall in Cheshire and gives a sense of domestic consumption during one week in 1743.

Dunham Massey operated a mixed economy of generating some products on-site from raw ingredients whilst buying in other items from local suppliers.¹⁴ For example, a hogshead of small beer was purchased ready-made, but hops were also bought, presumably for use in home brewing. This was a large household in the northwest of England, surrounded by extensive parkland and inhabited by the Earls of Warrington and Stamford, and had just undergone a substantial remodelling during the 1730s. Homes of this size had considerable scope for producing necessary domestic consumables from raw materials grown or reared on-site or bought in.¹⁵

The household account book (1797–1832) of a more modest Anglo-Irish family, the Bakers of Ballytobin in County Kilkenny, reveals a similar approach to that of Dunham Massey. The mistress of that household, Sophia Baker (née Blunden), supervised baking, dairying, stilling and the raising of some livestock and, during autumn, had to preserve enough meat and butter to see the household through the winter. Everyday items, such as tallow candles, were made at home.¹⁶ Baker also drew on local stores and those in the neighbouring towns of Kilkenny, Clonmel and Waterford, but door-to-door pedlars also offered opportunities to secure items such as linen, lace or ribbons. For the Bakers, who held no office in government, Ballytobin was where they spent the majority of their time. However, infrequent trips to Dublin procured more costly items such as china, silver or glass wares.¹⁷ Whilst the domestic space afforded to home production obviously varied widely according to social status, all households engaged in some productive activity.¹⁸ Those households of the middling to upper classes that have left their records to posterity offer the most complete insight, but the material worlds of lower-class households are, however, accessible – if scarcer in the archive.¹⁹

Household accounts of this kind reveal their authors’ ability to quantify domestic resources and map those resources onto time. The ability to calculate offered the possibility to predict and, thereby, cater for future need. Dealing in measurements that ranged from the minute to the colossal, these records offer insight into the short-term adjustments and the longer-term reckonings that householders made. The rates at which household products were acquired and used up also varied and the careful domestic manager needed to maintain a fleet of parallel calculations in mind. The household book helped her to manage this complex and ever-changing scene.

Whilst accounts reveal the quantity and diversity of materials put to use, letters offer glimpses of attitudes to these goods. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lady Penelope Mordaunt (neé Warburton) would regularly write to her husband, Sir John (1649–1721).²⁰ She wrote from ‘her house over against the back gate of St. James Palace, Westminster’ when he was visiting his estates in Norfolk or Warwickshire.²¹ On 28 August 1701, Mordaunt’s concerns were with her inability to keep weekly expenses under three pounds, despite her cook having found a supplier who would sell beef and mutton at two-pence, halfpenny and three-pence, halfpenny a pound respectively.²² However, the Mordaunts did not buy in all of their foodstuffs and a few days later, on 6 September, Lady Mordaunt was more worried about the market value for cheese being too low for them to consider selling their own homemade product.²³ Despite this healthy home production, Mordaunt remained concerned about runaway domestic expense, although she noted dining cheaply on offal to offset the over-spend.²⁴

Lady Mordaunt’s worries about household expenditure and her close eye on matters of home production and consumption fit well with the ethos of thrifty home management that was extolled in the advice manuals of this era.²⁵ Despite their wealth, the Mordaunts still attended to the minutiae of domestic thrift. In this case, as with Ballytobin, the mistress of the household had direct oversight of these aspects of domestic labour.

In other accounts of affluent households, it is clear that members of domestic staff took up some or all of this responsibility. The extract from the Dunham Massey household book, detailed above, reveals that Mrs Kinaston was likely the housekeeper as the kitchen, dairy and stillroom were under her purview and purchases of soap and payments to washerwomen indicate her oversight of the laundry. Other members of staff attended to other facets of home production and consumption. Nonetheless, the performance of these roles was typically coordinated by a mistress of the household whose responsibility was to ensure prudent home oeconomy.²⁶

The accounts of a Dublin townhouse, located near Kildare Street and owned by James Ware (b. c. 1699), reveal many more bought-in products than raw materials, as compared with a country estate like Dunham Massey.²⁷ For example, in 1742 Ware recorded ‘A Hogshead Hampshire Beer, Carriage from Chester of an ½ Hogsh^d beer, 25 Barells of small beer … Small beer from Hucksters, Ale from ye Brewer, Half barell, Ale from ye Alehouse’ – clearly relying on a range of suppliers, local and otherwise, to meet household needs.²⁸ Whilst Ware kept a record of servants’ wages, none of his categories – ‘Victuals’, ‘Drink’, ‘Household goods’, ‘Garden’, ‘Things in the Cellar’, ‘Repairs and other small matters’, ‘Taxes’, ‘Coals’, ‘Candles’, ‘Soap and blue’, ‘Water and washerwoman’ – had any other name against them.²⁹ Separate, intermittent payments for the time of a gardener, bricklayer and carpenter suggest that Ware himself oversaw everyday domestic expenditure, hiring in extra help for ad hoc jobs as they arose. The extent to which a master or mistress took a hands-on approach to domestic provisioning certainly affected the dynamics of household work and the surviving documentary evidence of that work. Nevertheless, even those who delegated the vast majority of tasks to trusted servants were still expected to maintain an overview of expenditure.

To this end, on 25 March 1748, Dunham Massey took stock. The household account book records, ‘Housekeepers Stok of breading and killing: 19 Fowls, 6 Turkies, 7 Geese, 3 Ganders, 11 Fowls for killing, 15 Chickens 4 Partridges’; ‘Thomas Hardeys Stock of Horses Cowes &c: 6 Stable horses, 1 Saddle Mare in fole, 3 Colts, 7 Coach horses, 7 draught horses, 1 old mare in fole, 1 old blind mare, 11 milk cows, 2 barren cows, 1 fatt cow … 2 year old calves, 2 Bulls, 20 Wathers,³⁰ 15 Ewes, 8 lambs, 1 ram, 2 boars, 1 sowe, 7 young hogs’.³¹ This process of tracking consumption was a common one for larger estates. Although quite different in format, a ‘Memorandum of the different articles of consumption for the year[s] 1783, 1784, 1785’ was kept for the Dublin townhouse and grand County Kildare estate, Castletown, owned by the Conolly family. Large totals were detailed for the annual quantities of cheese, lemons, oranges and apples; Irish crabs and lobster, veal and sweetbreads, oxen, lamb, sheep and pigs; and ale and small beer brewed. The record indicates whether the family bought items in town or country and also the amounts of beef and mutton they gave to the poor.³² These summaries provide a sense of the sheer volume of materials, goods and animals that circulated through these large households on a regular basis. They also reveal a strong oeconomical urge to account for, and sometimes restrain, the lavish spending of wealthy households.

Most accounts of middling or elite domestic consumption offer lots of detail of products that fed, clothed and cleaned the inhabitants alongside the odd status purchase of fine china or silk upholstery. But sometimes a household account can make explicit the intellectual verve of its author, and this is true of the house book for 1796 and bundles of ‘bills paid’ that sit in the Petworth House Archive, West Sussex. For the subject of this book, Petworth House has an interesting story to tell on account of the figure of Elizabeth Ilive (c. 1770–1822). She was the mistress of George O’Brien Wyndham (175l–1837), third Earl of Egremont, living at Petworth House for about fifteen years before marrying him in 1801 and becoming Countess of Egremont.³³ Her unusual life history will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. Here, the domestic record-keeping of Petworth House is explored for its insight into domestic enquiry.

A bundle of bills from 1798, which were paid by ‘Mrs Wyndham’, the title Ilive adopted during her time as the Earl’s mistress, reveals regular purchases of writing and drawing materials (inkstands, a mahogany desk, a flesh-coloured crayon, two dozen pencils, half a dozen black chalk, a silver pencil case) alongside travel literature, pearl-handled spoons, bone-handled knives, a plant catalogue and four eye cups.³⁴ Another collection of bills paid, this time between the years of 1790 and 1800 and by both the Earl and Mrs Wyndham, lists purchases of ‘Botanical Magazines’, books, a thermometer and a pianoforte among other more prosaic items such as cheese, bacon and oats.³⁵

A house book dated 1796 is more voluble on the scale and type of enquiry taking place at Petworth at this time. On 16 January, eighteen men were paid for between one and six days each to make a reading desk and a frame for the ‘Philosopher’s Room’, among other tasks including mending coops and fences, making gates and hewing a post in various locations across the estate.³⁶ Little over a month later, Egremont instructed staff to undertake ‘Making Reading Desk, framing Pictures and Maps, Making Bedsteads, Hanging Doors, Putting on locks & bolts, making & putting Wooden Bottoms to Chairs’.³⁷ A series of entries running from March to June mention carpentry designed to create a functioning ‘Silk worm Room’ – a space to cultivate silkworm colonies capable of generating raw silk.³⁸ Mention is made of the making of a stand for a globe, a drawing table and drawing boards for Mrs Wyndham, ‘a Desk to write on and to put books in to stand in Library’, a pedestal for a statue and the ‘Making and Canvassing [of] Boxes for Mr Ferryman & fixing his Birds &c in the North Gallery’.³⁹ These lists of works completed include not only the construction of specialised furniture, but also the augmenting of existing domestic space to house artworks, maps, taxidermy birds and even a colony of silkworms. There are glimpses too of the resource lavished on the hot houses, where exotic plant specimens were likely grown. They were regularly improved with new lighting, barometers (‘weather glasses’) and protective cases for these instruments. Whilst Petworth’s master and mistress were unusually devoted to the arts and sciences, these household accounts show that home improvement was an unending process, including the necessity of mending fences alongside the bespoke design of spaces for housing collections and undertaking investigative work.

The domestic records discussed here reveal a complex ecology not only of raw materials, finished products and human labour, but also the varied and sometimes overlapping roles and responsibilities of masters, mistresses and their domestic staff. At Dunham Massey, a grand country house, a housekeeper, a house steward, alongside a retinue of maids and groomsmen kept charge of their various domains. Meanwhile, the equally grand Mordaunts kept a much closer eye on their own domestic production and consumption. At Petworth House, a wealthy and motivated Earl and his mistress adapted their estate to accommodate varied intellectual pursuits, but this evidence of expensively complex home improvement sat cheek by jowl in their accounts with the purchase of basic provisions. Every householder, however curious, had to spare a thought for their stores of salted meat and small beer.

Rooms and their uses

By the later seventeenth century, the layout of domestic space had undergone considerable change. Homes, large and small, had shifted away from the medieval format of a central, high-ceilinged hall with smaller adjoining spaces towards the proliferation of more specialised rooms and the greater use of multiple storeys. A traditional historical narrative saw early modern householders abandon their communality, characterised by masters and servants sharing beds as well as dinner tables, in favour of increasing amounts of privacy in bedchambers, closets and back parlours. Corridors helped avoid unnecessary human traffic through rooms of a more secluded nature and, by the nineteenth century, those who could afford it might separate servants and their workaday rooms from those spaces that afforded comfort and class-specific conviviality to the master and mistress of the house. Homes also became much fuller with objects of domestic utility, comfort and decoration.⁴⁰

The literature on changing architectural plans is useful when considering the material flows of eighteenth-century homes.⁴¹ However, it is worth recognising that considerable mutability remained in terms of the purpose domestic space was put to. A narrow focus on designated room use can result in an overly rigid understanding of room specialisation. Change was far from uniform and great variation existed in domestic room design and use, depending on both region and class. Moreover, the wealthy and powerful were not always at the forefront of new adaptation.⁴² Here, rooms and floorplans are discussed but with this flexible approach to use in mind.

Floorplans provide insight into the flow of goods and people through the house. For example, in elite homes the scullery was used for washing and cleaning dishes and cooking equipment, preparing vegetables, fish or game and, therefore, it was desirable for there to be direct communication between this room and the kitchen, alongside the yard, coal cellar, wood house and ash bin. However, owing to the heat and odour that emanated from the scullery, it typically did not connect directly with spaces that contained fresh produce, such as the larder, dairy, pantry or other food stores.⁴³ In more modest homes, sculleries were also often housed in lean-to structures or outhouses suggesting similar preferences and also a fire safety precaution for a space which often contained a hearth.⁴⁴

Eighteenth-century householders and servants were attuned to the relative heat and cold of adjoining workspaces in order to ensure that produce did not spoil. In the later eighteenth century, Susanna Whatman remarked in her housekeeping book that ‘Butter, radishes, or anything that spoils in a hot kitchin should be placed near the parlor door, as should the cheese, to be ready to come in.’⁴⁵ For substantial country estates, Palladian architectural design promoted a ‘spinal corridor’ basement plan to keep domestic offices ‘below stairs’ whilst facilitating production, storage and serving of food and drink.⁴⁶ New wings and blocks accommodating the productive offices of the household were often added in this period to reduce both the risk of fire and the drift of kitchen odours into smarter parts of the house.⁴⁷

More modest households also underwent change, as N. W. Alcock’s detailed study of the well-preserved Warwickshire parishes of Stoneleigh and Ashow shows. Drawing on a rich supply of probate inventories, parish records and extant architecture, Alcock demonstrates that room use altered across the social spectrum between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This sample is comprised principally of yeomen, wealthy husbandmen, craftsmen and the lower gentry who had enough material wealth to leave their mark on the record. Their homes witness the predictable shift away from a hall as the heart of the home and, similarly, the proliferation of furnishings with ramifications for domestic comfort. In this sample, five-room houses usually included a kitchen and often also a pantry or buttery and even a dairy.⁴⁸ In six and seven-room dwellings, the inclusion of a dairy and a buttery or pantry became more likely and stables were also a frequent addition.⁴⁹ Farmhouses commonly encompassed a couple of service rooms (likely a dairy and a pantry) alongside the kitchen, and the larger examples also included a brewhouse and a cellar.⁵⁰ In these Warwickshire villages ‘A cheese chamber was almost universal’, although these rooms often stored other kinds of goods, such as wool and corn.⁵¹

At New House Farm in Stareton, built in 1716, the ground floor included the productive rooms of kitchen, dairy, pantry and brewhouse, with a back parlour over a cellar space. The first floor featured the commonplace cheese chamber (over the brewhouse), and a further four chambers – one listed as the ‘best’ with an adjoining closet.⁵² Such a house prioritised the functional roles of the home, giving up half of all domestic space to the making and storing of consumable goods, a good deal of space to retirement and relatively limited house room for entertaining.

Ursula Priestley and Penelope Corfield’s study of room use in Norwich based on 1,408 probate inventories and archaeological evidence offers an urban comparison with Alcock’s rural village. Norwich homes experienced a growth of domestic material culture, especially chairs and tables, suggesting a general increase in comfort. The expansion in kitchen furniture also implies that this room had become a key living space for the family, displacing the traditional hall and, perhaps, reserving the parlour for entertaining guests. This study notes the presence of books in the kitchen, especially Bibles, pointing to the use of the room for family prayers and further corroborating a sense of the kitchen as a living as well as a functional space.⁵³

By the eighteenth century, half of the Norwich sample had a washhouse with a hearth, in other words the likelihood of a heated copper for use for laundry. Whilst the prominent textile industry of the city might have prioritised this helpful domestic facility, it is also telling that between 1705 and 1730, 19 per cent of these washhouses appear to have been used simultaneously for brewing.⁵⁴ This evidence shows the flexible use that could be made of apparatus for heating, cleaning and processing domestic resources. This was particularly important when a home was also a business and 30 to 50 per cent of households incorporated a ground floor shop or working rooms dedicated to craft activities between 1580 and 1730. Many also used garrets as spaces for weaving, demonstrating the way homes accommodated a wide range of types of work.⁵⁵

It is worth noting that vernacular architecture and living conditions in Ireland were different from those of both rural and urban England. Whilst the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy benefitted from large estates, country homes and townhouses on a similar scale to their British counterparts, the general population in Ireland endured much more basic housing. Before the mid-nineteenth century, most Irish homes were built by their owners out of materials ready to hand.⁵⁶ In earlier periods, timber-frame structures were common and usually covered in sods, clay, straw or wattle. After extensive deforestation in Ireland, stone and mortar constructions became dominant and, in some regions, dry-stone walling was preferred.⁵⁷

Over the eighteenth century, Irish homes were most often single-storey, rectangular buildings of a single room in depth with a loft used for storage. As such, they had less scope for specialised spaces of home production than many households across the Irish sea. By the 1800s, ‘more than half of all vernacular houses were four bays long with three windows’, the doorway and one window belonging to the kitchen.⁵⁸ Usually, other rooms were bedrooms but in the larger home, there was often a parlour. Whilst vernacular Irish households were typically built on a smaller scale than their English equivalents, the kitchen was still the most important room. However, it is important to recognise the heterogeneity of Irish buildings and their responsiveness to specific environments in terms of design and use of materials.⁵⁹

Taken together, this evidence of rural and urban, English and Irish homes acts as a caution against taking the arrangements of elite homes as the model for room use in this period. Despite the greater scope of these establishments to achieve desired ends, their design and use were often divergent from ordinary homes and a ‘trickle-down’ model of change does not fit the rural and urban studies discussed here.

An interesting comparison with patterns of room use present in Britain and Ireland is the homes created by migrants to the east coast of America in this period. An enlightening sample of over ten thousand inventories for properties in Chester County, Pennsylvania, exists for the years 1682–1849. This was one of the first three counties formed by William Penn under royal charter, but the majority of new householders in the 1680s came from the British Isles, including many English and Welsh Quakers and Baptists.⁶⁰ Presbyterians and Anglicans followed and by the first decades of the eighteenth century, they were joined by Irish Quakers and Ulster Presbyterians.⁶¹

Like the Norwich study, these people were largely tradespeople or artisans, including large numbers of weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters and masons, a good number of coopers and shoemakers, tailors and doctors, alongside the requisite tavern-keepers, shop-keepers and distillers and a handful of painters, plasters and tutors.⁶² Of course, the distinct economic conditions of America’s eastern seaboard underpinned consumption practices. This was a credit-dependent tobacco economy and a frontier society, where the wealthiest had the easiest access to merchandise, not only through ease of credit, but also their ability to travel and their far-reaching networks of association.⁶³ These were diverse migrant communities adapting to their new climate and local natural resources outside of the bounds of major urban centres. Their buildings, furniture, foods and social relations were correspondingly heterogeneous, representing an accommodation between cultures of origin and local conditions.⁶⁴

In Chester County, most homes had several spaces that could accommodate the production of consumable goods and the storage of raw ingredients and specialised equipment. Practices of room use common in Britain and Ireland are visible here, especially in terms of longer-term change. One of the most ubiquitous rooms was the kitchen, which by the late 1600s was usually found within the main house. Some households had an additional ‘back kitchen’, ‘wash kitchen’ or ‘out kitchen’. There were very few designated ‘dining rooms’ in this community before 1830, the kitchen performing this function.⁶⁵ The lists of objects found in ten inventories dating 1688 to 1817 consistently include equipment (such as a jack, spit or tongs) and vessels (iron pots or ‘fire vessels’, iron kettles) for cooking on or over the fire.⁶⁶ Practical tableware and cooking pots made from earthenware appear in seven of the ten inventories and pewter in all but two. These inventories also reveal a prevalence of items associated with an earlier period of British domestic furnishings, such as pewter (as opposed to china). Two householders still owned trenchers – flat, wooden eating surfaces reminiscent of much earlier table settings in Britain. Only Benjamin Shaneman of Vincent owned anything finer, ‘six Queensware plates’, and his inventory was dated at the later end of the period – 1817.⁶⁷ The kitchens were often furnished with specialised equipment including colanders, funnels and kneading or dough troughs. Henry Camm of Newtown even had a still in his 1758 kitchen.

These kitchens were spaces of food production, but they also offered tables, chairs and stools – sometimes a couple of armchairs – for families to sit, eat and warm themselves by the fire. The presence of other materials including lumber, wool, linen yarn, wheat and flax implies a broader range of home production, consumption and construction. Many inhabitants of Chester County made good use of the cooler temperatures offered by cellars to store provisions, such as wine, beer, cider, salted meats, pickles, preserves and cheeses. In Pennsylvania’s hot summers, cool storage must have been a valued household attribute.

Like rural Warwickshire, these homes did include sociable rooms like parlours or sitting rooms, but they dedicated more space to practical matters.⁶⁸ In these houses, rooms are put to multiple uses, but over the course of the 150 years covered by the inventories, increasing specificity is visible. That said, smaller domestic spaces naturally offered less scope for room specialisation in these busy, productive homes – plates and guns, beds and lumber might well jostle alongside each other for limited house room.

These sources reveal the broad range of material processes, from cheese-making to stilling, that could be comfortably accommodated by domestic space in this era, whether that household was in an English provincial city or a newly built colonial American home. Local conditions mattered and shaped the material worlds of communities separated by many thousands of miles. However, deep continuities also existed. The more complex arrangements secured by the very many lodgers and transient tenants of large urban areas – where even access to a heat source was not guaranteed – are beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is the potential these domestic spaces held for enquiry that concerns this study. The potential lies in the details of the materials, processes and spaces outlined here.

Working rooms: kitchen, brewery and stillroom

Having considered the shifts in the type and use of common rooms in homes across the British world, it is worth taking a closer look at the material culture of key productive rooms. Of all domestic spaces, the kitchen exemplified the incredible diversity in materials and processes administered on a daily basis. Most kitchens afforded the curious householder a good heat source, a variety of specialised apparatuses and often a large space – or at least a substantial table – to work with. In 1739, the Gells of Hopton Hall in Derbyshire had a well-equipped kitchen including equipment to make the most of the roasting potential of the fireplace (‘Three coal rakes’, ‘two racks with hooks’, ‘six large spitts & one bird spit’), pans that indicated the existence of a stove or hot plate (‘nine Sauce pans; four stew pans; five brass pans; four fish pans; two leaden fish pans’) and a wide variety of other items from wooden scales to an egg slice.⁶⁹ In A. W. Baker’s household account book for Ballytobin House, ‘A list of Kitchen Things’ includes ‘preserving Pan Copper’, alongside a range of meat cutting, butchering and mincing equipment.⁷⁰ Likewise, an 1825 inventory of Styche Hall in Shropshire revealed the kitchen packed full of equipment that would facilitate the production of diverse consumables, including ‘11 Copper Stew pans & preserving pan’, ‘Two tin fish strainers’, a ‘Lanthern & two reflectors’, a ‘Cradle Spitt 20 Meat hooks in ceiling’ and ‘Two loafs of Sugar’.⁷¹ This elite household also benefitted from a larder, scullery, brewhouse, malt room and salting room, each offering further apparatus and supplies for bespoke provisioning.

During this period, kitchens in larger households shifted from having an open fire to becoming a closed hearth and, later, a range. This change in format provided the cook with a smoke-free kitchen but reduced the flexibility of use of the fire itself, especially for experimental purposes. However, as the fire became enclosed, other adjacent spaces, such as the scullery, were more commonly found in house design.⁷² Interestingly, publications from the earlier part of the period reflect the flexible use of the kitchen. John Rudolph Glauber’s expensively printed and bound The works of the highly experienced and famous chymist, John Rudolph Glauber: containing, great variety of choice secrets in medicine and alchymy (1689) included notes on ‘the Extrinsecal use of the Spirit of Salt in the Kitchen’ alongside other guidelines for alchemical procedures.⁷³ Glauber recommended the use of ‘spirit of salt’ in place of vinegar or lemon juice as a means of rendering the flesh of an old hen ‘as tender as a chicken’ when boiled with spices, water and butter.⁷⁴ This book reveals a contemporary association between activities such as cooking and chemistry, the frontispiece boasting that ‘the Art of Chymistry is very useful and highly serviceable in Physick, Chyrurgery [surgery], Husbandry, and Mechanick Arts’ as ‘long since evinced by the Excellent Mr. Boyl[e] … in his Experimental Philosophy’.⁷⁵

Another office of home production that required a dedicated space, specialised equipment and a skilled practitioner was the brewhouse. Brewing had been a significant domestic activity for many centuries; it was traditionally women’s work, but by the eighteenth century, the brewer in large households was much more likely to be a man.⁷⁶ There were regions where female expertise in brewing endured, such as the Chesapeake in America where they made most alcoholic beverages into the late eighteenth century.⁷⁷

Brewing was affected by the seasons, with most ale production taking place in the non-summer months in Britain and Ireland. Small beer production relied on regular brews because it did not keep as well as stronger ales, which could be stored for up to a year without spoiling.⁷⁸ Country house brewing was conducted on a large scale and at the turn of the nineteenth century, domestic brewhouses still accounted for half of all British beer production.⁷⁹ Whilst essential to the household, brewing demanded expertise in the complex field of fermentation and such skills were highly valued amongst domestic servants throughout this period.⁸⁰ Beer was also an important source of energy for the labouring class.⁸¹ A beer allowance frequently substituted for part of a servant’s wages and so the domestic production of beer remained fundamental to the economy of a large household in this period.⁸²

The 1825 household inventory for Styche Hall, in Shropshire, reveals the following as contents of the ‘Brewhouse’:

A ‘Brew House’ detailed in a 1743 household inventory for Compton Place in East Sussex reveals an elaborate set-up, starting with a ‘Large Brewing Copper’ accompanied by a diverse range of vessels including mash tubs, coolers, a rinsing tub, a washing copper, troughs and a malt mill. This entry also lists two ladders, two pulleys and ropes, one rake and a mashing staff – evoking the scale of the enterprise, whereby ladders were required to reach the mouth of the large copper or ‘high wash Tubs’ and implements on long handles to stir and remove surface detritus from the brew.⁸⁴ The Gells of Hopton Hall possessed smaller-scale facilities, but they still included items for heating, mashing, cooling and pouring liquid from one receptacle to the next.⁸⁵ This evidence emphasises the technical needs of brewing at scale, with two kinds of furnace at the heart of the Styche Hall operation.

Bakehouses and brewhouses were sometimes built adjacent to one another so that one furnace could facilitate both activities, for example at Foremark in Derbyshire (built 1759–61). A wealthy household would have produced beer of three different kinds on a regular basis and this required adjustments in the process to achieve the desired variations in flavour and alcoholic strength.⁸⁶ As Lord Mordaunt advised his wife, Lady Penelope, there were strategies for dealing with over-production: ‘Pray consider that wee do not want Ale when I come but rather Brew againe so to have some Bottled.’⁸⁷ Similarly, the Irish Quaker, author and diarist, Mary Leadbetter (1758–1826), recorded that ‘Thomas Bewley and I bottled ale’ on 4 October 1791.⁸⁸ Unlike other regular facets of home production, brewing offered a variety of options for short- and longer-term preservation and storage.

Another working room with specialised apparatus was the stillroom. This space was of particular importance in the production of remedies and luxuries. As the name suggests, it contained a still or alembic for distilling liquids – heated by a furnace (see Figure 1.1).⁸⁹ In an 1819 inventory, Dunham Massey Hall in Cheshire listed a ‘Still House’ containing ‘2 Tables & 2 Chairs, 48 Bottles of vinegar, Quantity of old Glass, Still, Cupboard, 2 stools & Butlers Tray.’⁹⁰ The large numbers of glass containers are in keeping with a place that produced a variety of ‘distilled’ products that might be used in small quantities over time. Research on eighteenth-century recipe books has revealed a range of descriptors for this facility, most commonly referred to generically as a ‘still’, but also commonly as a ‘limbeck’ or ‘cold still’ and more rarely as a ‘glass still’, ‘rose still’ or ‘bain marie’.⁹¹

Figure 1.1 Housekeeper in her stillroom. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Public domain.

Having traditionally been used for extracting the potent aspects of plants to produce health-giving medicinal ingredients, by the seventeenth century stillrooms were routinely also used for making and storing confectionery. The reason these functions were combined was partly because there was overlap in the techniques of production of health-giving herbal waters and celebratory spiced cordials.⁹² At this time, the stillroom was also largely the domain of the mistress of the household, which designated the higher status of stilling as compared with cooking, curing or cheese-making.

Mary Evelyn (c. 1635–1709), wife of the famous diarist John Evelyn and a regular at Court, remarked that she had ‘the care of piggs, stilling, cakes, salves, sweet-meats, and such usfull things’ in 1674.⁹³ Whilst it is reasonable to question the extent to which Evelyn’s engagement with all of these aspects of domestic production was hands-on, the connection drawn between stilling and the creation of salves and sweetmeats was genuine. As Evelyn argued in a letter to a friend, the priorities of a wealthy mistress were ‘the care of Childrens education, observing a Husbands commands, assisting the sick releeving the poore, and being serviceable to our friends’.⁹⁴ Assisting the sick by providing homemade medicines and entertaining visiting friends with lavish banquets both required time spent in the stillroom. Medicinal recipes that relied upon distillation were often collated in recipe books with other domestic tasks dependent on similar chemical processes, rather than appearing next to other medicinal remedies. This underlines the importance of technique in the ordering of these domestic recipes.⁹⁵

At the end of 1778, the household and personal expense accounts of Jane Creighton, First Baroness Erne of Sackville Street in Dublin, revealed a cost of £1:1:18 ‘For sweetmeats made at home’.⁹⁶ In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Irish society, upper-class households produced such confectionery for more elaborate dinners for invited guests. Sweetmeats, ‘marchpane’⁹⁷ confections and jellies would often have adorned a banqueting table. A menu created for the Gells of Hopton Hall for a dinner on 30 December 1752, for example, offered a range of deserts including ‘Dry’d Sweetmeats’ alongside brandied peaches, syllabubs and other fresh and candied fruits.⁹⁸ If not bought at great expense from a confectioner, these showy sweet treats were made by the mistress of Hopton Hall herself. However, whilst remedies and sweets may have emerged aplenty from the stillroom, this space offered the curious individual a wide scope for experimentation with materials and chemical processes.

Stillrooms have not attracted much scholarly attention, most likely because they fell out of use at the end of the period and have not survived the household improvements of subsequent centuries.⁹⁹ During the eighteenth century, a still became more likely to be housed in a kitchen, buttery, closet, hall, parlour or brew house.¹⁰⁰ In fact, there appears to be only one extant stillroom in England, at Ham House in Surrey, although spaces that originally housed a still do survive, including the example in Figures 1.2 and 1.3 at Strokestown Park, County Roscommon in Ireland.¹⁰¹ There is quite a bit to untangle in these images from the Irish Architectural Archive. In the seventeenth century, this room was a reception room, with a grand plasterwork over-mantle. However, when Strokestown Park was substantially remodelled in the 1730s, it was repurposed as a stillroom.¹⁰² Whilst the neo-Palladian redesign included wings for the productive offices of the house, including the kitchen and stables, it is possible that the beautiful plasterwork of this former reception room marked the space out for an elevated component of home production such as stilling. Of course, the heat source itself may have recommended this room for this purpose and its presentation in these images from the 1980s reveals walls lined with cupboards, which could have been added during its conversion to accommodate essential glass vessels. So, whilst it is difficult to be definitive about the extant architectural evidence, there are interesting indications here that a stillroom had a rather higher status than other facets of home production.

Figure 1.2 Photograph of Strokestown Park’s former stillroom, featuring the fireplace and over-mantle (1987). Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Figure 1.3 Photograph of Strokestown Park’s former stillroom, featuring fitted cupboards (1987). Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Around the house

In examining the household’s materials, equipment and space, the garden should not be forgotten. Obviously, large country estates had vast acres at their disposal for farming, husbandry, cultivation and leisure. However, many eighteenth-century householders had access to some outside space where animals could be kept or plants grown and these were put to the service of the kitchen. Famously, the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn took a keen interest in horticulture and forestry, publishing Sylva: or, a discourse of forest trees in 1664 and substantially augmenting later editions in 1670, 1679 and 1706.¹⁰³ In his own time, Evelyn’s garden at Sayes Court in Deptford was one of the best known in England.¹⁰⁴ His work with plants and trees prefigured the huge growth in interest in botany over the course of the eighteenth century and the significant shifts in understanding plant life of that later period. As many historians have shown, observing and documenting the marvels of nature became a popular pursuit in the British Isles – fuelled by a print culture that disseminated intriguing news of ‘exotic’ foreign flora and fauna encountered through networks of trade and empire. The garden has also been identified as a space of experiment for medical men and natural philosophers alike.¹⁰⁵

Careful domestic oeconomy embraced the garden as well as the kitchen and pantry, as James Ware’s meticulous household accounts show. Reporting on the expenditure relating to his Dublin townhouse, Ware revealed that his urban garden accommodated a wide range of activity, from the growing of kidney beans to the over-wintering of valuable fruit in the apple loft and the construction of an arbour.¹⁰⁶ This city garden supported a wide range of provisions for the dining table; in March 1741, Ware reported the carriage of currant trees from the country to plant in his garden, alongside the planting of other fruit trees. In the same year, asparagus roots and cauliflowers were bought to grow. Bills for seeds appeared yearly in these accounts and also entries for dung, a spade and a rake, lime and sand and a good deal of paid labour, including thirty days of a gardener’s time in 1741.¹⁰⁷ His accounts reveal a well-resourced and active kitchen garden in the heart of a busy city.

Lady Penelope Mordaunt’s careful management of her English household also extended to the garden, and her letters to her husband reveal her experiments with cultivating non-native plants. Like Ware, Mordaunt often wrote from her London residence, confirming the use of the more limited outside space adjacent to townhouses for growing fresh produce. On 26 August 1704, Mordaunt reported ‘I have saved ye seeds of ye two melons, but I think nether of them good’ and on another occasion, having received some melons, pears and two nectarines from the country, she noted, ‘I will be shuer to safe ye Melone ceeds, but I think I can send down beter seeds for ye Melan I think is two waterish.’¹⁰⁸ She also intended ‘if there be any figs to be had’ to send her husband some dried ones ‘for ye are very holsom’.¹⁰⁹ Her discussion of planting these seeds sat amongst a litany of details about her careful household provisioning, whether that was reporting on current stocks of coal or ensuring her husband had the domestic comforts he needed when away from home.

In domestic record-keeping, the garden and estate were sometimes treated as a sphere separate enough to deserve their own record book. For example, in the archive relating to Dunham Massey Hall, the garden accounts sit apart from the household goods, in four large, hidebound volumes of their own.¹¹⁰ For other domestic record-keepers, the productive function of a kitchen garden or fields ensured their inclusion within the main household accounts. Regardless of the organisation of household accounting, the material world of the home did not stop at its threshold. It commonly incorporated a traffic of goods that extended to gardens, farmland, neighbourhood outlets and beyond.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the diversity of commodities, furnishings, equipment, forms of labour and spatial arrangements that comprised the home in this era and considered how these varied according to class and location. On the one hand, the endless lists of goods presented in domestic accounting are revealing of the great variety of materials put to use at home. On the other, household plans and inventories provide a sense of the way space was occupied and used; letters and life-writing offer further qualitative detail of home production, use of space and – crucially – the preferences of those who undertook or oversaw household work. Whilst account books leave many of the historian’s questions unanswered, in the time they were written they offered their authors a powerful tool of oeconomical control. They were the means by which people managed their everyday lives, but they were also a lasting record of, and reckoning with, the material resources of life. They obliquely recognise the imprudent overspending on luxury items or the seasonal lack of fresh fruit. Annual summaries assumed a larger meaning, delivering the cumulative effect of many, small decisions in the hefty unit of tonne, barrel or carcass.

It was the interaction of material resources that represented the key to successful provisioning. As a result, householders were intent upon the constant and ever-shifting challenge of undertaking measurements accurate enough upon which to predict need and thereby provision adequately and on a budget. These domestic records speak to a prevalent cultural concern in this period, one of categorisation, classification and control: an oeconomical urge that predicted the activity of chemists as much as it did the concerns of a housewife.¹¹¹

Taken together, these sources indicate not only the thrifty oeconomy at work in many homes across the British world but also the incredible weight of material knowledge that was necessary for this task. These records also represent a form of material knowledge in their own right. They illuminate complex and interlocking domestic dynamics and the ways in which homes connected with other spaces and supply chains. The knowledge of home was similarly networked and relational; the story of one home’s resource management was the story of many materials, places and ways of knowing. In the next chapter, the discussion turns to the technique and tacit knowledge inherent in home production.