What is it about?
This paper explains the format, contents and legal background of Scottish household inventories 1500-1750 as a source for material culture, reconstructing domestic life. Scottish registered wills are different to English probate inventories, with a focus on debt and credit, and possessions were not always listed. However, some give an insight into furnishings and room use, and merchants' and shopkeepers' can give lists of stock in shops or cargoes. Inventories found in family papers can give misleading pictures of domestic furnishings. Some have a particular emphasis on wooden furniture and the timber fittings of the building. These were compiled with a legal idea of 'keepership' of the place as a building and ignore important and valuable furnishings. The key legal concept was 'heirship' which envisaged a core group of furnishings of a wealthy home, reflecting gentry or noble status. Inventories compiled to aid housekeeping and keep track of possessions in multiple homes can reveal female agency in purchasing, interior and garden design, and most significantly the location of and nature of activities. Heirship may have exerted a powerful conservative force over interior furnishing and planning. The article describes the furnishing of the hall, which remained a significant reception and dining space into the seventeenth century. Hall furnishings in Scotland seem to have had similar functions and agencies to those used in other countries, but there were key details in type. Tables and seats were likely to be fixed in position and this may be related to the idea of keepership and that wooden furniture was part of the fabric of the building.
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Why is it important?
Based on on exhaustive survey of inventories and their vocabulary as part of an AHRC funded research project 'Vanished Comforts', the article gives an important introduction into the nature of Scottish inventories as a source and as representations of the domestic interior, its spaces, and life in the home. Key differences to English inventories and their use and interpretation are explained. Consideration is given to inventories which record and reveal domestic activities, social activity including the use of scientific objects, processes of housekeeping and female agency, and the particular case of hall furnishings.
Perspectives
Scottish sources for material culture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century are underused by historians of material culture and social life. Compared with English inventories, the sources are not suitable for aggregation as probate inventories were used in Overton, Whittle, Dean, & Hann (2004). Neither is any one family collection as rich as the Le Strange papers addressed in Whittle & Griffiths (2012). However, Scottish inventories remain a rich source of unexpected insights, particularly in the ownership and exchange of scientific objects among early modern women, connections to court culture (for some) in the early seventeenth century, and the dominance of ideas of etiquette and estate and the roles and agency of objects and assemblages in creating and maintaining hierarchical space.
Dr Michael W Pearce
University of Dundee
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This page is a summary of: Approaches to Household Inventories and Household Furnishing, 1500–1650, Architectural Heritage, November 2015, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/arch.2015.0068.
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