Chapter 6 - Visiting One's ‘Neighbours’: Social Life in the Provinces

Summary

The landed elite regularly socialised with their peers, but giving and receiving hospitality entailed travel, and although the condition of the highways was not as difficult as was once assumed, one had to take care, especially in rugged countryside like the Peak. Viewing the Peak from Chatsworth in the 1720s, Defoe observed that ‘Upon the top of that mountain begins a vast extended moor or waste, which for fifteen or sixteen miles together due north, presents you with neither hedge, house or tree, but a waste and howling wilderness, over which when strangers travel, they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way.’ The lack of signposts, which were not compulsory until an Act of 1697, compounded the problem, especially in barren areas such as the Peak where even locals had to hire guides. While riding into Lancashire in the severe winter of 1614–15 Lionel, one of Cavendish's servants, required two guides to help him navigate his way across the Peak moors (‘that beinge great snowe’). Cavendish also required a guide on a visit to Buxton in August 1608. He and his party had been staying with Sir John Manners at Haddon Hall, and he hired a guide to take them to Buxton, paying him 1s. for his services. It seems as though Cavendish particularly wanted to visit Pooles Hole, a magnificent limestone cave inhabited in prehistoric times and a tourist attraction by 1600. He paid 1s. to a guide to take the company to the cave.

Socialising

Outwardly, the landed elite demonstrated their status by the way they conducted themselves and their relations with their peers, clients and dependants, hence Wotton's concern that the medieval notion of hospitality based on maintaining open house to all comers was fading. Of course, some individuals continued the custom: Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton Hall (Nottinghamshire) ‘generously, hospitably and charitably entertained all, from the King to the poorest Beggar’. Sir John Weld of Willey Hall (Shropshire), on the other hand, advised his son ‘not to be busy in Building nor in too much hospitality’ as these two major items of expenditure would waste his estate.