To St Augustine, the term ‘cura’ signified both care and administration.1 He intended these dual but connected definitions to be the underlying principles of all the clergy's responsibilities, from overseeing the spiritual welfare of individuals and leading liturgical rites, to the highest forms of Church governance. The ecumenical councils looked to uphold these values of cura in the later Middle Ages, in which the Church faced not only the discord caused by the Great Western Schism, but also threats posed by Wycliffite and Hussite heretics. Nevertheless, the ecumenical councils did not wholly preserve the guiding principles that Augustine established. Where Augustine was adamant that the Church ‘imposes nothing by force, but everything by persuasion and admonition’, the Council of Constance (1414–18) was concerned with concepts of contamination, purgation and amputation in dealing with multiple popes and heresies. Augustine had in fact addressed ideas of contamination and pestilence in his writings on the Manichaeans, yet he insisted that the role of the Church was not to sever its infirm members, but to heal them and keep the body intact. Equally important for Augustine in his discussions of heresy was the imagery of the lost sheep returning to the flock. When the sheep returns, it is not chastised but healed:

For Augustine, whether one received the brand, in this context baptism, within the Church or from those considered to be heretics, it did not matter. The Lord recognised his own brand even when the sheep has been branded by another. This is not to say that heretics could re-join the flock without consequence. Augustine recognised that often the medicines that were used to correct heresy were painful, but ultimately the pain was endured to keep the body of the Church united.

Agricultural lands within all the counties flooded by the sea surge on 31 January–1 February 1953 suffered losses and damages to varying degrees. In order to give context to the figures Trist recorded for East Suffolk, the official statistics for East Riding of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Essex and Kent are summarised below.

Question 1. – East Suffolk

1) The survey of the flooded areas:

On 2 February, a team of district advisory and drainage officers were allotted sections of the coast and river estuaries and asked to make an immediate rough assessment of the area of flood. This information was to hand by 4 p.m. Owing to difficulty impossibility of approach to the river walls, no account of any value could be made on the extent of wall damage. On 3 February, the County agricultural office chartered a private aircraft and flew up and down each estuary and the coastline from Brantham on the River Stour to Walberswick and plotted the position of wall damage which was submitted to the County flood organisation H.Q.

Following this survey, district advisors were instructed to collect full details of the area flooded, crops and livestock lost etc. for each farm concerned in their district. The flood line was plotted on district 6” maps and subsequently plotted on scale maps together with plottings of all wall breaches, scouring and over topping of sand and shingle defences.1

Following completion of the land survey, advisory officers proceeded to take pilot soil samples and gradually intensified sampling down to single marshes in the case of flooded arable and approximately 50 acre groups for grass marshes.

2) Assistance by A.E.C. to River Board:

a. Loan of staff:

Two drainage officers were attached to local River Board offices and four were assisting in the field in charge of pumps. Two advisory officers were attached to the southern H.Q. office at Ipswich together with two clerks and one clerk was loaned to a stores depot.

b. Loan of equipment:

8 lorries were put at the Board's disposal for the transport of troops and other labour organised by A.E.C. A large quantity of small hand tools were supplied, together with 8 excavators, a low loader and complete personnel for operation.

c. Organisation of labour:

35 excavator drivers and other drainage field workers were immediately loaned. Accomodation and catering facilities were made available at the Debach E.V.W. camp which was reopened to receive 750 troops.2 About 100 men were mustered from local labour exchanges. Arising out of a press appeal, 80 town volunteers from Ipswich were organised for wall work one Sunday.

In the summer of 1974, one Welsh estate was in serious trouble. A six- million-pound bill for death duties hung over James, Lord Gethin and his family patrimony, the baronial seat, and many acres of land in the beautiful Trethowan valley. At the age of fifty-eight, Gethin was ready to give it all up and make a new life with his personal assistant, with whom he had started a romantic relationship. But family ties ran deep. The more he was hounded by the tax authorities (there was a particularly zealous official, Mr Mackie, in charge of his case), the more Lord Gethin felt obliged to defend his position.

Gethin's son, Michael, was certainly not ready to let his father head off into the sunset. One day, after all, Michael would inherit the title as well as the estate. Michael knew that the battle was not just with the taxman. The tenants on the estate could cause problems too, as could his father's scheming London lawyer. That six-million-pound bill was a major worry, but so was the discovery that valuable copper deposits lay below the ground. It posed the very real threat that the estate could yet be broken up and then exploited for its mining. Lord Gethin was not averse to the idea if it resolved the tax demand. But it was anathema to his son, who even, horror of horrors, contemplated gifting the estate to the National Trust to protect it from exploitation. Such a drastic step was only considered because a whole way of life faced imminent extinction – a direct consequence of government fiscal policy.

The Inheritors was a six-part television drama that was broadcast on ITV in August 1974. Veteran Scottish actor Robert Urquhart played the lead role of the embattled Welsh aristocrat, while Peter Egan played his son. The series was produced by Wilfred Greatorex, who had a track record of creating dramas that centred on conflict and power struggles among elites. His previous hit for ITV was Hine (1971), in which the eponymous hero was an international arms dealer. Before then, The Power Game (three series, from 1965 to 1969) focused on high drama in executive boardrooms and was the successor to another corporate drama, The Plane Makers (three series, between 1963 and 1965).

This second mapping takes a chronological view, offering a perspective on changing patterns of musical organisation, repertoire and – by implication – taste. We’ll examine snapshots of four equally spaced seasons, not only to provide some orientation, but also to create a sense of ‘lived experience’ across the extraordinary variety of music on offer.

❧ Looking back and looking forward: the 1897–98 season

Let's first consider a season at the tail-end of the century, by which time the broad outline of the London theatre and concert calendar was well established.

This season saw a massive celebration of the life and reign of Queen Victoria, an unmistakeable assertion of both national heritage and imperial power. Her diamond jubilee on 22 June 1897 was an occasion for all manner of music – most memorably a Te Deum on the steps of St Paul’s, after which a vast crowd joined in the Old Hundredth. Many commentators described the emotion overwhelming the assembly, including the queen herself, at this ‘simple but beautiful thank-offering of song and prayer’.1 But this was only the formal highpoint of an outpouring of national sentiment. At the Alhambra, Sullivan's ballet Victoria and Merrie England ran for six months from 25 May: on opening night, the coronation scene received three curtain calls – something not normally permitted – while a film of the jubilee procession was later tagged on as a bonus.

WAGNER AND MUSICAL COMEDY

Yet musical life was simultaneously evolving in very different directions, during a period of upheaval anticipating the new spirit of the 1900s. If Shaw in 1893 had disgustedly asserted that London music was dying, driven only by force of habit, four years later London's movers and shakers were avidly seeking novel sensations, eyeing continental Europe and mining untapped audiences.

Three elements stand out, the first being the towering figure of Wagner. The British relationship with Wagner had got off to a rocky start in 1855, an impression only slightly ameliorated by the 1877 Albert Hall concerts in aid of his shaky finances. But as performances escalated during the 1880s, and as the aesthetic movement joined forces with a wave of popular enthusiasm, the floodgates opened.

Nothing symbolised the revival in the fortunes of British country houses so much as the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition that opened in Washington DC in November 1985. Ten years on from the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition, the Treasure Houses show saw more than seven hundred works of art from over two hundred of the largest and most prestigious of British country houses assembled at the National Gallery of Art. Arranged in the east wing of the gallery in a sequence of interiors conceived by curator Gervase Jackson-Stops, the exhibition brought together portraits of British royalty, furniture, tapestries, and works by Constable, Canaletto, and Velasquez.

The show had been a long time in the making. The minutes of the HHA's first annual general meeting in October 1974 recorded that a feasibility study had been commissioned into the possibility of a “Treasures of Britain exhibition” being toured in America in the winter of 1976. The original idea was for a show that would travel around the United States for six months – the condition being that it would need to be entirely “self-supporting”. The enthusiasm for the idea from the HHA's executive committee followed on from research trips that a number of them had made across the Atlantic (Lord Brooke had been unable to attend the 1974 AGM because he was on one of these trips). The Destruction show had been a direct inspiration. The director of the National Gallery, J. Carter Brown, had visited the V&A in 1974 to witness Destruction, and recalled the “sickening” sense of loss that the show had inspired. This sense of loss had stayed with him in the intervening period, providing some of the “driving spirit” behind the Washington exhibition. Treasure Houses was just as much a political statement as the Destruction exhibition had been, but now aimed to imprint on visitors another set of messages: that British artistic culture was alive and well, and continued to be looked after on the walls of its country mansions, which in turn were the powerhouses of the tourism and leisure industry.

By September 1189, the monks’ situation was starting to look better. The siege of the convent was over, the incumbent pope looked favourably on their cause, and the death of Henry II meant that Baldwin had lost one of his chief supporters. The new king, Richard I, appeared more interested in his crusade than helping the archbishop in his conflict with his cathedral chapter. Yet Baldwin's position was not as weak as the monks may have hoped. His own crusading vows meant that Richard was more likely to side with the archbishop than the monks, especially as he came to see the Canterbury dispute as an obstacle to the crusade's departure. Furthermore, the monks were to discover that the papal legate – specifically appointed to settle the conflict – was forbidden by the king from entering the kingdom. The convent understood their struggle was not over.

On 3 September 1189, eight Canterbury monks were standing in Westminster Abbey, witnesses to the coronation of King Richard I. Roger of Howden provides us with the first detailed account of an English coronation. According to this report, the ceremony began with a procession into the church: ‘First came the clergy in their robes, carrying holy water, and the cross, tapers, and censers. Next came the priors, then the abbots, and then the bishops.’ This procession included Archbishop Baldwin, who presided over the coronation. It is unclear if the Canterbury monks were also included in the procession although as the archbishop was representing Canterbury, it is likely that the monks were included in the ‘great number of earls, barons, knights, and others, both clergy and laity’ who followed the king into the church and took up positions in the choir. Apart from Richard himself, Baldwin was the key figure at the coronation. The right to crown the king of England was a jealously guarded right of the archbishops of Canterbury. Indeed, it was the coronation of Henry the Young King in June 1170 by the archbishop of York that precipitated Becket's capitulation to Henry II, with the agreement that the Young King would be recrowned by Becket to prevent the archbishop of York's coronation from setting a precedent.

SO FAR, I’VE CONCENTRATED largely on music at the centre of the metropolis, especially at those iconic venues just north of the river. Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the astonishing amount of music-making beyond the West End. A glimpse at those districts immediately south of the river, concentrating on Battersea, Brixton and Bermondsey, should illuminate not only suburban music but also music's role within the political debate.

Much south of the river remained undeveloped until the nineteenth century, when its former marshlands housed many of London's least well-off. Bermondsey's tenement housing resembled that of the East End, just across the river: it was here where philanthropic musical ventures were mostly directed.

As London's population expanded, and as working patterns changed, new railway lines extended commuting to a ring of suburbs bordering the capital. Large swathes of south and south-east London missed out on the Underground, for social and geological reasons, contributing to a sense of separation persisting to this day. Still, Brixton and Battersea were perfectly convenient, with trains into Victoria and Waterloo: and in 1900 Clapham Common station opened, giving direct access to the City.

Brixton typified the modestly comfortable south London suburb: a classic mix with wide avenues of affluent townhouses flanked by serried rows of undistinguished terraces. Battersea was more diverse. Some streets around the park displayed serious wealth, but areas bordering the river fell into what Charles Booth in his London Poverty Maps listed as ‘very poor’, and even ‘semi-criminal’.

❧ Life in the suburbs

It's impossible to miss the snide mockery that the suburbs attracted. T.W.H. Crosland set the tone in 1905 in The Suburbans: ‘penny buses, gramophones, bamboo furniture, pleasant Sunday afternoons, Glory Songs, modern language teas, golf, tennis, high school education.’1 For liberal politician Charles Masterman, in his searching analysis of The Condition of England (1909), unobtrusive middle-class suburbanites may have been ‘liberated from the devils of poverty’, but ‘the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants’. He described the ‘miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets’, the tiny gardens of Acacia Villa or Camperdown Lodge – the men sucked into City offices at daybreak, the women occasionally treating themselves to West End shops and theatres.

The Canterbury dispute was a complex affair. The main point of conflict concerned the erection of a new church first at Hackington and later at Lambeth, but intermixed with this conflict were also the long running disputes waged between monks and archbishops concerning lands, rights, and privileges. While it is the proposed new church that has always been given the centre ground in accounts of the quarrel, the other issues were arguably of greater importance to the monks. Although the church was a symbol of the discord between archbishop and chapter, as well as being a trigger to the prolonged period of litigation observed in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was the issues such as control of the exennia (the Christmas and Easter altar offerings from the cathedral estates) and the convent's ability to appoint its own officials, which had a greater impact on the day-to-day affairs of the monks. Yet without Baldwin's plan for Hackington, it is possible that these other problems would have merely simmered beneath the surface and would not have erupted in the twelfth century. If that had been the case, Baldwin's archiepiscopacy could have been remembered very differently.

Baldwin of Forde

Baldwin and the monks of Christ Church were at odds with each other from the beginning. He was not the monks’ choice as archbishop; they wanted either Theobald of Cluny or Odo of Battle. However, Henry II favoured Baldwin and imposed his choice on the chapter. Although not the monastic choice, Baldwin was by no means a bad person to have as a prelate. According to William of Newburgh, Henry often complained about churchmen who embraced the world with both arms. Baldwin was certainly not one of those. He was a hardworking and pious man who abandoned a promising career as a secular clerk to enter the Cistercian monastery at Forde in 1170, rising through the ranks to become abbot within a few years. In 1180, he was appointed bishop of Worcester, and four years later was translated to Canterbury. It was his actions against the Canterbury monks which gave him a poor reputation both then and now. Pope Urban III for example described him as ‘the most fervent monk, the warm abbot, the tepid bishop and the remiss archbishop’. This assessment has often been accepted by historians.

With the settlement of 1200 it appeared as though the dispute over a collegiate church was at an end. The last five years of Hubert's archiepiscopate were quiet. He never tried to build the house of Premonstratensians allowed under the agreement, nor did he try to revive the idea of a secular collegiate church. This suggests that Hubert never wanted to move the rights of the cathedral chapter to a new body. Both Sees and Whithorn had regular canons as the cathedral chapter. Whithorn in fact was a Premonstratensian chapter. If, as the monks insisted, the establishment of a new cathedral chapter was the plan, Hubert could easily have fulfilled this desire by building the permitted Premonstratensian house and transferring the episcopal see there.

Instead, Hubert repaired his relationship with the monks, who became very affectionate towards their archbishop. According to Gervase, there was so much affection that ‘by the grace of God it was as if they were of one heart and one soul’. Upon Hubert's death, Gervase even wrote a glowing encomium of the archbishop:

He was so bountiful, so liberal, and open-handed in entertaining guests and poor people, that what he possessed seemed to be the property of all. He was wonderful in erecting large and noble buildings. He was devout in the performance of divine service… But it was one great proof of his trust that he employed about him those whom he found faithful in service and truthful in words. Like Solomon he hated flattering lips, a lying tongue, and a forward mouth [Psalm 11.4, Proverbs 6.17, 8.13].

Although the settlement of 1200 was in the monks’ favour, the community was still unhappy with the result. While no new church was built, they had still lost revenues and estates, particularly the churches previously assigned to the almonry (Monkton, Meopham, Eynsford, and Eastry) and the exennia. In both cases the monks had a right to be dissatisfied with the settlement. The churches were to be held by the incumbents until their death, at which point they were to be divided equally between the monks and the archbishop. This division, however, did not take place, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the monks repeatedly tried to regain the churches.

Scratch the stone, stucco, or brick of the walls of any of Britain's estimated two thousand country houses and you will find a multitude of survival stories. The owners and custodians of these houses have found unique and diverse ways for each of them to remain standing into the twenty-first century, when so many other houses have been lost. These owners and custodians have developed coping strategies that have enabled houses not only to weather storms – whether literal, or of fire, flood, war, or pandemic – but subsequently to enjoy renewed strength, vitality, and resilience.

The stories that are told about country houses often begin with the ambitions and achievements of the generations that first commissioned mansions to be built. Such foundational owners may have hoped and anticipated that their descendants would enjoy untroubled lives amid verdant and productive farmland and harmonious local community relations. This was rarely, if ever, the case. All too frequently, the early aggrandisement of landed families, as expressed through the building of country houses surrounded by substantial gardens and parks, would give way at some point to hubris, and occasionally a dramatic fall.1 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sto-ries that were increasingly being told about the grandest country residences involved themes of decay and decline. Nevertheless, periods of demise might be followed by phases of revival, as owners found new purposes for the houses that they had inherited or acquired. This was certainly the case for some country houses in the 1950s and 1960s, when they opened for the first time to paying tourist visitors. Revival stories involved enterprise, initiative, clever financial management, and sheer hard graft, coupled with benign economic, political, and social circumstances as well as, sometimes, the good fortune of a successful marriage match.

This book attempts to tell some of these stories. In doing so, it shows how an important part of what used to be called ‘the national heritage’ – the British country house – has been saved in ways that involve far less reliance on direct state support than other categories of heritage.