The Country House: Hospitality – Dining, Dancing, Sports

Established in 1994, THE COURSE offers innovative and exciting lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.

‘Of all the great things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the only one they have mastered completely in all its details, so that it becomes a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house.’ Henry James

Jeremy Musson has spent over twenty years visiting and studying English country houses, and in this new specially designed course, takes some different approaches to understanding how the ‘well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house’ was planned, designed, built and used. Above all, he brings the architectural story to life by exploring the history of people in the country house, through domestic service, evolving technology, as well as the significant social life and ritual of the English country house from the mid sixteenth century.

The Country House: Hospitality – Dining, Dancing, Sports

The country house was designed as a place for hospitality and entertaining, and this lecture surveys the history of this entertainment, especially dining, and drinking, music and dancing, and traces how these features of entertainment influenced country house design. It will also look at the parallel evolution of field sports, and other aspects of country house pleasure and fun, over the past four centuries, from the masque entertainment to the late Victorian amateur dramatics, from cards to billiards, and all the features of the nineteenth-century ‘house party’.