Opened 20th June 2024

Middling Culture Exhibition

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Launched 20th June 2024

The Shakespearean Memory Parlour

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About the Exhibition

Welcome to the Middling Culture exhibition, where we highlight the lives of England's sixteenth and seventeenth century middle class. Through curated images and artifacts, we explore their daily realities—neither wealthy nor impoverished, but socially significant.

Our exhibition is organized into thematic sections, showcasing objects that define the middling class and its communities. These items illustrate their social mobility and distinct identity amidst broader society, revealing their role in shaping England's cultural landscape.

Popular Objects

Explore our collection showcasing treasured artifacts from England's middling class, offering insights into daily life, social mobility, and cultural identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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This clay fuming pot is of green and yellow lead glazed Surrey/Hampshire border ware. Fuming pots were used to heat herbs and spices to fragrance and fumigate people's houses. Hot embers would be put inside the pedestal base, which would heat the herbs in the chamber above. The herb chamber has holes in to let the smell of the herbs out. Fuming pots were not only to create pleasant scent. In early modern Europe it was commonly believed that disease spread through miasma (putrid air) so bad smells were a threat to health. Fumigation was therefore a popular method of preventing the spread of the plague. Responsibility for everyday medical practice including both prevention and treatment fell to the mistress of the house, so was a key part of middling women�s work. The medical recipe book, <em>A Rich Storehouse</em> OR <em>Treasurie for the Diseased</em> (London, 1612) gives this advice for scenting the home:<br />
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�A preservative by correcting the ayre in all houses:<br />
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Take Rosemary dryed, Juniper, Bay-leaves, or Frankincense, and cast the same upon the coles in a chafingdish, and receive the fume or smoke thereof into your head. If you will, put a little Lavender or Sage that is dryed, into the fire with the rest it will do much good. Also to make your fires in eathen pannes (rather to remove about your Chambers, then in Chimneys) shall be better to correct the aires in your houses, then otherwise.�<br />
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For middling women, diligence in scenting the home was part of essential domestic tasks and a vital complement to the medical marketplace of apothecaries and physicians. <br />
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Fuming dish

This is the skull of an adult female brown bear. Her eyes once stared out at crowds of people on London�s Bankside who had come to watch her engage in �sport� with dogs. The commercial pastime known as �bearbaiting� was a major attraction in England in the 1500s and 1600s. A bear would be chained to a stake and dogs set upon it (spectators would often bet upon the outcome).<br />
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Probably the most famous bearwards�people who kept the bears�are the playhouse builder Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law, the famous actor Edward Alleyn. Alleyn is a prime example of how commercial entertainment not only provided leisure for the public but promised social mobility for those involved (just like William Shakespeare). Alleyn paired his interest in both animal entertainment and acting with other typically middling characteristics�in particular, charity. By 1605, Alleyn had purchased the manor of Dulwich (just south of London), where he built his house as well as almshouses, a charitable school, and its chapel. The early modern entertainment industry, of which Alleyn was a key innovator, brought him up from jobbing actor to successful �play� entrepreneur and then eventually further beyond.

Bear skull

Skull, female bear

What sort of asset marks out somebody as middling, rather than being a wage labourer or dependent person? One answer lies in the administrative documents compiled upon a person�s death: in a will (a document outlining where assets and goods should go and to whom) and inventory (a list of �movable� goods owned by the deceased and their values). Not all middling individuals had such documents (and for many they may no longer survive), but the elite�including aristocratic men and women� usually did.<br />
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The majority of wills and inventories that survive from this period give us an impression of the type of assets owned by middling people. The inventory shown here, for instance, records some of the objects belonging to the Bristol sailor John Rockwell. The very existence of such an inventory implies that Rockwell had enough �things� in his life of value to warrant such a list being drawn up. These documents also show the variety of ways of marking assets, from �playing tables� like modern-day board games to debts owed by and to the deceased.

Inventory of John Rockwell

Inventory

A pottery tyg jug such as this may have been used to serve beer to a local labourer or the city mayor. Drinking spaces were key locations for early modern people across the social spectrum, but they held unique significance for middling individuals aiming for or exercising local political and social agency. The watering holes of the period broadly sat on a spectrum from alehouses (the �lowest� form of drinking establishment) to taverns and then the more elite inns. In reality, the lines were not so clear-cut. Middling and elite members of communities visited each type of space, though the tavern and especially the inn were more noticeably places where business, administration, religious organisation, and leisure combined. These inns tie together recreational space with local governance, social status, and identity.

Tyg

Drinking cup

Interior decoration was part of the substantial investment in domestic building and another way to display status for people like the Wyld family. The new extension to 43 High Street in Reigate in the 1620s was adorned with a set of wall paintings. Painted directly onto the wall surface, the floral decoration is a key part of the overall design and atmosphere of the space.<br />
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The paintings originally stretched across all four walls and the ceiling. They were brightly coloured and would have had a striking impact. Repeated and expansive patterns were fashionable throughout the later 1500s and the 1600s, but the choice of floral decoration here (rather than geometric) might refer to the location of the room at the rear of the property, looking onto a yard or flower gardens (another sign of status). There was a fashion for floral decoration across the decorative arts, evoking flowers� scent which might be considered beneficial to health. <br />
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hile fixed surface decoration like this would have been quite common in middling houses, it is rarely mentioned in inventories of the period because these documents only listed moveable and saleable goods.

Wall painting

Painting

Barrel

Dry coopered barrel

The Academy of Armoury, printed in 1688, was compiled by Randle Holme III (1627-1700). The Holmes were a prominent Chester family who served as councillors, aldermen, sheriffs, and mayors of the city. They were painter-stainers and heralds by trade: heralds were members of the <a href='https://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/' target='_blank'>College of Arms</a>, and their job was to oversee ceremonies, such as funerals, of individuals that held coats of arms. It was also their job to monitor the use of coats of arms, ensuring that people did in fact have the right to use them, based on their lineage. This meant that heralds were great record keepers, and the Holmes� family manuscripts take up 261 volumes in the British Library.<br />
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The Academy of Armoury lays out the role of the herald and of all things relating to it, from clothing to food. In this drawing, Holmes depicts various �Mechanick Tools and Instruments� used in the occupations he has previously discussed and which he encountered throughout his career in the city of Chester. The text forms a sort of encyclopaedia of the kind of objects that he thought might provide useful elements of heraldic bearings. Being based in Chester, a busy town, he was immersed in an environment of occupational imagery, in which the streets were negotiated by shop signs that used tools as symbols of their proprietors� trade. Holmes had a documentary eye, interested in the detail of these objects as a way of showing the distinction between them; his work therefore coincidentally provides us with an important reference work for understanding occupations and the tools they employed in early modern England, even as he draws them into the book with the pen and ink of his own trade.

The Academy of Armoury by Randle Holme III

Sketches of trade tools

This is one of 12 civic portraits from the city of Gloucester and depicts husband and wife John (d.1528) and Joan (d.1545) Cooke. It was painted long after the sitters died, probably around 1600, to commemorate and celebrate their achievements and to serve as a reminder to follow their example of good citizenship. John is depicted wearing his mayor�s robe and Joan holds a pair of gloves. These may be John�s Freeman�s gloves, displaying the civic status of both John and Joan who is holding them. The inscription records that Joan continued the charitable work of John following his death. <br />
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This sort of portrait would be displayed in public places like town- or guildhalls. The display of portraits of former mayors and other notable members of the town corporation constructed a sense of collective identity and promoted the status of the civic body. Members of the gentry would display pictures of important ancestors in their homes to highlight their status through family lineage, but members of the urban elite could display pictures of their civic predecessors to demonstrate their civic lineage. As such, remembrance of the virtues of past leaders could be used to bolster the status, authority and position of current officeholders within the community.

Middling Culture Exhibition

The Shakespearean Memory Parlour

About the Exhibition

Fuming dish

Fuming dish

Bear skull

Skull, female bear

Inventory of John Rockwell

Inventory

Tyg

Drinking cup

Wall painting

Painting

Barrel

Dry coopered barrel

The Academy of Armoury by Randle Holme III

Sketches of trade tools

Memorial Portrait of John and Joan Cooke

Painting