The household accounts of Henry Percy Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632)

Abstract

The thesis is based upon a full, critical study of some ninety-one household accounts to be found among the Alnwick MSS. of the Duke of Northumberland. These accounts form an almost complete set of the audited declarations of accounts of the household officers of Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, (1564-1632), between August, 1585, two months after his accession to the title, and March, 1603/1604, when a gap occurs in the series. The introductory chapter gives a brief biography of the ninth earl, known as "The Wizard Earl" on account of his interest in scientific experiment. He married a sister of the second earl of Essex and was imprisoned from 1605 to 1621 for alleged conspiracy in the Gunpowder Plot. The survival of the vast majority of the final household accounts over so long a consecutive period as nineteen years has enabled the author to make a contribution, in chapter II, to the understanding of the system of charge and discharge accountancy which was employed. The organisation of the household of the earl, which varied in size in the period from fifty to seventy persons on the check-roll, is described in some detail in chapter III. These two chapters may be regarded as the crucial chapters of this thesis. In the remaining nine chapters, the income and expenditure of the earl as set out on the household accounts are reviewed at length. A picture emerges of the life of a great nobleman in the closing years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign; the fullness of the source material has enabled this picture to be in some respects more detailed and more positive than Miss Scott Thomson's study of the Russells in the late seventeenth century. Of the appendices, the longest and most important contains transcriptions of good specimens of all the main types of accounting papers relating to the Percy household in the period. It is hoped that this thesis illustrates something of the value of exhaustive studies of such material for the social and economic historian.