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Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire. The largest private house in the United Kingdom.^[1]An example of the true stately home. From A Complete History of the County of York by Thomas Allen (1828–30)

Longleat House is an English stately home

A stately home is a "great country house".^[2] It is thus a palatial great house or in some cases an updated castle, located in the British Isles,^[3] mostly built between the mid-16th century and the early part of the 20th century, as well as converted abbeys and other church property (after the Dissolution of the Monasteries). They are in form and substance palaces by another name, yet that term in England is generally reserved for royal or episcopal residences, however modest in comparison to the stately home.

Location[link]

Stately homes are always located in the countryside, and their owners generally owned palatial homes in London also, in proximity to the royal court and parliament. These London residences, known as townhouses, corresponding to the hôtel particulier of Paris,^[4] generally took for their name the title or family name of their owner, such as Devonshire House, Grosvenor House, Spencer House, Northumberland House etc. Stately homes may include parts of true fortified "castles", if the buildings have been extensively extended, as at Belvoir Castle and Warwick Castle. Castle Howard is a misnomer, not being a castle, but a palatial residence.

Purpose[link]

These houses were status symbols for the great families of England, generally headed by great statesmen, who competed with each other to provide suitably grand settings in which to entertain members of the royal family. They were also the settings where affairs of state and party political matters were discussed informally among the ruling elite. They are termed the "seat" of their owner if he bears a title of nobility, the implication being the seat of a political powerbase, as was the true seat on the benches in the House of Lords where he had a right to sit and help determine the political destiny of the nation.

Architecture[link]

Famous architects and landscape architects such as Robert Adam, Sir Charles Barry, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir John Vanbrugh, Capability Brown and Humphry Repton were employed to incorporate new styles into the buildings. Great art and furniture collections were built up and displayed in the houses.

Decline[link]

The agricultural collapse towards the end of the 19th century, the First World War and then World War II changed the fortunes of many houses and their owners, and now they remain as a curious mix of living museums, part-ruined houses and castles and grand family estates. The introduction of inheritance tax caused many owners to relinquish ownership to the National Trust, being no longer able to afford their upkeep.

Current ownership[link]

Private[link]

Many stately homes are still owned and managed by private individuals who are descendants of their original builders, or by family trusts. The costs of running a stately home are naturally extremely high. Many owners let their properties for use as film and television sets as a means of gaining extra income, thus many of them are familiar sights to people who have never visited them in person. The grounds often contain other tourist attractions, such as safari parks, funfairs or museums. The Marquess of Bath at Longleat House in Wiltshire was the first to establish the commercial venture of a safari park in its grounds, followed by Woburn Abbey, seat of the Dukes of Bedford.

Institutional[link]

The following organisations own and are responsible for the upkeep of some stately homes:

• English Heritage
• National Trust
• Treasure Houses of England
• The Landmark Trust
• Historic Scotland
• National Trust for Scotland

Origin of the term[link]

Usage of term[link]

Modest owners do not usually use the phrase "stately home" but are more likely to call their property a "country house", which might seem an understatement to the objective observer. "Stately home" should be a term reserved for the truly palatial residence alone, but is nowadays often misused by estate agents wishing to aggrandise houses which are grand but not palatial. The term is also used imprecisely by commentators on modern society such as Robin Leach in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and parodists such as Dame Edna Everage.

List of English Stately Homes[link]

The following is a list of some of the largest English country houses, termed stately homes.

Illustrations[link]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

The following illustrations seek to show stately homes at their maximum expanses, in approximate descending order of size:

Portrait	Name	County; Date of design; Patron
	Chatsworth House	Devonshire; 1687; William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire
	Blenheim Palace	Oxfordshire; 1705; Queen Anne for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
	Longleat House	Wiltshire; c.1570; Sir John Thynne (d.1580)
	Castle Howard	N. Yorkshire; 1699; Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle
	Wentworth Woodhouse	S. Yorkshire; 1723; Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquess of Rockingham
	Kedleston Hall	Derbyshire; 1759; Sir Nathaniel Curzon (later 1st Baron Scarsdale)
	Wilton House	Wiltshire; 1630; Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke
	Petworth House	West Sussex; 1688; Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset. (Altered in 1870's)
	Holkham Hall	Norfolk; 1732; Thomas Coke, later 1st Earl of Leicester(d.1759)
	Woburn Abbey	Bedfordshire; 1744; John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford

See also[link]

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Nicholson, Nigel. Great Houses of Britain, Book Club Associates, London, 1978.

Further reading[link]

• Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, Yale University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-300-07869-2.

Hunt Emerson (born 1952) is a cartoonist living and working in Birmingham, England. He was closely involved with the Birmingham Arts Lab of the mid-to-late 1970s, and with the British underground comics scene of the 1970s and 1980s. His many comic strips and graphic novels are well known and have been translated into numerous languages.

His earliest strips in the 1970s appeared in such British small press comics as Graphixus, Moon Comix, Yikes, Animal Bite Comix, No Ducks, Phobos, Streetcomix, Free Comix, Warrior and Fish. A trip to the U.S. put him in touch with Rip Off Press who published his Thunderdogs, comic book for the underground market; while Don and Maggie Thompson included him in their mini-comic series, for which he created Calculus Cat, and he later contributed to their Eclipse Monthly magazine. Emerson art also appeared in the U.S. underground Commies From Mars. Dogman, and Large Cow Comix (a five issue series with separate subtitles) were all Emerson work cover to cover, and highly sought-after by collectors now, but it was Knockabout, a British comic book-sized and later album-sized anthology that featured some of Emerson's best strips, including the characters Alan Rabbit, Calculus Cat, Max Zillion and Alto Ego, Pusspuss, Momo and Fuzi, Charlie Chirp, plus the bizarre one-shot tales "Cakes And Bricks" "The Dentist" and "Mouth City". The latter two stories spawned a series called Citymouth, and later a collected volume. Squarebound books written by others, such as You Are Maggie Thatcher, and Hard To Swallow showcased Emerson strips and illustrations throughout.

In Outrageous Tales From the Old Testament he tackled a version of Leviticus written by Alan Moore, and in The Seven Deadly Sins, depicted "Envy". For the DC Comics imprint Factoid Books, in the 1990s, he did biographical comics on everything from Erich von Stroheim to Prince Charles and Princess Diana. These appeared in the Big Book Of... series. For dozens of issues of the British underground Brain Damage, he created "Arsover Tit".

The Emerson graphic novels Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Casanova's Last Stand and other adaptations of classic novels and tales have been successfully sold in numerous countries, and translated into several different languages.

For over 30 years Hunt Emerson's strips and illustrations have graced the pages of Fortean Times, a magazine of occult and unexplained phenomena, while his pornographically humorous Firkin The Cat (written by Tym Manley) has appeared in hundreds of Fiesta magazines.

He has been acclaimed as one of the 75 European Masters of Cartooning of the 20th Century by the Centre Nationale de la Bande Dessinee et de l'Image, and has won many other international awards.

The Beano[link]

At the moment he is drawing Ratz for The Beano, a strip about mean rats in a sewer. In 2002-2007, he drew Little Plum for that comic. In March 2009, after great work on both of the strips, he was picked as the artist for The Beano's revival of Fred's Bed. However, this version was viewed weird-looking by some people, and it has to be said the strip lost some of its humour and originality. This could be the reason why he left the strip in November, leaving Tom Paterson to become the artist.

External links[link]

• Hunt Emerson at Lambiek.net
• Long interview with Hunt Emerson
• Interview with Futureal Studio
• Hunt Emerson's official website