The definitive historical study of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the village of Nuneham Courtenay, a few miles south-east of Oxford, was published more than thirty years ago. In a wide-ranging essay Mavis Batey recounted how the first Earl Harcourt, founding President of the Dilettanti Society, embarked in 1761 on the creation of an appropriate landscape garden to complement the setting of his newly completed classical villa. An essential preliminary to the landscaping was the necessity to remove the medieval village out of sight of views of the house, and as early as 1760 work had already begun on building a new settlement outside the confines of the park. Progress was rapid, and by the autumn of 1761 the new estate village placed astride the Oxford-Henley turnpike was a going concern (Fig. 1). There is little to add to Mrs Batey’s account of the controversy that accompanied this arrogant display of the power exercised by eighteenth-century landlords over the lives of their tenantry apart from taking the opportunity to record that her own further research has confirmed the tentative identification of Nuneham with Oliver Goldsmith’s critical poem The Deserted Village. An entry in the manuscript notebooks of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, recording a visit to Lord Harcourt on 20 August 1800, reads:

The chronological extension of Howard Colvin’s Dictionary from its starting point of 1660 in the first edition of 1954 to the earlier date of 1600 in the second edition of 1978 enabled him to assess the career of Inigo Jones and that in itself provided him with sufficient justification. It also, inevitably, brought in a group of practising craftsmen who were capable of producing original designs as the occasion demanded but whose livelihoods depended to a greater or lesser extent on their manual and administrative skills. They were usually masons by training, such as Nicholas Stone, Robert Stickells, William Arnold, William Edge and the Yorkshire company of Akroyd, Bentley and Clark who migrated to Oxford in 1609, but they included notable carpenters such as Francis Carter, Robert Lyming and John Scampion, the bricklayer Peter Mills and the glazier Barnard Dinninghof.

It is clear that any explanation of the course taken by English country house design at the time of its first vigorous growth in the sixteenth century cannot be founded on a simple iconographical basis. A detailed knowledge of the processes by which the houses were constructed is essential to an understanding of their finished appearance and, as in any other age, due regard must be had to the characters of the individual personalities involved. In recent years, such an approach has considerably advanced our comprehension of the country houses, principally in the north Midlands, associated with Robert Smythson. Although at present the evidence is wanting for a biographical study of similar importance for any other part of the country, an examination of the documentary sources for a particular region could well prove fruitful in establishing a comprehensible picture of aesthetic control and design which may have a more general application.