The management of household and estate: the accounts of Alice Le Strange 1610-1654

"This paper offers a case study of one woman and her accounting practices in the first half of the seventeenth century. The gendering of keeping household accounts in this period is contradictory. On the one hand, it can be seen as a natural extension of the housewife’s duties to manage the household and control expenditure; on the other hand, the boundaries between household, farm and estate were blurred, so accounts often extended into managing far more than the domestic sphere. Large gentry households were complex enterprises with high turnovers of income and expenditure. A woman who kept such accounts was performing a role often carried out by professional stewards, who were always male. Alice Le Strange and her accounts are exceptional in a number of ways. They are unusually complete and long-running, containing a complete series of disbursements and receipts running for over forty years, as well as a good series of ‘Houshold Bookes’ or kitchen accounts recording the week by week production and consumption of food. Alice Le Strange not only kept household accounts, but also turned her attention to rationalizing the family’s estate accounts, rentals, field books, creating a system for cross referencing land holdings, tenants, and estate income and receipts from the sale of livestock, corn and timber. Additionally, she did so not as a woman alone, but as the preferred manager, with her husband Hamon, and for much of the period, her married son and heir also resident in the household. Although Alice is in many ways unique comparisons can be drawn with other Norfolk gentlewomen, such as her cousin Lady Frances Hobart, who restored the finances and instigated new accounting methods at Blickling. The paper will concentrate on two aspects of Alice’s management activities. First, it will examine the scope, contents and organization of her accounts and other related documentation, making comparisons with earlier records that were kept by Hamon, who relied more heavily on the services of bailiffs, servants and tradesmen. Second, it will explore her role as part of a family management team, which included her husband and son. Her contribution was vital to the improvement of the Hunstanton estate at that time. By establishing clear and comprehensive accounting routines, and providing what was effectively a seventeenth century database, she enabled specialization and released the energies of Hamon and Nicholas for other ventures, notably the rebuilding of the estate and land improvement schemes. Nicholas’s notebooks, written in a round legible hand, display the influence of his mother as she educated her children in the basics of accounting. The paper forms part of a larger research project utilizing Alice Le Strange’s accounts to examine gendered patterns of consumption and work in the first half of the seventeenth century. This research is funded by the ESRC and AHRB as part of the ‘Cultures of Consumption’ programme. "