This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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You have to be a particular type of geek to get excited by historic house inventories: those endless room-by-room lists of tables and beds and tapestries and cooking utensils; the annoyingly unhelpful references to pictures — “Five Portraits, Gilt frames, Glazed”; the cryptic entries that send one scurrying for a suitable glossary — “haulm” and “douter” and “kish”.

I am that geek. Ever since the moment back in the 1980s when I first came upon the late Lindsay Boynton’s magisterial edition of the Hardwick Hall inventories of 1601, I’ve been hooked. After Hardwick, I discovered Francis Steers’s Farm and Cottage Inventories of mid-Essex, 1635-1749; and then Karin-M. Walton’s Inventory of 1710 from Dyrham Park.

Humble or high-born, I didn’t care, as my unscholarly imagination filled one interior after another with dripping pans and trundle beds and hangings of green velvet and cloth of gold. I puzzled over the “payre of pullies lyned with black taffetie” in Bess of Hardwick’s bedchamber, and asked myself just why there was “an elephant’s snout” in the servants’ parlour at Dyrham?

Bishop Howard didn’t stint himself when it came to the life of the mind

Noble Households, a collection of late Stuart and early Georgian inventories of English houses published in 2006 as a tribute to John Cornforth, was a worthy addition to the genre. Now we have its companion volume, Great Irish Households. Like its predecessor, it is edited by Tessa Murdoch and published by the enterprising John Adamson.

Let me say right away that Great Irish Households is a joy. A box of geeky delights, certainly, but also a fabulous (one might even say indispensable) source for the scholarly study of the Irish country house between 1702 — when an inventory was taken of the contents of the shabby and slightly ramshackle Lismore Castle in County Waterford — and 1821, when the far from shabby contents of Mount Stewart in County Down were itemised for the second Marquess of Londonderry, better known as Lord Castlereagh.

Sandwiched between are sixteen more inventories which provide a remarkable insight into building histories, picture hangs, libraries and furnishings, food history and even Georgian agricultural practice. The collections range from the palatial — the Duke of Leinster’s Carton House in County Kildare, the Duke of Ormonde’s Kilkenny Castle — to the more modest Roscommon home of Robert Howard, Bishop of Elphin.

Elphin was sparsely furnished, and the valuer, George Manby, had to revise down the estimate of the furnishings of “ye Stair head room” from £6 to £2 6s. when it was noticed that the curtains were “much damaged and torn”. Bishop Howard didn’t stint himself when it came to the life of the mind, however: a separate inventory itemised 383 books in his study, from Joseph Addison and Voltaire to William Wilberforce and James White’s Complete System of Farriery and Veterinary Medicine.

Best of all, did the owners of Kilrush invent a delightful portmanteau word?

As so often with historic house inventories, the naming of rooms offers information and questions. It doesn’t take a detective to guess the reason for the naming of the Blue Damask Room at Hillsborough Castle in County Down: the four-poster was decked out with blue silk damask curtains, and the window curtains were likewise of blue damask.

But the Stococo Room at Major-General Richard St George’s Kilrush House in County Kilkenny? There wasn’t much in it when the inventory was taken in 1750 — a card table, a looking-glass and a grate. The house was subsequently abandoned. Presumably “Stococo” referred to some elaborate stucco work. Or perhaps to rococo decoration? Or best of all, did the owners of Kilrush invent a delightful portmanteau word combining the two? I hope so.

By far the most extensive entry is the “Inventory of Furniture &c of Carton House” taken on New Year’s Day 1818. Beginning in the attics with “one deal Bedstead painted” and ending at the Maynooth gate lodge with “Small gates, (the locks Bad)”, the inventorists bring us on an astonishing grand tour of state rooms and service yards, taking in everything from china and linen to guns, mahogany boot jacks and, in the Duke of Leinster’s study, “One Library Table with drawers and enclosed doors lined with Black leather, with Skeleton on Top”. Great Irish Households is worth buying for the Carton House inventory alone.

Each inventory is prefaced by what the book calls a preamble, an introduction from an expert contributor, which sets the scene and recaps the architectural history of the house. If I have a criticism of Great Irish Households, it is that these commentaries are too brief; in almost every case I was left wanting more. There are dozens of illustrations, many in colour, a comprehensive bibliography — and an excellent glossary, that essential component of published inventories. There you’ll find that a haulm is a chaff-filled bolster, a douter is a candle-snuffer and a kish is a wicker turf basket. Your life will be all the richer for it.