THE FINANCES OF AN ELIZABETHAN NOBLEMAN: HENRY PERCY, NINTH EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND (1564–1632)
N recent years economic historians have become increasingly interested in the fortunes of the Elizabethan aristocracy, an interest which has been reflected in a series of contributions to the Economic History Review and which has been intensified since the publication of Mr Stone's article in 1948. The length, complexity and heat of the controversy, as Mr Stone acknowledged in 1952, point a clear moral; to get the picture right, meticulous research is needed. There has been no lack of reference to particular examples; Mr Stone published in appendices to his first article notes on the finances of every member of the Elizabethan peerage. But, working as he was obliged to do largely from State documents and printed sources, it was inevitable that some of his statements should be open to challenge by anyone familiar with the private papers of individual noblemen. No class is more easily defined than the peerage, nothing could be more helpful to research historians than the small numbers involved in the period-there were only sixty peers in England in I 6oo-and no section of the population leaves fuller evidence behind it of its activities through documents and possessions. What is needed to resolve the problems over which the controversy has ranged, and raged, is a series of studies of individual peers based on extensive research among family archives. In this paper, I present the results of one such study as a contribution to this second stage of the discussion.2