The House of Allcroft: Power, Paternalism, and Decline at Stokesay Court

Country houses were more than buildings. They stood at the centre of systems of wealth, authority, employment and social obligation.The House of Allcroft traces the remarkable rise and eventual decline of the family associated with Stokesay Court, one of Shropshire's most distinctive Victorian country houses.Beginning with the Allcrofts' commercial origins, Antony David Davies follows their movement into landed society and examines the world they created around Stokesay Court. Victorian respectability, inheritance, household hierarchy, philanthropy, paternalism and private authority all form part of a wider story about the power once exercised by Britain's landed families.Drawing upon documentary evidence, public records, family history and personal memory, the book also considers what happened when the social structures that sustained that authority began to weaken.Part family history, part country-house history and part study of class and power, The House of Allcroft places one family and one estate within the profound social changes that reshaped Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.