Horses and the Aristocratic Lifestyle in Early Modern England: William Cavendish, First Earl of Devonshire (1551-1626) and his Horses

With the activities of the Earl of Devonshire as its principal focus, this scholarly and deeply-researched book sets out the many important functions horses had for aristocratic households in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Based on the Earl’s disbursement books in the estate office at Chatsworth House, it does much to illuminate the lifestyle and interests of a man who, until now, has remained largely in the shadow of his more famous mother, Bess of Hardwick. No book-length biography of him has yet been published, a surprising omission given that by his death Cavendish had built up one of the greatest estates of the seventeenth century. This book goes some way to filling that gap, and it builds firmly on the author’s equine expertise from his earlier monographs: The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1988), and Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London, 2007).