Lucy undertook a five-day curatorial research micro-internship in June 2026, hosted by the University of Oxford’s Heritage Partnerships Team and co-supervised by the National Trust.
Knole (Sevenoaks, Kent) is one of the National Trust’s largest and most visited properties, whose extensive collections comprise a significant amount of historical furniture. As part of my internship in partnership with the National Trust, I was tasked with researching eleven pieces in this collection, a set of seventeenth century campaign chairs. This was not a straightforward endeavour. Although a fashion for campaign furniture is well-documented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, very little is known about examples in this earlier period. I therefore focused on researching the general social, political and cultural context of the seventeenth century, and on this basis explored how and why the family at Knole at this time may have wanted furniture of this sort.
Campaign chairs are furniture designed specifically for travelling. Though designed to be indistinguishable in appearance to contemporary household furniture, they include ingenious mechanisms allowing them to be quickly folded up and moved. This combination of comfort and convenience has its roots in upper-class culture during the Age of Expansion: gentleman-officers, colonists and travellers overseas wished to maintain the “polite living” they had become accustomed to at home, and found such furniture the ideal means of doing so. Use of campaign furniture moreover allowed them to reinforce class hierarchies - both through its aesthetic similarities to their expensive domestic furniture, and the frequent need for servants to transport it.
The examples of campaign furniture at Knole almost certainly served exactly this purpose. Despite their relatively simple design, their walnut frames, gilt-wood finials, and velvet upholstery are all indicative of luxury and fashion. Furniture of similar construction was also commonplace in the Restoration court in the later seventeenth century, further serving to emphasise not only the aristocratic origins of its owners, but their close connections to the power and prestige of the crown.
For a family such as that of the Earls of Dorset, who owned Knole in this period, underscoring one’s noble identity would have been especially desirable. The nobility suffered attacks on their power and prestige in the early-to-mid seventeenth century, first during the personal reign of Charles I, later during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, their fortunes improved upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Nobles - including members of the Dorset family - held places in the expanding courts, served as officers for the army, and took leading roles in financing and administrating England’s colonial expansion. Meanwhile, a crucial trend in domestic politics, strongly supported by the fifth and sixth earls of Dorset, was a broader drive to enlarge and assert nobles’ (especially juridical) power. This was in contrast not only to the powers held by the Crown, but also those held by a Commons viewed as corrupt - and of the lower and middle classes, who the aristocracy held responsible for their hardships under Cromwell’s “mechanic tyranny”. All these factors gave the nobility a clear impetus to flaunt their hard-won status. They moreover would have had a keen desire to mark themselves and their power as distinct from other social groups. Campaign furniture, in combining noble prestige with the practicality necessary for travel and military purposes, would therefore have been strongly desirable for any aristocrat. By extension, it would have been desirable for the Earls of Dorset, who were energetically involved in high society and politics at this time.
The career of the sixth Earl of Dorset provides a tentative indication that he may have been responsible for purchasing these chairs. He was a frequent traveller in Europe and a naval volunteer in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, circumstances which would have instilled in him a need for convenient furniture. He also appears to have had a strong sense of noble identity, being a political advocate of the rights and powers of Parliament in general and the Lords in particular. This, together with his fashionable tastes - he was well-known as a patron of arts and culture - would conceivably have given him an especially keen desire to demonstrate this status through the furniture he used. However, I found no evidence in the course of my research which confirmed this decisively.
Researching these chairs serves as an important reminder that even aspects of material culture as unassuming as furniture do not exist in a vacuum. The chairs and their presence at Knole cannot be understood without a full consideration of aristocratic culture in the seventeenth century. Their design and use was influenced by deep-reaching sociopolitical changes, concomitant shifts in power structures, and the exercise of aristocratic power in reaction to all this. For a holistic interpretation of our heritage, it is crucial that we illuminate these influences upon it. Only through such an interpretation can we fully capture the living dynamics of the past, confront the injustices embedded in them, and explore how these same dynamics and injustices bear upon our society today.
Lucy Snowdon is a MSt student in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. Her research examines the relationship between language change and society in the history of English. Her internship with the National Trust has developed her skills in curatorial research, deepened her interest in a career in the heritage sector, and stoked her passion for illuminating the sociocultural forces quietly shaping our day-to-day lives.
