Exploring peasant and bourgeois identity: haggards, masers, sheep and spoons in later fifteenth-century County Dublin

Abstract This article uses inventory evidence for the possessions of households in later fifteenth-century County Dublin, an area largely characterised by rural settlement. Because household goods are often only indifferently recorded, its focus is less on individual cases than on larger patterns of consumption between social groups. In particular, by making comparisons with inventories from later medieval England and from the wine-growing Gers region of south-west France in the mid fifteenth century, it explores both how far evidence from County Dublin fits within and helps suggest wider European ‘peasant’ and ‘bourgeois’ patterns of consumption. By extension it explores the boundaries between the urban and the rural and how far a hybrid suburban identity can be discerned. In some cases a combination of close reading and statistical analysis is used to recover occupational identities, something that the source does not specifically record. The significance of the material culture of specific households is examined in two instances — one that of Lady Margaret Nugent, a wealthy and devout widow living in Dublin's St Michan's parish, and the other that of a couple who managed an inn located next to one of the city gates.