17 February 2026

What might an investigator be able to work out about you if they got hold of your supermarket receipts?  Do you follow a special diet, have a young family to feed or regularly entertain friends?  Maybe you succumbed to a cheeky rosé during “dry” January?  For her PhD, Rachel Small carried out a similar process to research the lives of the Grey family at Bradgate.  She visited the Society to give us an accessible presentation of what she discovered.

Although Bradgate House was abandoned in 1739, leaving few written records, we are fortunate to have a surviving Household Account Book for the years 1678-81.  It records the items purchased by the steward, Richard Frost, each week, and on a facing page it lists what was used in the kitchen and what remained in stock.  At that time, the house was occupied by Thomas and Elizabeth Grey, the Second Earl and Countess of Stamford, whose turbulent marriage ended in divorce a few years later.  (Elizabeth was a wealthy heiress who hated life here, so far from London.  She described the locals as “brutes” and is rumoured to have set fire to the house in order to get away!)  Though the couple had three children, sadly none of them survived.  Rachel estimates that the entire household comprised about 40 people, basing this figure on the consumption of weak beer, which was the standard drink at the time.

The Greys (if not their servants) led a lavish lifestyle, even by the standards of other country houses of the period.  The accounts record 181 different food items, though the menus were dominated by rabbit and chicken.  Some of the rabbits were bought from a Thurcaston huntsman called Mr Palmer.  Many of the chickens were “wood-hens” provided as part of the annual rent by the Greys’ tenants – including those in our two villages – in exchange for the right to collect wood from the estate.  Other food items were more seasonal, including songbirds and waders in autumn and lobsters in summer, when the roads were good enough to bring them from the coast.  Each year a flock of sheep was bought and fattened on the estate.  Venison rarely featured as hunting deer was considered to be for sport, not food.  The bones found during recent archaeological excavations in the ruins correlate remarkably closely with the mixture of creatures recorded in the accounts.  The Greys laid on a feast each St Swithin’s Day and the items consumed suggest it was for local people, not gentry.

Wine was imported from various countries, including claret and sack (fortified wine from Spain).  Rachel can tell that, even though French wine was banned and was not recorded as being purchased, the stores in the kitchen were still being replenished!

Theories of disease at the time involved restoring the balance of the four “humours” in the body.  At times when Elixabeth Grey was ill – indicated by payments to an apothecary and perhaps connected with pregnancy – the household diet can be seen to change to milder foods, which accords with the theory.