Furniture

• The furnishings at Hardwick Hall were practical and enjoyable, used to demonstrate wealth and status
• Bess would only buy new furniture when absolutely necessary, preferring to refurbish older pieces
• The furniture was either French or produced at Hardwick, with the higher status rooms having more French furniture
• Beds displayed taste, wealth and social status, with the best ones at Hardwick being gilded
• Bess used tapestries, some of Flemish design, to show a hierarchy within rooms: high status rooms having metal and silk embroidered tapestries, lower status rooms having only wool fibres
• Two tapestries in the Long Gallery were bought from the Hatton family by Bess, for £300
• Some of the tapestries were religiously symbolic, which was very fashionable at the time
• Bess had one of the largest collections of carpets, mainly Turkish, in England, placed under furniture to showcase status
• Bess's use of furniture shows the increasing wealth of the gentry
• Furniture in Hardwick Hall shows the influence of Renaissance designs in Elizabethan England