The collection comprises material created and collected by the early Cavendish family members, linked predominantly to the sites of Hardwick, Chatsworth and London. It includes an important series of 16th and 17th-century Cavendish family household financial accounts, inventories, rentals, surveys, memoranda books and court records mostly related to the land owned and or managed by the Cavendishes. It also includes a large collection of scribal manuscripts of a political, literary and utilitarian nature - including important texts by Francis Bacon and a copy of Purchas's Virginia's Verger. It also contains a 17th-century muniment register of the deeds in the Hardwick Evidence Room and a 17th-century catalogue of the library at Hardwick.
There is also an additional series of important inventories and legal documents that clarify the family's ownership of their land and are clearly related to the Hardwick Drawers series which was housed in the same room for centuries.
The financial account books include books that detail daily expenses of ‘Bess of Hardwick’ (later Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury and dowager countess) and her second husband, Sir William Cavendish. Also included among the twelve books from the period when Elizabeth was Countess of Shrewsbury and then dowager countess, are building financial accounts of Hardwick Hall and books with details ranging from the employment information of servants to the annual cost of a New Year’s gift to Queen Elizabeth I. Many of these volumes are extensively annotated by Bess between the 1550s-1600s.
The financial account books provide an insight into the longstanging single-entry, double receiver financial accounting system of the 17th century which Philip Riden points out is a 'genuine bureacracy, which funtioned independently of the circumstances of the family'. This can be seen in some of the financial accounts which continue to be recorded the same way despite the death of the 1st Earl of Devonshire, then that of the 2nd Earl, and the succession of the 3rd Earl from the guardianship of his mother, Countess Christian, and no matter the location of the family.
Later household financial accounts include the Privy Purse financial accounts of William, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, which record, among other things, payments to Thomas Hobbes.
The brief books in this series provide summaries of the areas of expenditure across all the Cavendish interests including the 1st and 2nd Earls’ investement in 'adventures at sea'. Greater in-detail examination of the financial account books and memoranda books from this period yield information about investments in the East India Company, Virginia Company, and Somers Isles Company.
This collection provides some insight into the involvement of women in the running of the estates. At the very top of the hierarchy, the countesses represented here in the records are shown to have spent great sums of money on ‘law causes’ to establish claim to their property and secure it for their offspring as well completing lower-level management of the estates through checking and signing off their own financial account books, just as the earls did. HMS/2/15, which includes copies of decades of indentures, is most representative of Countess Christian's period as head of the family - perhaps because she spent much time and money restoring the finances of the family after the death of her husband, which involved selling certain parts of land to repay his debts. The permission to establish an alms-house at Leicester Abbey is also included in memoranda book HMS/2/15.
The kitchen financial accounts provide evidence of the types of people the earls and the Dowager Countess Christian were entertaining and the sort of lifestyle they lived. An inventory of Sir Henry Cavendish’s house at Northaw c. 1540 with annotated notes by his wife Elizabeth Cavendish ("Bess of Hardwick") (HMS/5/1), show her early involvement with the custodianship of Cavendish family possessions and wealth. At the other end of the class spectrum the records capture the roles of female nurses, midwives, nursery maids, gardeners and cooks who were paid wages by and rented land from the Cavendishes.
Detailed analysis of the financial account books and rentals in this collection sheds light on the extent to which lives and generations of families revolved around the estates owned by the Cavendishes. For example, servants often rented properties on the Chatsworth and Hardwick estates, and provisions were bought for the kitchen from the tenant farmers of the Cavendish estates.
The other main part of this collection is the manuscripts. These manuscripts link the early earls to scholars of their day including Bacon, Baldassare Castiglione and Johannes Magirus. They provide some insight into the kind of material the earls may have been exposed to during their education and also allude to individual interests of the family. Much involvement with parliaments as well as investement in overseas adventures could be the reason for some of the types of manuscripts in this collection. It is not known to what extent these manuscripts were commissioned by the earls or other family members or were bought from book dealers or authors in London. The acquisitions of some books are recorded in the Privy Purse and House Steward financial accounts in this collection - again highlighting the financial accounts as a useful axis from which all activities of the household and estates can be identified to some extent.
A catalogue of the library based on a version compiled by Thomas Hobbes (scholar and tutor to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th earls) is also part of this collection (HMS/4/41) and like the 17th-century muniment register in the collection (HMS/5/14) shows how the Cavendishes managed their possessions not just through financial accounts and rentals but through keeping inventories. It also illustrates the vast breadth of information the Cavendishes had access to in the 17th century through their well-stocked library of printed books and manuscripts.
Whilst the additional Hardwick Manuscripts are mostly indentures on large parchment sheets rather than bound volumes like the rest of the collection, they link to this collection through their subject matter, which deals mostly with the way in which land and property were acquired and passed on through the family. This material is most similar to the distinct Hardwick Drawers collection also at Chatsworth, probably owing to the fact that the Drawers collection largely comprises legal documents and deeds, but it has more of a focus on land leases than family members. The muniment register is the item that links that collection to this, as it lists the places and locations of deeds that were in the Hardwick Drawers in the early 17th century.
The court records are perhaps the most eclectic records of the collection, but again, provide insight into the happenings occuring on Cavendish land or give information on land linked to the roles Sir William Cavendish held as courtier and treasurer to the King's Chamber.
The following items that were listed in Eugenie Strong's list HL/1 are missing from the collection:
HM/60 - A sermon preached before the Judges of Assizes for the County of Devon in St Peter's Church in Exon (HMS/4/25),
HM/61 - A discourse on Matthew chaper 28, verse 13, by Mr Lushingon, St Mary (HMS/4/26)
HM/66a - House Steward financial account book of William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, 1663-1667 (HMS/1//36). Although this is listed in Strong's catalogue as a separate item to HM/36 (HMS/1/37) the fact that they are almost identical in description and date span raises the question of whether HM/66a may in fact be HM/36 mistakenly recatalogued.
