THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY brought two developments which transformed the arts in England. First the redistri- bution of the wealth of the monasteries gave ambitious men the means of expressing their social position in houses and material possessions. Secondly, the arrival of renaissance ideas and designs from Italy, via France and the Nether- lands, boosted by the application of printing to the pro- duction of ornament designs towards the end of the fifteenth century, gave such men a new repertoire of ornament with which to impress their peers. Whether they were seized upon in a spirit of emulation or simply because they abounded in novelty and exoticism, these ornament prints - particularly, it seems, those originating in Antwerp - made a very considerable impact on architectural decor- ation and the applied arts in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In architecture they were used as a veneer on carcases which often retained their familiar and comfortable late-medieval form; in the decorative arts, they enabled native-born designers to ape fashionable continental products. The tapestries woven in the Eliza- bethan Midlands, when read in terms of the designs that inspired them, offer a valuable insight into the contem- porary creative process.

THE reputation of Pieter van Roestraeten has suffered greatly from wrong attributions. For many years vanitas still life paintings of a rogue type have been ascribed to him- dull, repetitious, mediocre works usually showing a scattering of scholarly objects over a tabletop draped with a turkey carpet. All too frequently they have nothing to do with Roestraeten's authentic output of fine still lifes, compositions of highly-wrought silver and gold objects, and later of Chinese porcelain and tea things.

A NOTABLE example of English upper-class interest in the barometer - which had been forcefully expressed by Roger North as early as 1676, three years after its invention' - is the so-called 'Belhus Barometer', now on display in the eighteenth-century galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig.25). This 'outstanding example of English talent in the marriage of applied science and applied art',derives its name from the Essex manor for which it was commissioned by Thomas Lennard Barrett, later 26th Baron Dacre (1717-87). The Barrett family had inhabited the area of Essex around Aveley since the thirteenth century, but Belhus Manor was Tudor in origin: John Barrett, who died in 1526, refers in his Will to 'my place called Belhouse Hall, alias Barrett's which I have newly builded'.