'True comfort, as we understand it, was invented by the French
in the seventeenth century,' writes Peter Thornton, who singled
out the 1630s as the key decade in this development and showed
how the new comfort was quite quickly transferred to the homes
of aristocratic Englishmen in the early Restoration period. This
section will look at how the homes of middling Londoners were
also transformed in the course of our period. This is much
easier to document then diet or apparel, since most inventories
list furniture, often in considerable detail. One can start by
looking at valuations of domestic goods, though it should be
noted that these are 'clearance sale' and not replacement
values, and people actually spent much more than the figures
listed by the valuers. Table 10.8 opposite provides average
valuations broken down into five wealth groups and
distinguishing between two sub-periods, before and after 1690.
The table shows that there was little change over time, a rather
surprising result since, as will be see