The STRANGE Rules of a Regency Country Ball That Austen Never Explained — The Real Netherfield

Regency England began in February 1811, when the Regency Act made the Prince of Wales ruler in place of his father, George III, and it lasted until 1820. The 1811 census counted about ten million people in England and Wales, most still living in villages and market towns, while the Napoleonic Wars pushed up the price of bread, coal and candles. A country gentry family lived on rents from land, and the clergy of the Church of England depended on tithes and on the income of the parish living.This episode of History for Sleep covers the country ball of the 1810s as Jane Austen's first readers knew it. It looks at the white high-waisted muslin gown worn even in winter, the thin kid dancing slippers that wore through in a single night, and the wooden pattens on iron rings that kept skirts out of country mud. It covers the ballroom itself, with its floor chalked in patterns for grip and its wax candles costing far more than the tallow used at home, the supper served around midnight, and the white soup Austen names in Pride and Prejudice. It also covers the hard money behind the music: curates paid little more than eighty pounds a year, non-resident rectors holding several parishes at once, and tenancies that ran to quarter days such as Lady Day on 25 March.The strictest custom of the Regency ballroom was the formal introduction. A lady could not speak to or dance with a gentleman until someone known to both had presented them, and a lady who refused one partner was expected to sit out that dance rather than accept another; at public assemblies, such as the Upper Rooms in Bath opened in 1771, a master of ceremonies made these introductions for the whole room.Within a few years of Waterloo the long country dance gave way to the quadrille and the waltz, and the Regency ball faded into the more private, more formal world of Victorian society.