It is easy to gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source - the inventories of the estates of the colonists.
Cricket was deemed too posh where I came from, and I'd never have risked walking home through the estates in my whites. My club played some of the posh schools. I'd have the cheapest kit, but I loved those games. As soon as the posh lads opened their mouths and you heard their accents, the stakes were raised.
On our toughest estates, generations pass with the same experience of worklessness and educational failure.
Few escape our most deprived estates. Few young people with potential escape difficult upbringings. Fewer cross the social divides.
The fact of the matter is it's very reasonable to ask the wealthiest estates to pay their share. We did that since Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president.
He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth, to him.
We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.