Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  Lordly magnificence was not created merely by the presence and costliness of rich materials, and the consumption of fine food and drink, but by servants, and the semi-ritual nature of their behaviour and deference: whether keeping their lord company, dressing him, or serving his food and wine. His reputation derived from the quality of their service and the richness of their dress.

  The numbers involved in these households right up into the late sixteenth century could be breath-taking – although the household itself could shrink or swell as necessary. The Earl of Warwick travelled to London in the mid-fifteenth century with 600 liveried servants; William Cecil, Baron Burghley, employed 120 in 1587; while at the end of the sixteenth century 144 served the Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham Castle. Royal households, which set the standards, held the largest numbers. The 1318 Ordinance lists 363 servants in Edward II’s household, with 129 in the stables alone, whereas Henry VII’s is thought to have comprised over 800.3

  In the thirteenth century around ninety great magnates ran what we would describe as ‘great households’, with roughly another forty-five bishops, abbots and priors living in similar style. And despite our modern view that this was a dangerous and insecure time, the numbers of these households apparently continued to grow, so that by the end of the fifteenth century it is now thought that there were perhaps as many as 1,500 landed individuals maintaining an aristocratic lifestyle.4

  The Earl of Derby’s household in the mid-sixteenth century numbered between 115 and 140, only six of whom were women. The preponderance of males was probably, as suggested above, a reflection of the need for physical security, as the servants of a great household could still in theory be called on to act almost as a private army. In the household of courtier Sir Thomas Lovell in 1522–3, there were still only five female servants out of a total of at least ninety.5

  The medieval and Tudor aristocrat expected a life of comfort, protection and elegance for himself and his immediate family, provided by tolerably well-mannered, cleanly dressed, deferential and dutiful attendants, who would in turn need trusted, more manual assistants. They, too, needed to be well cared for, to ensure their loyalty, trust and obedience, and in order to carry out their duties effectively. In such a household even the most menial servants would expect a greater degree of comfort and permanence than they would as an agricultural labourer.6

  The senior servants – the leading household officers – played a particularly critical role in maintaining order and prestige. They would have been responsible for the management of houses and estates, and all that that entailed, overseeing maintenance, heating, cleaning and, above all, sustenance. The feeding of not only the family but a whole multitude of attendants and servants, as well as the hospitality shown to visitors of all ranks, lay at the heart of medieval culture, and was often on a massive scale.

  We may be surprised by the survival of words in contemporary life that link us to this distant-seeming world. The word ‘waiter’ meant originally an attendant who literally waited until needed, for whatever purpose. The word ‘menial’ literally meant those who worked for the household, from the old French word mesnie, derived from the Latin mansionata. This survival also extends to some of the distinctly English rituals in such places as City corporations and guilds, or Oxford and Cambridge colleges, such as the habit of having a separate high table for the Masters and Fellows of a college, and for the pudding course to be taken in a different room from the dining hall.7

  This applies not only to these traditional, rarefied environments, self-evidently rich in historical reference, but to our everyday lives, for even the word ‘bar’ in an English pub comes from the plain, practical, wooden-plank surfaces of the buttery in the medieval great hall, from which the beer was served. It is a strangely comforting thought, as well as a reminder of the semi-public nature of the early country-house community, however hierarchical in nature.8

  It cannot be emphasised enough that the life of a great medieval household was profoundly hierarchical. Just as a king was served by a nobleman, the nobleman would be served by a gentleman of his household and so on down the ranks. This tradition is reflected in the titles of senior courtiers in the royal household today, where many of the medieval household titles persist in an honorary form, from Lord High Chamberlain to the Master of the Horse.9

  Most importantly, the grander households were also essentially mobile institutions, with great lords and their attendants travelling from residence to residence, towing with them the necessary furniture while drawing provisions from associated agricultural estates.10 In addition, they were effectively the seat of a mini-government from which extensive landholdings and local justice were administered. They took their cues from the central government, such as it was, in the form of the royal court.11

  Anyone with the mildest interest in the historic houses of the British Isles will have visited at least some of the great halls built by the medieval and Tudor aristocracy. You may have stood, for instance, beneath the vast expanse of roof in the hall at Penshurst Place in Kent, built in the fourteenth century by Sir John de Pulteney, merchant, banker and four times mayor of London, or in the expansive spaces concealed within the massive walls of late-fourteenth-century Bodiam Castle in Sussex, or the surviving sixteenth-century great hall at Rufford Old Hall, Lancashire, which survives from the mansion built by Sir Thomas Hesketh.12

  The architecture of the great country houses of the aristocracy in this period inevitably reflected the need to accommodate large entourages, with separate lodgings for visitors and senior attendants. The life of the household was centred on the great hall, which was usually entered through a porch at one end. The porch led directly into a ‘screens passage’, which divided the hall from the three doors leading to the kitchen, buttery (a store for beer and wine, deriving from the same word as butt and bottle) and pantry (for bread and perishables, from pain) for bread. The kitchen would itself also be divided into specialist departments: sauceries, confectioneries, sculleries, poultries, larders, a cellar for wine and a chandlery for candles. As well as the lord’s wardrobe (a chamber for storing precious metals), there was usually a wardrobe devoted to cloth and spices.13

  The far end of the great hall was known as the ‘high’ end, often raised on a dais; in the centre of the room there would be an open fire. From the later fourteenth century, the high end was usually lit by an oriel window or projecting bay. In the early medieval period, the head of the household would dine at the high end, with lesser members of the household dining on trestle tables that could be cleared away; in large households there were often multiple sittings for the main meal of the day. The flavour of these households can still be captured when dining in the historic Cambridge and Oxford colleges.14

  By the fourteenth century, the head of the household would normally have eaten in a withdrawing apartment, although his food would still be carried in procession through the hall before being served to him there. The sheer scale of surviving kitchens from the late Middle Ages – notably those at Durham Castle, in which all the offices are preserved – make vividly apparent the importance of cooking in aristocratic life.15

  In the great households of barons and bishops, of the most successful merchants, or highly placed public officials, hundreds of men sustained the power and privilege of this elite – and in ever-increasing numbers. Also servants begat servants, so that the senior servants often had servants of their own – ‘a child of the chamber and a horse-keeper’ at least.16

  In the deployment of residential apartments, great hall and kitchen, lodgings and counting houses, the architecture directly reflected the number of people who made up a noble household. Indeed, the scale of both combined would have meant more to the contemporary observer, as today we tend to see these buildings as empty spaces, as redundant as a medieval tithe barn.

  Changing attitudes and expectations of living conditions; the competitive consumption of the medieval nobility’s lifestyle; changing behaviour and attitudes to person
al comfort: all were reflected in the gradual evolution of the physical relationship of different areas: the kitchens and related offices, the great hall, and the development of more private withdrawing rooms or chambers, which would be used for sleeping, dressing, washing, living, eating and receiving privileged visitors.17 Most houses were entered through service courts.

  Servants were always part of the everyday life of the landowner. The famous fifteenth-century Paston letters, written by members of an East Anglian landowning family to one another, are filled with intriguing detail suggestive of the presence and activities of household servants, who might sometimes deliver them (as well as necessary sums of money and other requests) to the addressee. At the end of one letter, Margaret Paston writes to her husband John in 1465: ‘Pecock shall tell you by mouth of more things than I may write to you at this time.’18

  In many ways it is the importance of the safe transit of money that catches our eye; John Paston II wrote to John Paston I (23 August 1461):

  I suppose ye understand that the money that I had of you at London may not endure with me till that the King [Edward IV] go into Wales and come again, for I understand it shall be long ere he come again. Wherefore I have sent to London to mine uncle Clement to get 100s. of Christopher Hanson, your servant, and send it to me by my servant, and mine harness with it which I left at London to make clean.19

  Sometimes the issue is the recruitment of servants; in the same letter John Paston II wrote: ‘I send you home Pecock again; he is not for me. God send grace that he may do you good service, that by estimation is not likely. Ye shall have knowledge afterward how he hath demeaned him [self] here with me. I would, saving your displeasure, that ye were delivered of him, for he shall never do you profit nor worship.’20

  Another typical reference comes in the letter of Margaret Paston to John Paston I, dated 24 December 1459: ‘I pray that ye will essay to get some man at Caister to keep your buttery, for the man that ye left with me will not take upon him to breve [account] daily as ye commanded. He saith he hath not used to give a reckoning neither of bread nor ale till at the week’s end, and he saith he wot wel that he should not con don it; and therefore I suppose he shall not abide.’21

  In 1462, one servant, John Russe, admonished John Paston in London on the consequence of his long absence, giving his master in effect a good talking-to on paper: ‘Sir, I pray God bring you once [again] to reign among your countrymen in love . . . The longer you continue there the more hurt grows to you. Men say you will neither follow the advice of your own kindred, nor of your own counsel, but continue your own wilfulness, which . . . shall be your destruction.’22

  Sometimes this closeness could be a danger. There was a considerable furore when Margery Paston married her lover, Richard Calle, who had run the family estates with great efficiency but was still a servant; he was considered of a lower rank, and he owned no land. The couple married secretly in 1469 and for a time were banished.23

  A steward was usually the most educated and the most powerful individual servant, often identifiable by name. If their literary stereotype is anything to go by, stewards could be a source of anxiety to families who saw their potential for becoming over-powerful, for marrying vulnerable widows or daughters. This betrayal of trust is referred to in the song sung by Ophelia in Hamlet: ‘It is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter.’24

  As can be seen from the Paston letters, some deeper attachments occurred between senior servants and ladies of the household. Certainly some stewards were highly ambitious and successful, and marriage into a noble family could help advance their interests. One most famous example is John Thynne, the son of a Shropshire farmer, who was steward to Edward Seymour (later Protector Somerset) and later bought land in his own right. He married the heiress of Richard Gresham and eventually built Longleat. Seymour’s gentleman usher, Francis Newdigate, married the dowager duchess Anne and became MP for Wiltshire in 1559.25

  But many senior late-medieval servants would have been deeply devoted to their masters. One such, John Russell, speaks to us across the centuries via a blank verse treatise that he wrote in the 1460s, titled The Book of Nurture. Written in the form of an instructive discourse with an inexperienced but hopeful young man looking for opportunity and advancement through service to a nobleman, it details the duties of servants to a great lord at the time.26 Russell also wrote another treatise titled The Book of Courtesy and both were based on his experience of having spent most of his life in service.

  Russell himself says that he learnt all these sciences ‘with a royal prince, to whom I was usher and also marshall’. His master was Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, who died in 1447, the younger son of Henry IV. Duke Humphry, whose library forms the core of the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford, built a much admired palace, Bella Court, later known as Placentia in Greenwich, on the site of which was built the Greenwich Naval Hospital.27

  Despite his scholarly interests, Duke Humphry chose to endure the burning heat of court intrigue and politics. He was for a time the Regent of England, yet had to endure the humiliation of having his second wife imprisoned for witchcraft. Shortly afterwards he himself was arrested for treason, dying in captivity a few days later. A trusted, long-serving, able and literate servant such as John Russell would have provided much of the stability and order of Duke Humphry’s life, as well as himself being less subject to the whims of political fortune than any immediate family member.

  What sort of man was an usher or a marshal? When the great fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer in his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales wrote of the innkeeper of the Tabard who comes up with the idea of the story-telling on the pilgrims’ journey that is the basis of the Canterbury Tales, he describes him as ‘full fit to be a marshal in a hall’; he goes on to depict a man of presence and authority.

  Mr Russell must have been just such a person, if perhaps more ascetic and clerical – with a slightly bloodless face, as in the famous portrait of Henry VII. He may well have been highly conservative, as his verse treatise has an unmistakably Jeeves-like tone of amiable, but indefatigable, certainty and authority. Mr Russell’s treatise – which like all such works may itself have been based in part on earlier writings – is effectively a manual of service, outlining the more responsible roles of the noble household in the late fifteenth century, and probably those of the century before as well.

  Intriguingly, it was later published in edited form by the entrepreneur early printer, Wynkyn de Worde, as the Boke of Keruynge (1513), which in itself suggests that by the sixteenth century there was a wider market for such manuals of servants’ duties, as wealthier Tudor merchants and officials from non-aristocratic and non-courtier backgrounds took an increasing interest in details of etiquette, which were traditionally passed down in on-the-job training. Indeed, another version was published in 1577, by Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture or Schoole of Good Manners.28

  The upper servants of the day were the men who were on show and who had direct physical contact with the aristocrats they served. But while Mr Russell’s account genuinely helps us visualise the roles and activities of great houses, he says little about the lower servants, such as the young boys who would have had the grimmer manual tasks of cleaning and carrying, or turning the spit in the kitchen. They were probably recruited from local peasant families and were paid off when the household moved on to another residence.

  The most junior servant was the scullion, derived from the French word escuille for a dish. This individual washed cooking utensils and dishes in the kitchen, and was usually also expected to clean and sweep those service rooms and their associated courtyards. In the later centuries this was the task of the humble scullery maid.

  Mr Russell does not mention any women. This is because they were few in number in later medieval and Tudor households, aside from the immediate companions and attendants of the lady of the house, any unmarried daughters still at home, or nurses for children. If they appear elsewhere they were usual
ly employed only in the very humblest roles, often as washerwomen. Indeed, many early household manuals advised against employing women, for moral reasons, in monastic tones that imply they would be a distraction to the men.29

  The great medieval and Tudor kitchens seem to have been staffed principally by men, partly because strength was needed for larger-scale catering. The evidence of bequests suggests that numbers of women servants began to grow from the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century female servants were certainly more commonplace, especially in the households of gentry, although not in positions of major responsibility.30

  The earliest mention of a lowly menial female servant in English is thought to be that in a late-fourteenth-century translation of the writings of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a thirteenth-century English friar who taught at the schools in Paris, translated into English by John Trevisa, chaplain to Lord Berkeley. His references to the ‘servaunt-woman’ make uncomfortable reading to a modern reader, for she is to be ‘put to office and woerke of traveylle, toylinge and slubberynge’. In addition she is fed on ‘grosse mete’ and ‘kept lowe under the yoek of thraldom and of servage’.31

  Our man, Mr Russell, was at the other end of the household hierarchy, a maître d’ figure. We do not know much about him outside the description that he gives in his treatise.32 Like many who spent part of their career in the service of a great household during the late medieval and Tudor periods, he was likely to have come from a minor landowning family, although he may equally have been the son of a senior household officer. Indeed, he could conceivably have worked his way up the ranks from quite humble origins.