The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Gibbon pointed to the plight of the runaway slaves under the universal government of the Roman Empire: nowhere to flee for the victims of injustice, for whom the world thus became ‘a safe and dreary prison’. English girls who could not or would not marry were similarly without refuge. In contrast the remarkable longevity of many of the so-called ‘withered daughters’ who made the adventurous journey to the Continent to become Catholic nuns is also worthy of note. Two abbesses of Rouen, for example, died at over ninety; one of whom, Mother Francisca Clifton, had completed seventy-five years in religion. This longevity argues a life of purpose very different from that which faced many of their sisters at home – and of course freed in addition from ‘the pain and the peril’ of childbearing which brought so many of these other young women to an early death. Spiritual considerations quite apart, there was something to be said for the point of view of that ‘Popish orphan’ Mary Gunter (she was in fact not allowed to become a nun and died in England, still young, in 1633).’10 A life of chosen virginity, led in an ordered, secure and educated society, was certainly not the worst fate which could overtake a young woman in the seventeenth century.

  In seventeenth-century England, neither legally nor psychologically was there a proper place for the unmarried female or ‘maid’ – the term generally in use in 1600 – except on her way to marriage. Psychologically, it was hard to look on a young woman as a heroine. The Blessed Virgin Mary was no longer the official pattern of English womanhood as she had been before the Reformation, no longer praised in nightly Ave Marias, daily or weekly masses as a chaste and sinless female. On the Catholic Continent, the position of respect she enjoyed was emphasized in the seventeenth century by the institution of a number of new Marian feasts in the church calendar.11 Candles glimmered before the multitudinous wide-eyed depictions of the Virgin, painted by Murillo in honour of the growing cult of the Immaculate Conception. In England, the whole subject of the Virgin Mary was complicated by the fact that Marian devotion in any form – ‘Mariolatry’ – was regarded as High church or Laudian, liable to lead directly to Rome.

  There was justice in this contention. Anthony Stafford, for example, who wrote a book entitled The Femall Glory in 1635, in which he attempted to rescue the Virgin Mary as a figure to be admired and emulated – she was not to be considered ‘a mere woman’ – was a follower of Laud, as was his patroness, the learned Lady Theophila Coke, to whom he dedicated the book. Stafford described Mary’s marriage to Joseph as being intended merely to ‘serve as a bar to the importunity of other Suitors … so she might the more freely enjoy the inconceivable pleasure she took in her vowed Virginity’. As for the conception of Jesus: ‘most blessed Virgin … let thy Modesty rest secure; for the Operation of God, and not of man is here required’.12

  This kind of heady talk was anathema to the Puritans, to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary was no more than ‘Mall [a nickname for Mary], God’s Maid’.13 So Protestant womanhood was left with Grandmother Eve alone – that fearful guilty ancestress – to represent them. There was no chaste heroine in their pantheon: Grandmother Eve being very much a wife and mother, in her own guilty way, as all women in the seventeenth century were supposed to be.

  Legally, the position of the ‘feme sole’ was equally ignored: her legal rights were assumed to be swallowed up in those of her nearest male protector. This does not overlook the fact that young women of the labouring class (that is, the vast majority of the population) worked to support themselves by one method or another from an early age;14 it was from the ‘spinsters’, for example, a considerable number of young women working at home, that the modern legal term for the unmarried female was derived during the seventeenth century. Certain professions such as that of dairymaid or milkmaid had a tradition of independence, based on the adventurous expeditions to market which such ‘maids’ carried out in the course of their work, a freedom of movement not enjoyed by their sisters at home in the village.

  The bold girls admired by Pepys at Westminster in the May Day parade of 1667, garlands round their milk-pails, ‘dancing with a fiddler before them’ as they collected tips from customers, came of a long tradition of such independent lasses; they were probably from farms nearby (Westminster then being on the edge of a rural area) and on their way to the Maypole in the Strand. Dairymaids were also amongst the highest paid of women workers: in 1647 a dairymaid who brought a cow to Hatfield so that the Lord Cranborne of the day could drink its milk was given a 2s tip – at a time when women agricultural labourers were lucky to get 4d a day.15 Nevertheless an unmarried milkmaid, even if she enjoyed some practical freedom, was still legally in the care of her father, like any other young woman, and on marriage passed into that of her husband.

  The point has been well made that it was only at marriage that men entered fully into the society into which they had been born;16 that was also true of women, who in taking up their destined place as wives, were filling that place most convenient for the rest of society – which was male. The concept of an unmarried female, beyond a certain age and not demonstrably in the care of a male, tended to bring about a kind of bewilderment at best.

  ‘Are you a maid, or widow, or a wife?’ asked a Suffolk magistrate of Sister Dorothea, an English Catholic nun and follower of Mary Ward, when she was brought before him in 1622.17 At the time of her arrest, Sister Dorothea was posing as the kinswoman of Lady Timperley of Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich; from this vantage point she had taught local children of ‘the vulgar sort’ their Pater, Ave, Creed and Commandments, but she had also done a great deal of good work among the sick and the poor, which had made her popular in the neighbourhood and somewhat inhibited the magistrate in his treatment of her.

  ‘I am a maid,’ was the answer of Sister Dorothea.

  ‘So much the better,’ the magistrate exclaimed with relief, feeling that the problem was now virtually solved, ‘for then I hope a good husband will persuade you to change your religion.’ In vain Sister Dorothea protested that she had no intention of changing her state; the magistrate, taking his stand on the fact that the nun had performed much service to the poor – ‘to give you your due’ – and armed with the comforting thought that her religious eccentricity could not be of long duration, dismissed her. It was a point of view robustly expressed by Sir Ralph Verney, echoing the words of St Paul (a favourite source where he was concerned) to the Corinthians. He remonstrated on the subject of Nancy Denton, that ambitious scholar, to her father: ‘Dr Denton, teach her to live under obedience, and whilst she is unmarried, if she would learn anything, let her ask you, and afterwards her husband, At Home.’18

  Obedience was thus the watchword.

  One version of it was the obedience practised by the numerous serving-maids living in other people’s houses as part of their ‘family’ – the significant term used for the household. The role of the serving-maid, as opposed to that of the free unmarried female, was a conventional one, fully understood by society. For one thing it was widely fulfilled: it has been suggested that between one quarter and a third of all households of the period contained servants, in view of the fact that the lowly as well as the mighty entertained them.19

  Marriage – especially to another servant – did not necessarily bring this kind of obedience to an end in any case since, as has been pointed out, girls outside the moneyed or landed class married quite late.20 Not only in the great social edifices such as Woburn Abbey but in the little country dwellings were maids to be found – often the daughters of friends, leaving their own family to practise obedience (and work for their keep) in the ‘family’ of another, not necessarily removed further up the social scale.

  Domestic service in the seventeenth century was not only a common fate, it was also not a bad way of life and the horror stories of later times – the Victorian era, for example – should be dismissed from the imagination as anachronistic. The intimacy denoted by the use of the word family had considerable advantages: food was shared, and where plentiful, it was plentifu
l for maid as well as master (or mistress). Indeed, the free regular provision of food, and often clothing as well, placed the domestic in a privileged position not only compared to those many unfortunates at the very bottom of society, who seldom had either, but also to their social equals, day-labourers.

  Moreover, such provision places the apparently low annual wage of about £2 a year given to maidservants in perspective. The board wages for food for the maids at Belton House, Grantham, seat of Sir John Brownlow, when the family went away to London were 6s a week; in a 1688 inventory of the fine new palace designed for the Brownlow family by Wren, all the rooms including the servants’ rooms had feather-beds, besides three blankets and a quilt. The maids’ rooms at Woburn Abbey had pictures on their walls.21

  Servants featured prominently in wills, where quite large sums would be bequeathed; if these legatees were mainly older women, married or widowed, nevertheless such legacies betokened the care and affection lavished in general upon their maids by those women they served. Mary Countess of Warwick left £80 to Martha Upsheer, a chambermaid, £70 to Anne Coleman, another old servant, and £40 to ‘my ancient servant Mary Taverner’, formerly her housemaid. Mary Warwick’s executors were instructed to use the money to purchase annuities for these women. Dame Margaret Verney, wife of Sir Edmund and mother of Sir Ralph, mentioned all the women servants at Claydon when she made her will (and incidentally they were all still there in service when she died ten years later).22

  As long as the concept of the domestic as part of the ‘family’, held by most people at the beginning of the seventeenth century, lingered, so the scale of the maids’ existence remained in proportion to the people they served. In the 1680s Mary Woodforde, wife of a Prebendary at Winchester Cathedral, wrote of the marriage of her servant Ann: ‘She lived with us thirteen years and a half.’23 The idea of a maid as an inferior creature, entitled therefore to a far inferior standard of life, came later.

  With so many domestic servants to consider, it was natural that the topic of their treatment should come under common discussion. Inordinate severity was generally frowned upon; the Puritan handbooks pointed to it as morally wrong. Winefrid, sister of William Blundell of Lancashire, busy engaging a servant at 15s a quarter for a lady of rank in London who wanted a Lancashire servant, had time to reflect that ‘some sweet encouragement’, not perpetual severity, was the way to treat servants. In 1688 Lord Halifax took pains to tell his daughter that as a newly-married mistress of a household of servants she must not abuse her position: The Inequality which is between you, must not make you forget that Nature maketh no such distinction.’24

  What then were they like? What of Nell Duck, Mary Hearne and Mary Croast, maids and cook-maid to Dame Isabella Twysden? What of Betty Bushin, Lydia Long the laundry-maid, and ‘Alice-about-the-house’, all in service to the Earl of Bedford at Woburn Abbey?25 In many cases the lives of these maids come to us merely in tantalizing glimpses, like the rustle of a petticoat or the turn of an ankle, in the incidental references of accounts of their employers.

  In 1614 at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, seat of the Earl of Essex, three maids fell into the moat as they were doing the laundry. Two were saved by long poles, but one continued to drown. The Earl of Essex stood on the bank as the girl struggled, crying in some excitement: ‘Now she sinks! Now she’s gone!’ until another bystander, Arthur Wilson (who tells the tale), plunged in and saved her. Thereafter the delighted Earl received Wilson ‘in his private chamber’ and made him his gentleman-in-waiting – which equally delighted Wilson. Of the bedraggled laundry-maid nothing more is heard.26

  From the Woburn Abbey accounts, it is possible to know details such as the fact that they were often given clothes as presents, or part-presents (‘To Abigail, towards a nightgown. £1 10s od’). The Woburn maids also took – or were given – a great deal of medicine, and they were constantly bled for hysteria.27 About the emotions or even events which might have prompted the hysteria, it is far more difficult to know.

  The fact, referred to by Lord Halifax, that nature made ‘no such distinction’ was sometimes wryly underlined by the sexual connections formed between master, or master’s son, and maid; another side-effect of household intimacy. The opinion of the time held this to be a two-way hazard. Francis Kirkman, in his autobiography, confessed that he had a dread of being caught by a maid in marriage if he ‘toyed’ with one; for she might then try to prove he had already married her. It was considered to be a sign of madness in the son of Lord Grey of Wark, destined to marry the Earl of Northumberland’s daughter, that he fell in love with his mother’s chambermaid, or at any rate the experience was blamed for causing his ‘weak brain’ to ‘turn over’;28 yet madness was not necessarily the explanation for such a socially unsuitable infatuation, propinquity being a more likely cause.

  Another story told by Kirkman is probably more typical of the kind of blackmail which prevailed in which dismissal or worse was threatened if the maid proved obdurate. A certain married couple could never agree on a maid, for the master would not accept a plain nor the mistress a pretty one (a dispute no doubt as old as domestic service itself). In the end the master compromised by accepting a girl who was ‘liquorish’ hoping ‘to have a lick at her honeypot’. When the ‘liquorish’ girl was duly discovered broaching her master’s cask of Canary wine in the cellar, she had to submit to his advances under threat of imprisonment for theft in Bridewell.29

  Fear of unemployment followed by destitution was surely enough to account for Alice Thornton’s story of the goings-on in the louche household over which the Earl of Sussex and his ‘most odious’ Countess presided. Alice Thornton recounted with shocked surprise that when the Earl ordered six of the house-maids to dance naked, only one ‘modest chaste maid’, said she would not do it, and when ‘pressed’ by the Countess, immediately left her service. On the other hand Robert Hooke’s maid Nell, who slept with him three times a month for no extra money in the 1670s, as he records in his diary, presumably found the bargain worth while (at £4 a year, and more for sewing, she was already well paid).30 In her own way Nell was living under obedience.

  But some fell through the net and some did not care to be confined by it. Jane Martindale was an independent-minded Lancashire girl who in 1625 revolted against the narrow life prescribed for a yeoman’s daughter. (We happen to know her brief story because her brother Adam, the Nonconformist minister, wrote his autobiography.)31 Jane, in her brother’s words, had ‘her father’s spirit and her mother’s beauty’. She objected for instance to the restrictions imposed on the dress of women of her class – freeholders’ daughters customarily wore ‘felts’ (a covering garment) over petticoats and waistcoats with handkerchiefs round their necks, and white cloths covering a coif on their heads. ‘’Tis true the finest sort of them wore gold or silver lace upon their waistcoats, good silk laces (and store of them) about their petticoats,’ wrote Martindale. ‘But the proudest of them (below the gentry) durst not have offered to wear an hood, or a scarf … not so much as a gown till her wedding-day.’

  1625 was a year in which one of the major outbreaks of plague had taken place in London; as a result a number of refugees from its devastation had reached Lancashire. When the time came for them to return, Jane Martindale decided to go with them, leaving her home village of Prescot, and seek the more adventurous life of the big city; she hoped to get a place serving ‘a lady’ since she was ‘ingenious with her needle’. Jane’s parents pleaded with her, pointing out that she wanted for nothing at home, while the London atmosphere might well prove dangerous to one who was not very hardy, having been brought up in the pure air of Lancashire. If Jane wanted to get married, her father told her that he could afford that luxury for her too – being able to provide a dowry.

  Jane persisted. She took a little money from her family to get established in London and off she went. Perhaps her plan to serve ‘a lady’ with her ingenious needle might have worked – a form, naturally, of domestic service, but the
life of serving ‘a lady’ in London offered opportunities for advancement unknown to a yeoman’s daughter in Lancashire. Unfortunately she herself caught the plague and the plan had to be abandoned. Even so, her spirit was not altogether extinguished; she sent for a goose-pie from her family, in order that she might make merry with her friends, and they duly sent one, encased in ‘twig-work’ all the way from Lancashire. Jane added that some money for drink would also be appreciated, that ‘the goose might swim’, without cost to herself. But the carrier took three weeks to deliver pie and money; in the meantime Jane was in such dire poverty that she contemplated selling her own hair; ‘which was very lovely’, wrote her brother, ‘both for length and colour’.

  Ironically it was ‘this blessed knot’ of matrimony which rescued Jane in the nick of time; not the independent life she had envisaged. One of the young men who had travelled back to London with her had fallen in love with the beautiful Jane. He now married her, and the newly-wedded pair set up to run an inn called the George and Half Moon, just outside Temple Bar, which divided the City of London and Westminster. Jane’s parents assisted her to furnish the inn, and sent country produce down from Lancashire.

  Jane’s city life then ran smoothly until the spring of 1632 when her mother became seriously ill. Jane bought ‘an excellent swift mare’ and rode home to Lancashire; too late – her mother was dead on her arrival. At this point Jane and her husband decided to sell the London inn and set up again at Warrington, to be closer to her remaining family. During one of her journeys between London and Lancashire to arrange all this, Jane stopped off at an inn to have a drink, where some children were suffering from smallpox. She caught the disease and died, being buried at Prescot in August 1632, beside her mother.