Up and Down Stairs

by Jeremy Musson

  These liveries acted both as a payment and also as a badge of belonging, an expression of being part of a great household, much like an army uniform. This meant that anyone wearing a livery would automatically come under the protection of that lord. Neat uniforms all in the same colours helped underline his prestige. In the household of Sir William Petre, secretary to Henry VIII, ordinary servants were given new clothes in spring and autumn. In the winter they wore grey frieze, a coarse woollen cloth. In the summer this was replaced by grey marble, a parti-coloured worsted cloth that was woven to resemble the flecked veins found in marble.89

  Most servants would be fed by the household, except grooms and pages of the marshalsea (or stables, derived from the old English word meaning ‘seat of the horsekeeper’) who were more likely to be paid cash wages in lieu of food. Numbers of portions served are recorded in household checker rolls, in terms of units of four (a mess) in which food was served.90

  The upper servants who ran the great households must have been men of considerable ability and have identified very closely with their masters. George Cavendish, gentleman usher for the household of Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and chancellor of England, described in detail his experiences as Wolsey’s ‘gentleman usher’. He served Wolsey both at the height of his fame and in his final disgrace, ‘contynually duryng the terme of all his troble until he died’ in 1530. Cavendish’s account gives us a glimpse into the most prestigious non-royal household on the eve of the Reformation.91

  Wolsey was, according to his biographer, served by a great number of ‘noble men and worthy gentilmen of great estymacion and possessions wt no small nomber of the tallest yomen [i.e. yeomen] that he Could get in all this Realm’. The physical appearance of the servant was as important a factor in the sixteenth century as it was for footmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mr Cavendish thought it quite right for a nobleman to prefer ‘any tall & comly [i.e. handsome] yoman unto his servyce’.92

  Every day in Wolsey’s hall at Hampton Court there would be three tables, each seating three principal officers: a steward, who was always a doctor or a priest, a treasurer, a knight, a controller, and an esquire, all of whom carried at all times their white staffs of office. The description of one of Wolsey’s two cooks suggests the prestige of such a post: ‘Now in his privy kitchen he had a Master Cook who went daily in Damask, Sattin or velvet with a chain of gold about his neck.’ Two particularly tall yeomen were picked to stand at his gate. In addition to the never ending list of servants for every conceivable need, Wolsey maintained a considerable number of clergy and choristers, as appropriate to the household of an archbishop and chancellor of England.

  In his own chamber, he had his high chamberlain, his vice-chamberlain, twelve gentleman ushers, and a small army of attendants dedicated to serving him in his private apartments, including the Earl of Derby, who had six attendants of his own. As well as a substantial secretariat, there were four footmen which were dressed ‘in riche Runnyng Cootes [coats] when so ever he rode any journey then had he a herald at arms, also a serjeant at arms’. So the list goes on, including an ‘instructer of his wards’, which was literally a teacher or tutor for the young. According to his checker rolls, Wolsey’s household numbered around 500 persons.

  Mr Cavendish proudly recorded the household attendants’ appearance when he accompanied Wolsey on embassies to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V: ‘his gentilmen beyng in nomber very many clothed in lyuere cootles of Crymmosyn velvelt [i.e. livery coats of crimson velvet] of the most purest Colour that myght be invented wt chains of gold abought ther nekkes. And all his yomen and other mean officers in Cottes of ffyne skarlett.’

  The progress of the embassies is portrayed in some detail, as are the entertainments that Wolsey gives the king at Hampton Court: ‘Such pleasures . . . devised for the king’s comfort & consolation as might be invented or man’s wit imagined the banquets [pudding course] were set forth with masques and mummerys in so gorgeous and costly manner that it was an heaven to behold’, along with ‘all kind of music and harmony set forth with excellent voices both of men and children’.

  These descriptions give some sense of the extraordinary level of organisation in the great households that went into the grandest display at major events, involving astonishing numbers and extravagant cost. The breathless admiration of this contemporary witness illustrates the pride taken by a serving man in his own modest contribution.93

  After Wolsey’s downfall, Hampton Court became a palace for Henry VIII, and it is here that the magnificence of a Tudor kitchen can be truly understood today. This is partly due to the sheer scale of the surviving Great Kitchen, built in 1530. It was not the privy kitchen of the king, but catered for those household officers and members of the court who were entitled to be fed there in the Great Hall, some 600 in number.

  The king usually ate privately in his privy chamber, while higher-status courtiers and household officers ate in the Great Watching Chamber. Leftovers from the tables were gathered up to be distributed to the poor by the almoner. Another 230 household servants also received a daily ration, eaten in their own rooms or work stations (their leftovers were delivered to the scullery).

  Each meal consisted of two courses served in the Great Hall, in messes (a dish to be shared between four), and served by the senior man at the table. The Historic Royal Palaces Agency, which runs Hampton Court, has recently instituted an impressive programme of demonstrations reproducing the most vivid experience of a sixteenth-century kitchen at work anywhere in the world.94

  It is less easy to form a clear picture of where most servants slept. For reasons of practicality and security, most personal servants had to remain within calling distance of their masters or mistresses and thus slept close to them, perhaps even sharing their chamber, or lying down in the passage outside.95 Most senior household servants would have slept on pallet beds that would be taken at night to the rooms where they conducted their business during the day and then stored away again the following morning. Designated rooms might be contained within the courtyard range; for instance, such rooms as are mentioned in the 1522 inventory of Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, which boasted a porter’s lodge, a master receiver’s chamber, a steward’s chamber, a wardrobe and a yeoman’s chamber.96

  Some servants might still have slept in the great hall (as they certainly would have done in much earlier times, as suggested by the passage in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, describing the whole household sleeping in the hall) or in the kitchen, although not in the domestic offices, which would be kept locked. By the sixteenth century there was some attempt to monitor this, at least in the regulations for Henry VIII’s household, which forbade scullions to ‘lie in the nights and dayes in the kitchens or . . . by the fire-side’.97

  The inventories of mid-fifteenth-century Caister Castle in Norfolk, built by Sir John Fastolf, shows that by this date senior servants were usually assigned their own chambers. Twenty-eight rooms were occupied by a total of thirty-eight beds, and some twenty-two rooms are identified with individuals or officials of the household. Servants of all ranks were likely to have been expected to share beds at times. John Russell’s Book of Courtesy makes mention of the etiquette to be used if asked to share a bed. It was, for instance, considered polite to ask which side of the bed the other person wanted to sleep on, and then to lie as far away from them as possible.98

  The Book of Courtesy gives the dimensions of a shared pallet bed:

  Grooms shall make litter and stuff pallets out,

  Nine foot in length without a doubt,

  Seven foot certainly shall it be broad,

  Well watered and bound together, craftily trod,

  With wisps drawn out at feet and side.

  Presumably such a bed would be used by more than one person at one time.99

  Chambers in the base court accommodated other officials, including the lord’s cook, stableman and gardeners, while some servants were given pallet beds and bla
nkets at their places of work, in the bakehouse, stables and gardeners’ rooms. At Bishop Waltham Palace in Hampshire, adapted in the fifteenth century, there appears to be a sizeable dormitory over the newly built brewhouse and bakehouse.100

  Rooms of servants were certainly often shared. The inventory in 1542 of Sutton Place in Surrey shows that all the laundrymaids slept together and, in another room, the ‘lads’ of the kitchen bedded down alongside the fool.101 There are a number of areas in the roof spaces within service buildings attached to medieval houses that have windows, which is presumably because they could be used as service or occasional guest accommodation, as at the fourteenth-century Westenhanger Castle in Kent.102 The 1575 inventory of Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, shows that the porter there had a bed (at 1s 6d) that was more valuable than that of the gardener (1 shilling) as well as more bedding. Such gradations emphasised the hierarchy of the household.103

  The valets of the household of Edward III had the right to pallet beds, with canvas bedding stuffed with straw, rushes or even broom.104 The clergyman William Harrison took a dim view of the straw pallets used by sixteenth-century servants: ‘If they had any sheet above them it was well, for seldom had they any under their bodies to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet and rased [sic] their hardened hides.’105

  Habits and customs of great households were always changing, and varied between households, but there was overall a surprising consistency up to the end of the sixteenth century. Some flavour of country-house hospitality as it survived into the Elizabethan period can be gauged from the survival of the Willoughby Household Orders, drawn up by Sir Francis Willoughby, a wealthy member of the gentry, in 1572 for Wollaton, before major rebuilding took place.106 The senior household officers, recorded in payments, were then Henry Willoughby, steward, George Cam, gentleman of the chamber, Thomas Shaw, controller, and Richard Wrigley, head gardener.

  Two men were responsible for the accounts, William Marmion and William Blythe. The household included only a small number of women. Lady Willoughby apparently oversaw the children herself, along with two nurses, and was attended by two gentlewomen, Elizabeth Mering, her lady-in-waiting, Marjory Garner, and three other women (including, unusually, a female fool called Mary).107

  Ritual and ceremony described in these regulations were still designed to hold a household together, absorbing the all too obvious tensions between the stewards, bailiffs and serving men in their struggle for power and influence; many were the younger sons of local landowning families. These dissensions may have been a major factor in the undoing of larger households in the early seventeenth century, which were becoming more and more difficult to fund, and perhaps also to control.108

  The gentleman usher was then one Robert Foxe who, according to the regulations, was to ‘supply the place of the usher, whose office is first of all to see that the hall be kept clean and that his groom sees no doggs come there at all. He is diligently to have a good regard of every person that comes into the hall, to the end that if they be of the better sort, notice may be given to the master, or to some head officer that they may be entertained accordingly.’ People were seated and served according to their rank, as were their servants.

  Even if they were not of the highest rank, guests were still to be treated with respect and offered food and drink: ‘If of the meaner sort, then [he is] to know the cause of their coming, . . . to the end they may be dispatched and answer’d of their business, provided always that no stranger be suffered to pass without offering him to drink.’

  The usher was expected to preserve the standards of behaviour:

  Upon intelligence given from the clerk or the cook that meat is ready to be served, he is with a loud voice to command all gentleman and yeomen to repair to the dresser. At the neither [sic] end of the hall he is to meet the service, saying with a loud voice, ‘Give place, my masters,’ albeit no man be in the way, and so to goe before the same service until he come to the upper end of the hall.

  After the lord has been served in his private dining chamber, ‘[The usher] is to place in the hall in dinner and supper time all noblemen’s men which be fellows together, and all gentlemen according to every of their master’s degrees’. He was also to form the clerk of the kitchens how much food was needed. This was done in order that proper hospitality could be offered, reflecting the dignity of his master.109 Lesser servants could also be called in to serve, if there was a large number of visitors: ‘Three or four of the meanest sort of servants, as namely the slaughterman, the carter, and some of the best grooms of the stable, the allowed pages and boys in the house, to attend upon the first dinner, and they to have the remainder thereof’.110

  The usher was required to keep discipline: ‘if there shall be any stubborn persons, he is to expell them out of the hall’; to keep the noise down by saying, ‘Speak softly, my masters.’ He must not fetch and carry but command the butler and panter to do so.111

  There were strictures too for the butler, Penne: ‘his office is ever to keep clean and sweet his buttery, and likewise his plate and cups, making sure every day to have fresh and clean water.’ His duties were also ‘to keep the great chamber clean, to make fires there, and to provide for lights in due season, and to cover the boards and cupboards there, having good regard to the cleanness of his linen’.112

  The butler was responsible too for distributing bread to the servants of the household who did not dine in the great hall: ‘[he] is to use good discretion in serving forth of the bread and beer to the houses of office’, including the kitchen, the bakehouse, and the nursery.113 These regulations give a vivid illustration of the survival of traditional practices in the later Elizabethan period and the demands of a gentry household of considerable numbers.

  But by the very end of the sixteenth century, there was a noticeable gear-change in the old traditions of the household. One anonymous writer, known only as I.M., produced the verse treatise, A Health to the Gentlemanly profession of Serving-men, published in 1598. Apart from his initials, its author’s identity is unknown but he was probably a higher household servant of some sort. He laments the decline in standards of service, essentially complaining that service in an aristocratic household was no longer a post for a gentleman.114

  We hear similar laments in every generation. Those who devote their careers to maintaining an elaborate etiquette experience a change in customs and inevitably feel that standards have slipped. They would feel that their world – perhaps the world – was falling apart. In the late sixteenth century large households had to be reduced for the sake of economy. Prestige was sought not through service in a noble household but through the patronage of positions at court and county government.

  I.M. bewailed the ‘decay of Hospitality and Good House-keeping’ that had brought about the decline of the traditional corporate flavour of the aristocratic household in which hospitality was paramount. He outlined the household as it had once been, the better calibre of men formerly called upon to serve: ‘First, they were chosen men of witte, discretion, government, and good bringing up’ which qualified them for being involved in the serious business, political affairs, and worldly wealth of their lords and masters.115

  They would also be men of ‘valoure and courage, not fearing to fight in the maintenance of their Maister’s credite in his just quarell’, of ‘strength and activitie’, to be excellent in the shooting, running, leaping and dancing like those henchmen in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Finally, they were ‘men of qualitie’ to be seen in haulking [hawking], hunting, fyshing and fowling with all such like Gentlemanly pastimes.’116 These ‘were known from the rest by the names of Serving men’ and were drawn from a gentlemanly background, as distinct from those in more servile roles.

  Although it has to be admitted that the author was probably chiefly concerned with his own loss of status, and evidently thought little of the ordinary working men who came under his command, for him the joy of the service hierarchy w
as that it inextricably linked all the layers of society:

  Even the Dukes sonne [was] preferred Page to the Prince, the Earles seconde son attendant upon the Duke, the Knight’s seconde sonne the Earles servant, the Esquires son to weare the Knyghtes lyverie, and the Gentleman’s sonnes the Esquire’s [sic] Serving Man. Yea, I know at this day, gentlemen[‘s] younger brothers that weares their elder brothers Blew coate and Badge, attending him with as revered regard and duetifull obedience, as if he were their Prince or Soveraigne.117

  Nor did they think this hierarchy ‘servile’, whilst ‘their fare was always of the best, their apparel, fine, neate, handsome and comely’.118

  It seemed to the author that things had altered beyond redemption: ‘The First is, the compounding of this pure and refined mettall (whereof Servingmen were first framed) with untryed dregges and drosse of less esteeme. The seconde is the death and decay of Liberalitie.’119 Also, younger generations were no longer willing to lay out huge sums on the maintenance of large, unwieldy households, preferring instead to spend extravagantly on luxuries that their parents disdained.

  In ‘I.M.’s view the upstart new gentry, who were descended from tradesmen, with their preparedness to take on the children of yeomen in place of the better-bred serving men of former times, spelt the beginning of the end:120 ‘The Golden world is past and gone.’121 It is a pity we do not have any records of the views of the hard-working yeoman’s sons, who no doubt considered themselves to be operating much more efficiently and practically than their over-bred predecessors. Whether I.M.’s perception of events was true or not, the nature of the great household was certainly changing. It would rely less and less on large numbers of well-connected attendants, whilst still requiring a degree of comfort, magnificence and hospitality that depended on the skills, labour, and loyalty of others.