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The Beginning of the Back Stairs and the Servants’ Hall
The Seventeenth Century
IN THE SEVENTEENTH century, the households of landowners continued to be complex and hierarchical, but there was a shift from an emphasis on precedence and outward display to one of a more personal, moral and civilised way of life. This was the era of the cultivation of the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman. This adjustment affected the nature of relationships within noble households, which were very different from those of the early and mid-sixteenth century.1
The process of change was probably given additional impetus by the economic and social disruptions of the civil war and the Commonwealth in the middle of the century, not least because aristocrats formerly in exile brought home new ideas and patterns of behaviour. The most famous example was the arrival of dining à la française, with all the dishes laid out on the table at once, which remained the main form of service until the nineteenth century.2
From matters of display, particularly grand dining, to the most minor aspect of country-house life, from estate and household accounting to the removal of slops, households continued to be served by a skilled body of servants whose whole lives might be spent in the service of one family. Somewhat smaller than the medieval community, the seventeenth-century household was still treated in a very hierarchical manner, but as the century progresses there is less emphasis on public service from a gentle-born attendant, and more on developing the specialised roles of the professional domestic servant.
Fynes Moryson, writing in 1617, recorded a proverb that England was the hell of horses, the purgatory of servants and the paradise of women, ‘because they ride Horses without measure, and use their Servants imperiously, and their Women obsequiously’ [i.e. with excessive courtesy]. He also noted that households were generally smaller than those of the previous century.3
By the end of the seventeenth century, the barrier between employer and servant is drawn more vividly, not least in architectural terms, as from the middle of the century separate ‘servants’ halls’ begin appearing, showing that it was becoming the norm for the servants to dine separately – and out of sight. This custom increased throughout the seventeenth century. More private family dining arrangements are found, and the provision in attics for servants’ sleeping garrets is more common, as the aristocratic family wanted less immediate contact with the more menial servants. By this time, we really have moved into the world of upstairs and downstairs.
As historian Mark Girouard described it so memorably in Life in the English Country House: ‘The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last night’s faeces coming down them.’4 However, on a normal day the timing and management of menial servants would probably have been carefully calibrated in the grander houses to avoid such unpleasant encounters.
Aristocratic households continue to be somewhat peripatetic, moving between rural estates or between their country seats and London houses. In the early seventeenth century Sir John Hobart of Blickling Hall in Norfolk used to reduce his staff from twenty-seven to seven when he left his primary seat for a period in London.5
There might be as many as 120 staff, as in the Earl of Dorset’s household at Knole. Sir Thomas Wentworth of Wentworth Woodhouse (later Earl of Strafford) maintained a staff of sixty-four, including forty-four male servants, six female servants and a chaplain. The household of Sir Edward Carr of Aswarby in Lincolnshire (who in his will made bequests to forty-five servants, thirty-seven of whom were male) incorporated two tutors and a chaplain. A more typical household size for the landed gentry would have been that of Sir John Brownlow of Belton, who at the time of his death in 1679 employed thirty-one servants, twenty-one of them male.6
The drive for privacy in the early years of the century was related to emerging ideals of order and economy, as well as to a new sense of cultivation and decorum (even ‘taste’) that reduced the expectation of the open-house largesse of the late medieval era. One Sir Hugh Cholmley recorded in his memoirs: ‘In spring, 1636, I removed from the Gate-house into my house at Whitby, being now finished and fit to receive me; and my dear wife (who was excellent at dressing and making all handsome within doors) had put it into a fine posture, and furnished with many good things, so that I believe, there were few gentlemen in the country, of my rank, exceeded it.’ He wrote with pride about his well-ordered life: ‘having mastered my debts, I did not only appear at all public meetings in a very gentlemanly equipage, but lived in as handsome and plentiful fashion at home as any gentleman in all the country, of my rank.’
He was pleased too with the number of his staff and their household management:
I had between thirty and forty in my ordinary family, a chaplain who said prayers every morning at six, and again before dinner and supper, a porter who merely attended the gates, which were ever shut up before dinner, when the bell rang to prayers, and not opened till one o’clock, except for some strangers who came to dinner, which was ever three or four besides my family; without any trouble; and whatever their fare was, they were sure to have a hearty welcome. Twice a week, a certain number of old people, widows and indigent persons, were served at my gates with bread and good pottage of beef.
Sir Hugh compared his own well-ordered housekeeping with that of his grandfather, who always had a crowd of riotous retainers.7
The gentleman attendant was still a feature of the early part of the century, but it was rare to find one at its end, except in the role of the steward, who might still be a minor landowner serving a greater lord in his district. Chaplains and secretaries might be well connected and would certainly be well educated. It was common to find a gentlewoman attendant to the lady of a household but this would be increasingly in the role of companion rather than social equal. The governess (also a feature in the sixteenth century) now becomes a familiar component of country-house life, and, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she was expected to come from a superior background.8
The seventeenth century seems to be a critical period in which women assume more and more of the servant roles in a country house, partly because they were cheaper but also because they were able to take on more senior housekeeping duties. Indeed, one could argue, this is the century that established as key characters both housekeeper and governess.
One speaker for the emerging figure of the senior female servant, just as John Russell wrote of the duties of the senior male servants a century and half earlier, is Hannah Wolley. As she was born around 1622 and died in the 1670s, her life spanned the middle years of the century, seeing her through the civil war, the Commonwealth and the Restoration.9
Mrs Wolley is a rather modern character, for although she had spent some years in domestic service, she was notably entrepreneurial, using her experience to become an admired – and imitated – author. From the age of seventeen she was in service to a noblewoman, almost certainly Anne, Lady Maynard, who died in 1647. Mrs Wolley continues to have something of a reputation as a writer of recipes today; indeed, she is thought to have been one of the first female British authors to make a reasonable living from her writing, but her reputation rested on her career in service to aristocratic families from the 1630s.10
Lady Maynard was the second wife of the 1st Baron Maynard, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber who had been an MP and was lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire in 1620.11 He built a house at Easton Lodge, near Bishop’s Stortford in Essex, which was given an additional wing and chapel in 1621.12 The house was completely rebuilt in 1847, but the original can be seen in a 1768 engraving. The site is still discernible in the west wing of Warwick House and a gatehouse on the Stortford Road.
Tantalisingly, an inventory has survived for the house as it was in 1637, entitled ‘A Booke of all the householdstuf in Eston Lodge’. It differs from other contemporary inventories in that it does not include clothes and jewels, but is notable for detailing the richness of the furnishings and especially the needlework. It offers a detailed record of th
e house of Mrs Wolley’s youthful service. Lord Maynard died in 1640 ‘due to a fever brought on by zeal in the King’s Service’ in putting down an army mutiny.13
She presumably left service not long after, as she is next heard of in 1646, when she married Jerome Wolley, master at the free grammar school in Newport, very close to Little Easton. She also helped her husband run a school in Hackney for a time. After he died, she married in 1666 one Francis Challiner, who died before February 1669. She published The Ladies Directory in 1661, which was quickly reprinted, following it with The Cook’s Guide in 1664, The Queen-Like Closet in 1670, and The Ladies Delight in 1672 – all principally recipe books. Her last authenticated book was A Supplement to the ‘Queen-Like Closet’ or A Little of Everything, which appeared in 1674, with recipes, notes on household management, and instructions for embroidery and letter writing. Her books all show her to be highly educated and able.
Cooks then were still principally men and among her contemporaries her principal rival was fellow author and male master cook Robert May, who had worked for Lord Montague, Lord Lumley, Lord Dormer and Sir Kenelm Digby. His The Accomplisht Cook was first published in 1660. In the expanded edition of 1684 he writes of the ‘Triumphs and Trophies of cooking’ that he created for his earlier patrons, as well as of his alarm at the fashion for French male cooks, who remain much in evidence for the next three centuries.14
Mrs Wolley’s output is essentially recipe books. The Ladies Directory, for instance, sets out a series of recipes for dishes and home remedies, including preserves, jellies and waters with medicinal value. The longer title is ‘the ladies directory in choice experiments & curiousities of preserving in jellies, and candying both fruits & flowers: Also, an excellent way of making cakes, comfits, and rich-court perfumes. With rarities of many precious waters; among which . . . excellent water against the plague: with severall consumption drinks, approved by the ablest physicians.’
The Cook’s Guide was dedicated to Lady Maynard’s daughter, Lady Anne Wroth, and her granddaughter, Mary: ‘The Duty I owe to your Ladyship, and the rest of your noble Family, commands more than this book is able to Express; but since ill fate hath made me altogether incapable of any Worthy return of your Love and Bounty, be pleased to accept this as a Signal of what I am obliged to.’
Her second dedication to Mary, the daughter, is a little more revealing, referring explicitly to the importance of the lady of the house being able to direct and educate her own servants in the arts of housekeeping. She writes:
The sublimity of your Lady Mother’s affairs I fear will not permit her very often to view this book; besides her Ladyship needs it not, her acceptation and approbation hereof is my honour only, not her benefit; your practice will be my content, and I doubt not your own. It is a miserable thing for any Woman, though never so great, not to be able to teach her Servants; there is no fear of it in you, since you begin so soon to delight in those Sciences as may and will accomplish you.15
Mrs Wolley refers to having prepared a banquet for King Charles I, presumably while in service to the Maynards. She writes of ‘very choice Receipts [recipes] . . . from my own Practice, who have had the honour to perform such things for the Entertainment of His late Majesty, as well as for the Nobility’.16 No painted portrait of Mrs Wolley survives, as far as I am aware, but in her writings we get more than a flavour of a Mrs Beeton-like character and tone of voice.
The Gentlewomans Companion was first published under Wolley’s name in 1673, although Wolley herself complained that this was a plagiarised version of her own manuscript brought out by the publisher, Dorman Newman, trying to cash in on her success and popularity.17 But then it was quickly reprinted in 1675 and still carried her name as author. It contains a biographical note in the beginning, ‘A Short account of the life and abilities of Authoress of this Book’, in which the assumed author cites her modesty, her previous books and listed her skills, including ‘Preserving all kinds of Sweet-meats wet and dry’, ‘Setting out of Banquets’, and ‘All manner of Cookery’. It claims that at the age of fifteen she was ‘intrusted to keep a little School’, and was already in the enviable position of accomplishments in Italian, singing, dancing and instrument playing.
After two years, she was taken on as a governess to ‘a Noble Lady in the Kingdom’ who ‘was infinitely pleas’d’ with her learning. During this time she learns the arts of cooking and preserving, and became ‘acquainted with the Court, with a deportment suitable thereunto.’ After her mistress’s death, she moved to employment with another lady whom she serves – first in the role of governess, then of stewardess (or housekeeper) and finally of secretary – for another seven years, in which she ‘kept an exact account of what was spent in the house’ and gained knowledge of ‘Physick and Chirurgery [i.e. surgery]’.18
Although this may not be an entirely accurate picture, much of this biographical material seems to have been adapted from Mrs Wolley’s previously published books. Her known works, and those possibly by other hands under her name, all make much of the fact that gentlewomen may have been ‘forced to service’ on account of being ‘impoverished by the late calamities, viz. the late Wars, Plague and Fire’, as Mrs Wolley herself observed in her confirmed autograph work, The Queen-Like Closet.19
The stresses on aristocratic and gentry families in this period might well have driven some widows and daughters into service in other households just to survive. The Gentlewomans Companion (1675) encourages parents to ‘endeavour the gentile [gentle] education of their Daughters, encouraging them to learn whatever opportunity offers, worthy [of] a good estimation. For riches hath wings, and will quickly fly away; or Death comes and removes the Parents, leaving the Children to the tuition of merciless and unconscionable Executors.’
If they are not trained in the arts of housekeeping, parents lay their daughters open to having to accept more humble jobs: ‘their Daughters are often exposed to great hardships, many times contenting themselves to serve as Chamber-maids, because they have not the Accomplishments of a Waiting-woman, or an House-keeper.’20 The same book records the duties of the governess to the children of the gentlewomen, a feature of country house life long before the nineteenth century: ‘They who undertake the difficult Employ of being an Instructress or Governess of Children should be persons of no mean birth and breeding, civil in deportment, and of extraordinary winning and pleasing conversation.’
A governess is to study ‘diligently the nature, disposition, and inclination of those she is to teach’. Aside from books of piety, the author also recommends romances ‘which treat of Generosity, Gallantry, and Virtue’, including Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, as well as all ‘productions of the needle’, plus rock-work, moss-work and cabinet-work, in addition to preserving, conserving and distillation: ‘those laudable Sciences which adorn a Compleat Gentlewomen’.21
Lady Anne Clifford recalled her governess Mrs Anne Taylour with affection as one of the main influences on her life, along with her tutor. She had plenty of companions to choose from in her adult life too, as illustrated in an extremely rare document at Knole in Kent. Described as ‘A catalogue of the Household and Family of the Right Honourable Richard, Earl of Dorset’, it hangs in a frame in the part of the house occupied by the present Lord Sackville and lists all those who made up the household of the Earl and Countess of Dorset (the playboy grandson of the 1st Earl and his serious-minded wife, Lady Anne) as it was between 1613 and 1624.22
The Knole catalogue details where staff would sit for meals, whether in the Great Chamber, the Parlour, the Great Hall, at high and long tables, the Dairy, or the Kitchen and Scullery. It even mentions the handful of permanent staff who stayed in Dorset House in London when the main household went elsewhere.
The size of the household of Lady Anne’s second husband, Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in the mid-seventeenth century was of a similar number, as recalled by John Aubrey in Brief Lives:
’Tis certain, the Earles of Pembroke were the most pop
ular Peers in the West of England; but one might boldly say, in the whole Kingdome. The Revenue of this Family was till about 1652, 16,000 pounds per annum. But with his offices and all he had thirty thousand Pounds per annum. And, as the Revenue was great, so the greatnesse of his Retinue, and Hospitality were answerable. One hundred and twenty Family uprising and down lyeing: whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest Servants, and Retayners.23
The Knole household list illustrates just the same type of ‘Family’. The Knole catalogue itself is, unusually, written on vellum, which suggests that it may have been drawn up for a commemorative purpose rather than merely as a record; indeed, it is accompanied by a humble prayer for the health of the household and especially the mistress, signed by Henry Keble, yeoman of the pantry. The presence of the names of all the servants adds a considerable resonance to the document, with surnames that might still be found in Kent today. Vita Sackville-West certainly made use of them in her novel, The Edwardians, set in Knole in the early twentieth century, for example calling the butler Vigeon, who on this household list appears as the huntsman.
Up and Down Stairs Page 7
