At Home - Bill Bryson [49]
Many houses were so filled with pantries, storerooms, and other service areas that the greater part of the house actually belonged to the servants. In The Gentleman’s House (1864), Robert Kerr stated that the typical stately home had two hundred rooms (counting all storage spaces), of which almost exactly half were household offices—which is to say rooms devoted to servants and their tasks, or their bedrooms. When stables and other outbuildings were added in, the property was overwhelmingly in the servants’ control.
The division of labor behind the scenes could be enormously complicated. Kerr divided the suites of offices into nine categories: kitchen, bakery and brewery, upper servants’ hall, lower servants’ hall, cellars and outhouses, laundry, private rooms, “supplementaries,” and thoroughfares. Other homes used different reckonings. Florence Court in Ireland had more than sixty departments, while Eaton Hall, the Cheshire seat of the Duke of Westminster, got by with just sixteen—quite a modest number bearing in mind that he had more than three hundred servants. It all depended on the organizational predispositions of master, mistress, butler, and housekeeper.
A large country house was likely to have a gun room, lamp room, still room, pastry room, butler’s pantry, fish store, bake house, coal store, game larder, brewery, knife room, brush room, shoe room, and at least a dozen more. Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans. Another in Wales, according to historian Juliet Gardiner, had a room set aside for ironing newspapers. The grandest or oldest homes might also have a saucery, a spicery, a poultery, a buttery, and other rooms of more exotic provenance, such as a ewery (a room for keeping water jugs, the word somehow derived from aquaria), a chandry (for candles), an avenery (for game beasts), and a napery (for linen).
Some of the workroom names are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. Buttery has nothing to do with butter. It refers to butts, as in butts of ale. (It is a corruption of boutellerie, the same word from which butler and bottle are derived; looking after the wine bottles is what butlers originally did.) Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.
In all but the most modest households owners rarely set foot in the kitchen or servants’ area and, as Gardiner puts it, “knew only by report the conditions in which their servants lived.” It was not uncommon for the head of the household to know nothing about his servants beyond their names. Most would have had little idea how to find their way through the darker recesses of the servants’ areas.
Every aspect of life was rigorously stratified, and these anxious distinctions existed for houseguests and family as much as for servants. Strict protocol dictated into which parts of the house one might venture—which corridors and staircases one might use, which doors one might open—depending on whether one was a guest or close relative, governess or tutor, child or adult,