Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [0]
The English Manor House
100 Period Details: Plasterwork
How to Read a Country House
The Country Houses of Sir John Vanbrugh
Up and Down Stairs
The History of the Country House Servant
JEREMY MUSSON
www.johnmurray.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by John Murray (Publishers)
An Hachette UK company
© Jeremy Musson 2009
The right of Jeremy Musson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-387-4
Book ISBN 978-0-7195-9730-5
John Murray (Publishers)
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.johnmurray.co.uk
To my amazing mother, Elizabeth (1942–2009)
Contents
Introduction
1. The Visible and Glorious Household
From the later Middle Ages to the end of the Sixteenth Century
2. The Beginning of the Back Stairs and the Servants’ Hall
The Seventeenth Century
3. The Household in the Age of Conspicuous
Consumption
The Eighteenth Century
4. Behind the Green Baize Door
The Eighteenth Century
5. The Apogee
The Nineteenth Century
6. Moving Up or Moving On
The Nineteenth Century
7. In Retreat from a Golden Age
The first half of the Twentieth century
8. Staying On: A Changing World
The later Twentieth Century
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography and Sources
Introduction
A SERVANT, ACCORDING to Dr Johnson in his famous Dictionary of 1755, was ‘one who attends another, and acts at his command – the correlative of master’. It is curious to think that, until the 1950s, the very term was as commonplace as any word relating to housekeeping among the upper and middle classes. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, the word had virtually disappeared from everyday use.
Johnson’s definition is essentially repeated by The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1979 but also gives a second meaning – originating from late medieval English – ‘One is who is under the obligation to render certain services to, and obey the orders of a person, or body of persons, in return for wages or salary.’1 The word ‘servant’ thus traditionally encompassed the status of a trades’ apprentice to his master, and was often extended to other labourers in employment. The term domestic servant seems to have emerged to distinguish it from the increasing significance of the ‘civil’ servant, someone who worked for the government.
For those who love looking around country houses, the servant should be regarded as an indivisible part of the story. Like great machines, these houses combined public and private functions, as places of residence and hospitality, as well as of political and estate administration. They were built not only for the occupation of a landowning family but also had to accommodate a large body of servants to run it, whose duties included not only providing food, heat and light but the maintenance of precious contents and furnishings that needed constant attention. This book will focus on the domestic servant of the larger country house, rather than of the town house or the middle-class household.2
The first chapter begins in the 1400s, and after 1600 each century has a chapter to itself. The two that cover the period up to 1700 are naturally more of an overview, fleshing out those who would have worked in a large landowner’s household, spelling out those lives and duties which can be deduced from limited available sources. From the seventeenth century, through memoirs and letters such as those of the Verney family, and books by authors such as Hannah Wolley, we start to get a much more vivid sense of connection with the complex life stories and responsibilities of country-house servants.
The chapters