Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [10]
It cannot be emphasised enough that the life of a great medieval household was profoundly hierarchical. Just as a king was served by a nobleman, the nobleman would be served by a gentleman of his household and so on down the ranks. This tradition is reflected in the titles of senior courtiers in the royal household today, where many of the medieval household titles persist in an honorary form, from Lord High Chamberlain to the Master of the Horse.9
Most importantly, the grander households were also essentially mobile institutions, with great lords and their attendants travelling from residence to residence, towing with them the necessary furniture while drawing provisions from associated agricultural estates.10 In addition, they were effectively the seat of a mini-government from which extensive landholdings and local justice were administered. They took their cues from the central government, such as it was, in the form of the royal court.11
Anyone with the mildest interest in the historic houses of the British Isles will have visited at least some of the great halls built by the medieval and Tudor aristocracy. You may have stood, for instance, beneath the vast expanse of roof in the hall at Penshurst Place in Kent, built in the fourteenth century by Sir John de Pulteney, merchant, banker and four times mayor of London, or in the expansive spaces concealed within the massive walls of late-fourteenth-century Bodiam Castle in Sussex, or the surviving sixteenth-century great hall at Rufford Old Hall, Lancashire, which survives from the mansion built by Sir Thomas Hesketh.12
The architecture of the great country houses of the aristocracy in this period inevitably reflected the need to accommodate large entourages, with separate lodgings for visitors and senior attendants. The life of the household was centred on the great hall, which was usually entered through a porch at one end. The porch led directly into a ‘screens passage’, which divided the hall from the three doors leading to the kitchen, buttery (a store for beer and wine, deriving from the same word as butt and bottle) and pantry (for bread and perishables, from pain) for bread. The kitchen would itself also be divided into specialist departments: sauceries, confectioneries, sculleries, poultries, larders, a cellar for wine and a chandlery for candles. As well as the lord’s wardrobe (a chamber for storing precious metals), there was usually a wardrobe devoted to cloth and spices.13
The far end of the great hall was known as the ‘high’ end, often raised on a dais; in the centre of the room there would be an open fire. From the later fourteenth century, the high end was usually lit by an oriel window or projecting bay. In the early medieval period, the head of the household would dine at the high end, with lesser members of the household dining on trestle tables that could be cleared away; in large households there were often multiple sittings for the main meal of the day. The flavour of these households can still be captured when dining in the historic Cambridge and Oxford colleges.14
By the fourteenth century, the head of the household would normally have eaten in a withdrawing apartment, although his food would still be carried in procession through the hall before being served to him there. The sheer scale of surviving kitchens from the late Middle Ages – notably those at Durham Castle, in which all the offices are preserved – make vividly apparent the importance of cooking in aristocratic life.15
In the great households of barons and bishops, of the most successful merchants, or highly placed public officials, hundreds of men sustained the power and privilege of this elite – and in ever-increasing numbers. Also servants begat servants, so that the senior servants often had servants of their own – ‘a child of the chamber and a horse-keeper’ at least.16
In the deployment of residential apartments, great hall and kitchen, lodgings and