Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [11]
Changing attitudes and expectations of living conditions; the competitive consumption of the medieval nobility’s lifestyle; changing behaviour and attitudes to personal comfort: all were reflected in the gradual evolution of the physical relationship of different areas: the kitchens and related offices, the great hall, and the development of more private withdrawing rooms or chambers, which would be used for sleeping, dressing, washing, living, eating and receiving privileged visitors.17 Most houses were entered through service courts.
Servants were always part of the everyday life of the landowner. The famous fifteenth-century Paston letters, written by members of an East Anglian landowning family to one another, are filled with intriguing detail suggestive of the presence and activities of household servants, who might sometimes deliver them (as well as necessary sums of money and other requests) to the addressee. At the end of one letter, Margaret Paston writes to her husband John in 1465: ‘Pecock shall tell you by mouth of more things than I may write to you at this time.’18
In many ways it is the importance of the safe transit of money that catches our eye; John Paston II wrote to John Paston I (23 August 1461):
I suppose ye understand that the money that I had of you at London may not endure with me till that the King [Edward IV] go into Wales and come again, for I understand it shall be long ere he come again. Wherefore I have sent to London to mine uncle Clement to get 100s. of Christopher Hanson, your servant, and send it to me by my servant, and mine harness with it which I left at London to make clean.19
Sometimes the issue is the recruitment of servants; in the same letter John Paston II wrote: ‘I send you home Pecock again; he is not for me. God send grace that he may do you good service, that by estimation is not likely. Ye shall have knowledge afterward how he hath demeaned him [self] here with me. I would, saving your displeasure, that ye were delivered of him, for he shall never do you profit nor worship.’20
Another typical reference comes in the letter of Margaret Paston to John Paston I, dated 24 December 1459: ‘I pray that ye will essay to get some man at Caister to keep your buttery, for the man that ye left with me will not take upon him to breve [account] daily as ye commanded. He saith he hath not used to give a reckoning neither of bread nor ale till at the week’s end, and he saith he wot wel that he should not con don it; and therefore I suppose he shall not abide.’21
In 1462, one servant, John Russe, admonished John Paston in London on the consequence of his long absence, giving his master in effect a good talking-to on paper: ‘Sir, I pray God bring you once [again] to reign among your countrymen in love . . . The longer you continue there the more hurt grows to you. Men say you will neither follow the advice of your own kindred, nor of your own counsel, but continue your own wilfulness, which . . . shall be your destruction.’22
Sometimes this closeness could be a danger. There was a considerable furore when Margery Paston married her lover, Richard Calle, who had run the family estates with great efficiency but was still a servant; he was considered of a lower rank, and he owned no land. The couple married secretly in 1469 and for a time were banished.23
A steward was usually the most educated and the most powerful individual servant, often identifiable by name. If their literary stereotype is anything to go by, stewards could be a source of anxiety to families who saw their potential for becoming over-powerful, for marrying vulnerable widows or daughters. This betrayal of trust is referred to in the song sung by Ophelia in Hamlet: ‘It is the false steward that stole his master’s daughter.