Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [13]
The most junior servant was the scullion, derived from the French word escuille for a dish. This individual washed cooking utensils and dishes in the kitchen, and was usually also expected to clean and sweep those service rooms and their associated courtyards. In the later centuries this was the task of the humble scullery maid.
Mr Russell does not mention any women. This is because they were few in number in later medieval and Tudor households, aside from the immediate companions and attendants of the lady of the house, any unmarried daughters still at home, or nurses for children. If they appear elsewhere they were usually employed only in the very humblest roles, often as washerwomen. Indeed, many early household manuals advised against employing women, for moral reasons, in monastic tones that imply they would be a distraction to the men.29
The great medieval and Tudor kitchens seem to have been staffed principally by men, partly because strength was needed for larger-scale catering. The evidence of bequests suggests that numbers of women servants began to grow from the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century female servants were certainly more commonplace, especially in the households of gentry, although not in positions of major responsibility.30
The earliest mention of a lowly menial female servant in English is thought to be that in a late-fourteenth-century translation of the writings of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a thirteenth-century English friar who taught at the schools in Paris, translated into English by John Trevisa, chaplain to Lord Berkeley. His references to the ‘servaunt-woman’ make uncomfortable reading to a modern reader, for she is to be ‘put to office and woerke of traveylle, toylinge and slubberynge’. In addition she is fed on ‘grosse mete’ and ‘kept lowe under the yoek of thraldom and of servage’.31
Our man, Mr Russell, was at the other end of the household hierarchy, a maître d’ figure. We do not know much about him outside the description that he gives in his treatise.32 Like many who spent part of their career in the service of a great household during the late medieval and Tudor periods, he was likely to have come from a minor landowning family, although he may equally have been the son of a senior household officer. Indeed, he could conceivably have worked his way up the ranks from quite humble origins.
Mr Russell’s treatise, written in the 1460s, speaks in its very organisation of self-discipline and order: ‘All the officers I have mentioned have to obey me, ever to fulfil my commandment when I call, for our office is the chief in spicery and cellar, whether the cook belief or loth.’ Mr Russell clearly had to assert himself against the master cook. This almost comical aside hints at inevitable tensions between highly skilled senior officers, another feature echoing through the centuries right up until the present day.33
But Mr Russell, diplomatically, celebrates the need for different skills in the great households, writing: ‘All these diverse offices may be filled by a single person, but the dignity of a prince requireth each office to have its officer and a servant waiting on him.’ Presumably the ‘diverse offices’ were divided up in different ways, depending on the size and wealth of the household.34
The fictional narrator figure of this treatise meets a young man in need of an occupation, and agrees to teach him ‘the duties of a butler, a panter, of a chamberlain, and especially, the cunning of a carver’, all of which were normally learnt by observing the practitioners in action. A ‘henchman’, or young man from good background working as an attendant as part of his education or training for life, would begin by looking after the cups at the end of his lord’s table and observe in action the