Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [18]
These upper servants were responsible for carrying out the extraordinarily elaborate ritual already described by Mr Russell, which governed their master’s every waking moment – from first light to the ending of the day. Their duties usually began early, as in the household of the Prince of Wales, the young Prince Edward, in the 1470s. The main gates would be opened from five in summer and six in winter. As was usual in great households then, the daily round would start with a chapel service, followed by breakfast for the lord and his family. Dinner for the household was served between nine and eleven in the morning. The evening was demarcated by evensong, supper, and the ceremony of ‘all night’ or seeing the lord to bed. The main gates were closed by nine or ten.64
As Mr Russell’s treatise shows, the entertainment of great visitors was central to the life of the noble household. Another late-fifteenth-century treatise sets out the protocol for receiving a guest who has arrived during a mealtime, describing how he should be taken to his chamber, through the great hall, to be greeted courteously by the marshal and ushers. An usher should take his servants to drink at the bar of the buttery and show them their master’s sleeping quarters; he should also ensure that bread, beer and wine were taken to his chamber.65
All this was not just for protection, but for dignity’s sake. Remember the argument in Act II, scene IV, between King Lear and his daughters about his need for retainers, when he is asked to reduce his retinue, eventually to one. When Regan says, ‘What need one?’ he replies in agony: ‘O! reason not the need: our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous.’ The actual physical presence of even a few retainers was quite simply the sine qua non of aristocratic life at any level. This ‘need’ is hinted at by Elizabeth Stonor, of Stonor in Oxfordshire, who strikes a plaintive note in a letter to her husband, written in March 1478: ‘And I pray you that you will send me some of your servants and mine to wait upon me, for now I am right bare of servants.’66 It was difficult to emphasise your noble or gentry status without the proper attendants.
The nature of such a household, recounted in detail only fifty years after John Russell’s treatise but with many of the practices there described still in vogue, is to be found in the remarkable document known as the Northumberland Household Book. The household regulations of Henry Algernon Percy, 5th Earl of Northumberland, were drawn up in 1511/12 as a process of audit and good management, supplying a rare example of a non-royal list of household members and its arrangements. These regulations relate principally to his two houses, Leaconfield Castle and Wressil Castle, providing an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the great household at its fullest, at the beginning of the century when it started to become unfashionable to retain one on a permanent basis. The list of those in the household is worth inspecting here in some detail.67
Leaconfield, or Leconfield, Castle was near Beverley in Yorkshire. It no longer survives but was described by the antiquary John Leland thus: ‘Leckinfield is a large house, and stands within a great moat, in one very spacious court; 3 parts of the house, saving the main gate that is made of bricke, [are] all of timber. The 4[th] parte is fair, made of stone, and some brick . . . the Park thereby is very fair and large.’68In 1541, the earl hosted a visit from Henry VIII there. Wressil Castle, now known as Wressle, also in Yorkshire, was a similarly extensive complex and survives only as a ruin.
The original