Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [22]
The young Geoffrey Chaucer was famously a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster (d.1363), and the wife of Prince Lionel, one of the sons of Edward III. Indeed, the earliest documentary evidence for Chaucer’s life are payments in her household account books for clothes and a gift ‘for necessaries at Christmas’.84 In the late fifteenth century, the child Thomas More waited in the household of Cardinal Morton. As William Roper, More’s son-in-law, recalled in his biography, Vita Thomas Mori: ‘In whose witt and towardnesse the Cardinall much delightinge, would often say of him unto the nobles that dyvers tymes came to dyne with him: This child here wayting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.’85
Well-bred young men would often receive a certain amount of formal education, sometimes with a cleric or later a professional schoolmaster in the nobleman’s household. They were often following in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, going to the same households for their education – much as later landowning families had attachments to different public schools and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. This habit was beginning to decline during the sixteenth century, when children might equally be sent to grammar schools, or to university, or to the Inns of Court.86
Roger Ascham, who was employed as tutor to Princess Elizabeth, wrote a famous book, published in 1570, when such household-based education was still very current. Its lengthy title was: The schole-master, or plaine perfite way of teaching children to understand, write and to speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed for the private bringing up of youth in Ientlemen and Noblemen’s houses. His book was in part inspired by a conversation concerning the scholars of Eton who were running away as a result of too heavy beatings. Ascham’s father had been steward to Lord Scrope, and he himself had been educated not at a school but in the household of Sir Humphry Wingfield.87
Most attendants in a medieval and Tudor household were rewarded with ‘liveries’, literally a living allowance. Originally, this meant more than just clothing (which later became the principal meaning associated with the word) and certainly covered money, food and goods, such as candles and wood. Clothing was usually dispensed as cloth, in a quantity and colour chosen to reflect the status of the recipient. Livery badges were worn in addition, often showing the family crest or coat of arms. Academic gowns in universities still continue this tradition of reflecting hierarchy in differentiated dress, as do the judiciary.88
These liveries acted both as a payment and also as a badge of belonging, an expression of being part of a great household, much like an army uniform. This meant that anyone wearing a livery would automatically come under the protection of that lord. Neat uniforms all in the same colours helped underline his prestige. In the household of Sir William Petre, secretary to Henry VIII, ordinary servants were given new clothes in spring and autumn. In the winter they wore grey frieze, a coarse woollen cloth. In the summer this was replaced by grey marble, a parti-coloured worsted cloth that was woven to resemble the flecked veins found in marble.89
Most servants would be fed by the household, except grooms and pages of the marshalsea (or stables, derived from the old English word meaning ‘seat of the horsekeeper’) who were more likely to be paid cash wages in lieu of food. Numbers of portions served are recorded in household checker rolls, in