Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [24]
The king usually ate privately in his privy chamber, while higher-status courtiers and household officers ate in the Great Watching Chamber. Leftovers from the tables were gathered up to be distributed to the poor by the almoner. Another 230 household servants also received a daily ration, eaten in their own rooms or work stations (their leftovers were delivered to the scullery).
Each meal consisted of two courses served in the Great Hall, in messes (a dish to be shared between four), and served by the senior man at the table. The Historic Royal Palaces Agency, which runs Hampton Court, has recently instituted an impressive programme of demonstrations reproducing the most vivid experience of a sixteenth-century kitchen at work anywhere in the world.94
It is less easy to form a clear picture of where most servants slept. For reasons of practicality and security, most personal servants had to remain within calling distance of their masters or mistresses and thus slept close to them, perhaps even sharing their chamber, or lying down in the passage outside.95 Most senior household servants would have slept on pallet beds that would be taken at night to the rooms where they conducted their business during the day and then stored away again the following morning. Designated rooms might be contained within the courtyard range; for instance, such rooms as are mentioned in the 1522 inventory of Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, which boasted a porter’s lodge, a master receiver’s chamber, a steward’s chamber, a wardrobe and a yeoman’s chamber.96
Some servants might still have slept in the great hall (as they certainly would have done in much earlier times, as suggested by the passage in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, describing the whole household sleeping in the hall) or in the kitchen, although not in the domestic offices, which would be kept locked. By the sixteenth century there was some attempt to monitor this, at least in the regulations for Henry VIII’s household, which forbade scullions to ‘lie in the nights and dayes in the kitchens or . . . by the fire-side’.97
The inventories of mid-fifteenth-century Caister Castle in Norfolk, built by Sir John Fastolf, shows that by this date senior servants were usually assigned their own chambers. Twenty-eight rooms were occupied by a total of thirty-eight beds, and some twenty-two rooms are identified with individuals or officials of the household. Servants of all ranks were likely to have been expected to share beds at times. John Russell’s Book of Courtesy makes mention of the etiquette to be used if asked to share a bed. It was, for instance, considered polite to ask which side of the bed the other person wanted to sleep on, and then to lie as far away from them as possible.98
The Book of Courtesy gives the dimensions of a shared pallet bed:
Grooms shall make litter and stuff pallets out,
Nine foot in length without a doubt,
Seven foot certainly shall it be broad,
Well watered and bound together, craftily trod,
With wisps drawn out at feet and side.
Presumably such a bed would be used by more than one person at one time.99
Chambers in the base court accommodated other officials, including the lord’s cook, stableman and gardeners, while some servants were given pallet beds and blankets at their places of work, in the bakehouse, stables and gardeners’ rooms. At Bishop Waltham Palace in Hampshire, adapted in the fifteenth century, there appears to be a sizeable dormitory over the newly built brewhouse and bakehouse.100
Rooms of servants were certainly often shared. The inventory in 1542 of Sutton Place in Surrey shows that all the laundrymaids slept together and, in another room, the ‘lads’ of the kitchen bedded down alongside the fool.101 There are a number of areas in the roof spaces within service buildings attached to medieval houses that have windows, which is presumably