Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [25]
The valets of the household of Edward III had the right to pallet beds, with canvas bedding stuffed with straw, rushes or even broom.104 The clergyman William Harrison took a dim view of the straw pallets used by sixteenth-century servants: ‘If they had any sheet above them it was well, for seldom had they any under their bodies to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet and rased [sic] their hardened hides.’105
Habits and customs of great households were always changing, and varied between households, but there was overall a surprising consistency up to the end of the sixteenth century. Some flavour of country-house hospitality as it survived into the Elizabethan period can be gauged from the survival of the Willoughby Household Orders, drawn up by Sir Francis Willoughby, a wealthy member of the gentry, in 1572 for Wollaton, before major rebuilding took place.106 The senior household officers, recorded in payments, were then Henry Willoughby, steward, George Cam, gentleman of the chamber, Thomas Shaw, controller, and Richard Wrigley, head gardener.
Two men were responsible for the accounts, William Marmion and William Blythe. The household included only a small number of women. Lady Willoughby apparently oversaw the children herself, along with two nurses, and was attended by two gentlewomen, Elizabeth Mering, her lady-in-waiting, Marjory Garner, and three other women (including, unusually, a female fool called Mary).107
Ritual and ceremony described in these regulations were still designed to hold a household together, absorbing the all too obvious tensions between the stewards, bailiffs and serving men in their struggle for power and influence; many were the younger sons of local landowning families. These dissensions may have been a major factor in the undoing of larger households in the early seventeenth century, which were becoming more and more difficult to fund, and perhaps also to control.108
The gentleman usher was then one Robert Foxe who, according to the regulations, was to ‘supply the place of the usher, whose office is first of all to see that the hall be kept clean and that his groom sees no doggs come there at all. He is diligently to have a good regard of every person that comes into the hall, to the end that if they be of the better sort, notice may be given to the master, or to some head officer that they may be entertained accordingly.’ People were seated and served according to their rank, as were their servants.
Even if they were not of the highest rank, guests were still to be treated with respect and offered food and drink: ‘If of the meaner sort, then [he is] to know the cause of their coming, . . . to the end they may be dispatched and answer’d of their business, provided always that no stranger be suffered to pass without offering him to drink.’
The usher was expected to preserve the standards of behaviour:
Upon intelligence given from the clerk or the cook that meat is ready to be served, he is with a loud voice to command all gentleman and yeomen to repair to the dresser. At the neither [sic] end of the hall he is to meet the service, saying with a loud voice, ‘Give place, my masters,’ albeit no man be in the way, and so to goe before the same service until he come to the upper end of the hall.
After the lord has been served in his private dining chamber, ‘[The usher] is to place in the hall in dinner and supper time all noblemen’s men which be fellows together, and all gentlemen according to every of their master’s degrees’. He was also to form the clerk of the kitchens how much food was needed. This was done in order that proper hospitality could be