Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [26]
The usher was required to keep discipline: ‘if there shall be any stubborn persons, he is to expell them out of the hall’; to keep the noise down by saying, ‘Speak softly, my masters.’ He must not fetch and carry but command the butler and panter to do so.111
There were strictures too for the butler, Penne: ‘his office is ever to keep clean and sweet his buttery, and likewise his plate and cups, making sure every day to have fresh and clean water.’ His duties were also ‘to keep the great chamber clean, to make fires there, and to provide for lights in due season, and to cover the boards and cupboards there, having good regard to the cleanness of his linen’.112
The butler was responsible too for distributing bread to the servants of the household who did not dine in the great hall: ‘[he] is to use good discretion in serving forth of the bread and beer to the houses of office’, including the kitchen, the bakehouse, and the nursery.113 These regulations give a vivid illustration of the survival of traditional practices in the later Elizabethan period and the demands of a gentry household of considerable numbers.
But by the very end of the sixteenth century, there was a noticeable gear-change in the old traditions of the household. One anonymous writer, known only as I.M., produced the verse treatise, A Health to the Gentlemanly profession of Serving-men, published in 1598. Apart from his initials, its author’s identity is unknown but he was probably a higher household servant of some sort. He laments the decline in standards of service, essentially complaining that service in an aristocratic household was no longer a post for a gentleman.114
We hear similar laments in every generation. Those who devote their careers to maintaining an elaborate etiquette experience a change in customs and inevitably feel that standards have slipped. They would feel that their world – perhaps the world – was falling apart. In the late sixteenth century large households had to be reduced for the sake of economy. Prestige was sought not through service in a noble household but through the patronage of positions at court and county government.
I.M. bewailed the ‘decay of Hospitality and Good House-keeping’ that had brought about the decline of the traditional corporate flavour of the aristocratic household in which hospitality was paramount. He outlined the household as it had once been, the better calibre of men formerly called upon to serve: ‘First, they were chosen men of witte, discretion, government, and good bringing up’ which qualified them for being involved in the serious business, political affairs, and worldly wealth of their lords and masters.115
They would also be men of ‘valoure and courage, not fearing to fight in the maintenance of their Maister’s credite in his just quarell’, of ‘strength and activitie’, to be excellent in the shooting, running, leaping and dancing like those henchmen in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Finally, they were ‘men of qualitie’ to be seen in haulking [hawking], hunting, fyshing and fowling with all such like Gentlemanly pastimes.’116 These ‘were known from the rest by the names of Serving men’ and were drawn from a gentlemanly background, as distinct from those in more servile roles.
Although it has to be admitted that the author was probably chiefly concerned with his own loss of status, and evidently thought little of the ordinary working men who came under his command, for him the joy of the service hierarchy was that it inextricably linked all the layers of society:
Even the Dukes sonne [was] preferred Page to the Prince, the Earles seconde son attendant upon the Duke, the Knight’s seconde