Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [28]
As historian Mark Girouard described it so memorably in Life in the English Country House: ‘The gentry walking up the stairs no longer met their last night’s faeces coming down them.’4 However, on a normal day the timing and management of menial servants would probably have been carefully calibrated in the grander houses to avoid such unpleasant encounters.
Aristocratic households continue to be somewhat peripatetic, moving between rural estates or between their country seats and London houses. In the early seventeenth century Sir John Hobart of Blickling Hall in Norfolk used to reduce his staff from twenty-seven to seven when he left his primary seat for a period in London.5
There might be as many as 120 staff, as in the Earl of Dorset’s household at Knole. Sir Thomas Wentworth of Wentworth Woodhouse (later Earl of Strafford) maintained a staff of sixty-four, including forty-four male servants, six female servants and a chaplain. The household of Sir Edward Carr of Aswarby in Lincolnshire (who in his will made bequests to forty-five servants, thirty-seven of whom were male) incorporated two tutors and a chaplain. A more typical household size for the landed gentry would have been that of Sir John Brownlow of Belton, who at the time of his death in 1679 employed thirty-one servants, twenty-one of them male.6
The drive for privacy in the early years of the century was related to emerging ideals of order and economy, as well as to a new sense of cultivation and decorum (even ‘taste’) that reduced the expectation of the open-house largesse of the late medieval era. One Sir Hugh Cholmley recorded in his memoirs: ‘In spring, 1636, I removed from the Gate-house into my house at Whitby, being now finished and fit to receive me; and my dear wife (who was excellent at dressing and making all handsome within doors) had put it into a fine posture, and furnished with many good things, so that I believe, there were few gentlemen in the country, of my rank, exceeded it.’ He wrote with pride about his well-ordered life: ‘having mastered my debts, I did not only appear at all public meetings in a very gentlemanly equipage, but lived in as handsome and plentiful fashion at home as any gentleman in all the country, of my rank.’
He was pleased too with the number of his staff and their household management:
I had between thirty and forty in my ordinary family, a chaplain who said prayers every morning at six, and again before dinner and supper, a porter who merely attended the gates, which were ever shut up before dinner, when the bell rang to prayers, and not opened till one o’clock, except for some strangers who came to dinner, which was ever three or four besides my family; without any trouble; and whatever their fare was, they were sure to have a hearty welcome. Twice a week, a certain number of old people, widows and indigent persons, were served at my gates with bread and good pottage of beef.
Sir Hugh compared his own well-ordered housekeeping with that of his grandfather, who always had a crowd of riotous retainers.7
The gentleman attendant was still a feature of the early part of the century, but it was rare to find one at its end, except in the role of the steward, who might still be a minor landowner serving a greater lord in his district. Chaplains and secretaries might be well connected and would certainly be well educated. It was common to find a gentlewoman attendant to the lady of a household but this would be increasingly in the role of companion rather than social equal. The governess (also a feature in the sixteenth century) now becomes a familiar component of country-house life, and, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she was expected to come from a superior background.8