Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [29]
The seventeenth century seems to be a critical period in which women assume more and more of the servant roles in a country house, partly because they were cheaper but also because they were able to take on more senior housekeeping duties. Indeed, one could argue, this is the century that established as key characters both housekeeper and governess.
One speaker for the emerging figure of the senior female servant, just as John Russell wrote of the duties of the senior male servants a century and half earlier, is Hannah Wolley. As she was born around 1622 and died in the 1670s, her life spanned the middle years of the century, seeing her through the civil war, the Commonwealth and the Restoration.9
Mrs Wolley is a rather modern character, for although she had spent some years in domestic service, she was notably entrepreneurial, using her experience to become an admired – and imitated – author. From the age of seventeen she was in service to a noblewoman, almost certainly Anne, Lady Maynard, who died in 1647. Mrs Wolley continues to have something of a reputation as a writer of recipes today; indeed, she is thought to have been one of the first female British authors to make a reasonable living from her writing, but her reputation rested on her career in service to aristocratic families from the 1630s.10
Lady Maynard was the second wife of the 1st Baron Maynard, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber who had been an MP and was lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire in 1620.11 He built a house at Easton Lodge, near Bishop’s Stortford in Essex, which was given an additional wing and chapel in 1621.12 The house was completely rebuilt in 1847, but the original can be seen in a 1768 engraving. The site is still discernible in the west wing of Warwick House and a gatehouse on the Stortford Road.
Tantalisingly, an inventory has survived for the house as it was in 1637, entitled ‘A Booke of all the householdstuf in Eston Lodge’. It differs from other contemporary inventories in that it does not include clothes and jewels, but is notable for detailing the richness of the furnishings and especially the needlework. It offers a detailed record of the house of Mrs Wolley’s youthful service. Lord Maynard died in 1640 ‘due to a fever brought on by zeal in the King’s Service’ in putting down an army mutiny.13
She presumably left service not long after, as she is next heard of in 1646, when she married Jerome Wolley, master at the free grammar school in Newport, very close to Little Easton. She also helped her husband run a school in Hackney for a time. After he died, she married in 1666 one Francis Challiner, who died before February 1669. She published The Ladies Directory in 1661, which was quickly reprinted, following it with The Cook’s Guide in 1664, The Queen-Like Closet in 1670, and The Ladies Delight in 1672 – all principally recipe books. Her last authenticated book was A Supplement to the ‘Queen-Like Closet’ or A Little of Everything, which appeared in 1674, with recipes, notes on household management, and instructions for embroidery and letter writing. Her books all show her to be highly educated and able.
Cooks then were still principally men and among her contemporaries her principal rival was fellow author and male master cook Robert May, who had worked for Lord Montague, Lord Lumley, Lord Dormer and Sir Kenelm Digby. His The Accomplisht Cook was first published in 1660. In the expanded edition of 1684 he writes of the ‘Triumphs and Trophies of cooking’ that he created for his earlier patrons, as well as of his alarm at the fashion for French male cooks, who remain much in evidence for the next three centuries.14
Mrs Wolley’s output is essentially recipe books. The Ladies Directory, for instance, sets out a series of recipes for dishes and home remedies, including preserves, jellies and waters with medicinal value. The longer title is ‘the ladies directory in choice experiments & curiousities of preserving in jellies, and candying both fruits & flowers: Also, an excellent way of making cakes, comfits, and rich-court