Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [32]
It seems that the family usually ate in private, upstairs in the Great Chamber, and the senior servants ate in the Parlour (today the private family dining room, and long known as the Poet’s Parlour after the portraits that hang there), but on certain days all might still eat with the immediate family and some senior attendants on the raised dais in the Great Hall.25
There would have been a degree of ceremony at mealtimes, perhaps similar to that observed in the lodgings of the courtier, the Earl of Carlisle, by Thomas Raymond, a nephew of one of Lord Carlisle’s retainers: ‘I have often seen his diet carried from his kitchen across the court at Whitehall, 20 or 25 dishes covered, mostly by gentlemen richly habited, with the steward marching before and the clerk of the kitchen bringing up the rear, all bareheaded. This for the first and as many more for the second course.’26
At the ‘Parlour Table’ sat the senior household officers, whose responsibilities, education or birth put their status only just below that of the family. The women are waiting women; notably the men, including the chaplain, steward, and the gentleman of the horse, are given the title Mr, are referred to as gentlemen and are ranked above those who worked with their hands.
At the ‘Clerk’s Table in the Hall’ came the next rung of senior servants, skilled and dependable, including clerks of the kitchen, who were in charge of purchasing kitchen provisions, Henry Keble, a pastryman, three cooks, a slaughterman, a groom of the great chamber, two gardeners, a caterer or provisions purchaser and one Lowry, ‘a French Boy’.
The yeoman of the buttery eventually absorbs the roles of the pantry and by the end of the century has become the butler, operating from a room known as the pantry or butler’s pantry, whilst the groom of the chamber remains an identifiable post well into the twentieth century, by which time it has responsibility for the condition and presentation of public rooms.27
It is notable that the gardeners are here in the senior rank of yeoman servants; given that there are only two of them, they probably had additional labour brought in as necessary.28 It is worth remembering that this was the age of gardeners such as John Tradescant. The elaborate gardens of the seventeenth century required head gardeners of impressive tradecraft. The Company of Gardeners, incorporated in 1605, specified apprenticeships of seven years and enumerated the skills expected of the professional gardener for ‘the trade crafte or misterie of Gardening’, which included ‘planting grafting Setting sowing . . . covering fencing and removing of Plantes herbes seedes fruites trees Stockes Settes and of contryving the conveyances to the same belonging’.29
Tradescant, who in died 1638, is perhaps the most famous of the early-seventeenth-century gardeners associated with a great country house, as he was the principal gardener to Robert Cecil (created Earl of Salisbury), and working at Hatfield by 1610. A contemporary note on expenditure refers to work in the kitchen garden there: ‘diging dunging sowing & planting of Earbes Rootes hartichokes . . . & all other Earbes nessicarie [necessary] for the kichen with the keepping Clene of the gardin & geving Attendance for the sarving of the house with thes Nessicaries’. Under the gardeners in that kitchen garden alone were three workmen, two labourers and six women weeders at 6d a day, suggesting the scale of gardening operations in the early seventeenth century.30
At Knole, the nursery staff are also mentioned in the household catalogue, but presumably they dined in a chamber dedicated to the nursery. At the ‘Long Table in the Hall’ were seated various attendants, and, among others, a barber,