Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [36]
Some bequests provide an insight into the love-hate world of country-house service. In a will of 1686, Sir Nicholas Bacon of Shrubland Hall, Suffolk, originally left a bequest of £20 to Edward Inolds, the boy who waited on him, but later cut him out of the will, describing him as ‘that ungratefull’ rogue. In 1697, Sir Richard Earle of Stragglethorpe in Lincolnshire made a legacy to his servant, Thomas Waller, rather touchingly ‘begging of him to be sober’.44
The employer’s responsibility for the welfare and morals of members of his household, exemplified by such bequests, is reflected in the many seventeenth-century manuals of guidance on household management, which emphasised this strongly. Robert Cleaver’s A Godlie Forme of Householde Governmente (1603) exhorts masters to look after their servants, ‘not onely in providing for them wholesome meat, drink and lodging, and otherwise to help them, comfort them, and relieve and cherish them in health as well in sicknesse as in health.’
Cleaver also advised that the master should rule and correct the menservants, and his wife the maidservants, a recurring theme right up to the early twentieth century, ‘for a man’s nature scorneth and disdaineth to bee beaten of a woman, and a maides nature is corrupted with the stripes of a man.’ Servants, Cleaver wrote, should in their turn be ‘so full of curtesie as not a word will be spoken by their masters to them, or by them to their masters, but the knee shall be bowed withall: they can stand hour after hour before their masters, and not once put on their hat’.45
A sense of responsibility for the lives of your employees was surely not unreasonable in the circumstances of the time. Some guidance, however, seems alarmingly harsh today. Sir Miles Sandys in 1634 wrote of the importance of the householder addressing the morals of those in their care: ‘as neere as you can, to beate down Sinne in them, especially that of Swearing.’46
Clearly, physical chastisement of servants was not uncommon. Adam Eyre, another Puritan and a captain in the civil war, recorded in his diary for 9 October 1647: ‘This night I whipped Jane for her foolishness as yesterday I did for her slothfulness . . . and hence I am induced to bewail my sinfull life, for my failings in the presence of God Almighty are questionless greater than hers are to me.’47
In his tract, An Exposition of the Domesticall Duties (1622), William Gouge wrote: ‘Some [employers] make no difference betwixt servants; but esteem of bad and good all alike; they think that the best servants do but their duty. . . . But it is a point of wisdom to account a duty as a kindness; especially when good will of heart is joined with outward performance of duty.’ Paying good wages was, he thought, just such a matter of duty: ‘When masters do altogether detain their servants’ wages; this is a crying sin, which entereth into the ears of God.’ Employers should value the skills and loyalty of their staff, for ‘Masters and Mistresses are flesh and blood as well as servants, and so subject to weakness, sickness, old age, and other distresses, wherein they may stand in great need of servants’ help.’48
Sir Henry Chauncy eulogised as a model employer Sir Charles Caesar of Bennington (who died in 1624). He was apparently treated with some awe by his servants.
very regular in his Life, and orderly in his Family [meaning household], which made the Lives of his Servants very easie, and his House very quiet, never reprimanding a Servant oftner than once, and if the Party offended again, he was silently discharged without Noise or Notice of his Displeasure.49
Often in the story of a particular house, one servant stands out on whom the head of the household especially relies. Sir Henry Slingsby, 1st Baronet of Red House in Yorkshire, was eventually