Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [46]
On the other hand, she recognised the dangers of children spending too much time in a great house without supervision lest they ran wild, getting ‘into every dirty office, where the young master must learn to drink and play at cards with the kitchen-boy, & learn to kiss his mother’s dirty maid for a mess of cream. The daughters are danced upon the knee of every clown and serving man, & hear them talk scurrilous to the maids.’114
Rather more poignantly, in Brief Lives John Aubrey related that Sir John Danvers once told him that the reason that the gentry liked their sons to take the Grand Tour was to ‘wean them from the acquaintance and familiarity with the Serving-men: for then parents were so austere and grave that the sonnes must not be company for their Father; and some company man must have.’115 This shows how long a tradition the distant parent, and the companionable servant, has been in the English aristocracy.
In the seventeenth century the management of a household began to devolve more from the mistress of the house, to whom it might prove onerous. In the 1670s, Mary Evelyn, the wife of the diarist, landowner and gardener John Evelyn, wrote a memorandum on household management for her husband’s young friend, Margaret, then newly married to the politician and courtier Sidney Godolphin, which principally consists of long lists of necessary household items, from linen to pewter and glassware. John Evelyn said later that the young Mrs Godolphin ‘never was House-keeper before, had lost her Mother long since & being from a Child, bred in Courts, may be thought (with reproch) not much to have busied her head about Oeconomique matters’.116
This friendly letter touched in important ways on the management of servants’ food: ‘What is left at dinner & that may handsomely be spar’d from the Servants (whom I am sure you will not abridge, but this will be the discretion of your woman, who you say shall be your Housekeeper) may [be] reserv’d for their Supper; though in London they have in most places only Bread & Beer. But here in the Country where they work continually and are much abroad, they will require Supper of Flesh, of which something is kept for your Breakfast.’117
A key piece of advice was appointing a trusted female to run the household by proxy, as Mrs Godolphin had asked about how best to manage accounts and servants: ‘all I can say is, That if you have a faithful Woman or Housemaid, it will cost you little trouble. It were necessary that such a one were a good Market-woman, & whose Eyes must bee from the Garret to the Cellar; nor is it enough they see all things made cleane in the House, but set in ord[e]r also.’118 A minor aside suggests that a large residential domestic staff at that time could be controlled by mistress and housekeeper in a way that non-resident domestics could not: ‘Use as seldom Charewomen and Out-helpers as you can [because] they but make Gossips.’119
To sum up, the faithful housekeeper ‘should bee the first of Servants stirring and last in bed, & have some authority over the rest, & you must hear her & give her credit, yet not without your owne Examination & inspection . . . It is necessary alsoe she should know how to write and cast up small sums & bring you her Book every Saturday-night, which you may cause to be enter’d into another for your selfe . . . such a servant (I tell you) is a jewel not easily to be found.’120 This advice clearly bore fruit. When Mrs Godolphin died in 1678, in his biography of her Evelyn mentions her concern, ‘care and esteem of those she left behind, even to her domestic servants to the meanest of which she left considerable legacies, as to the poor’.121
In 1685, the Evelyns sent a version of this document to Samuel Pepys, who filed it with a similar specification from Lady Rolles for what was needed in a household. This version ends with a list