Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [47]
The reduction in the numbers of gentlemen-status attendants was reflected in architectural terms. This is the century of the ‘back stairs’, with the provision of a separate servants’ hall at a distance from the ‘polite’ quarters of the house. This is vividly illustrated by one late-seventeenth-century treatise on architecture, ‘On planning a country house’, written by Sir Roger North, in which he observes that ‘it is an inviolable rule to have the entrata in the midle. But this must not be the common passage for all things, in regard [to] your freinds [sic] and persons of esteem should pass without being annoyed by the sight of foul persons [that is, the servants], and things must and will be moving in some part of a large and well inhabited dwelling.’ He argued: ‘Therefore, for such occasions there must be a back entrata. . . . The like is to be sayd of stayres. For the chief must not be annoyed with disagreeable objects, but be releived [sic] of them by a back-inferior stairecase.’123
As for servants’ sleeping accommodation, there was a continuation of the pattern created in the late medieval and Tudor period, in that lower servants’ bedrooms were usually in garrets, sometimes in the small rooms behind the upper part of a gable or above stables. In the late 1680s, on a visit to the architecturally advanced Coleshill House in Leicestershire, built in the 1650s, Celia Fiennes noted in her diary ‘several garret rooms for servants furnished very neat and genteel’.124 The evidence of wills and inventories does not suggest that many such rooms, except those of the most senior household officers, were particularly well furnished and they were often shared.125
Dining in the early part of the seventeenth century still largely took place in the hall but by the end of the century servants and tenants no longer dined alongside the immediate family in the public sphere of the house. The earliest reference to a servants’ hall seems to be in 1654, when the inventory was taken at Aston Hall in Warwickshire, which was built in the 1630s; in the later seventeenth century, such halls are also recorded at Charborough in Dorset, at The Vyne and at Belton House, both in Hampshire.126 In an inventory of 1664, the servants’ hall at Aldermaston House in Berkshire is said to contain a large table, a side cupboard, two old Turkey chairs (meaning that they are decorated with knotted embroidery), an elbow chair, two Turkey-work stools and a candlestick.127
In his diary for September 1677, John Evelyn expressed his admiration for the newly built Euston Hall in Norfolk, noting the quality (and the separateness) of the servants’ accommodation, with ‘appartments for my Lord, Lady, and Dutchesse, with kitchins & other offices below, in a lesser volume with lodgings for servants, all distinct . . . The out-offices make two large quadrangles, so as never servants liv’d with more ease & convenience, never Master more Civil.’ Later he adds: ‘He has built a Lodge in the Park for the Keeper which is neate & sweete dwelling and might become any gentleman of quality.’128
However, when gentleman and amateur architect Roger Pratt wrote down his principles for designing a country house in 1660, he was concerned that bedchambers for family and guests be served by a nearby servants’ lodging that had access to the back stairs. Each of the chambers, he declared, should ‘have a closet, and a servant’s lodging with chimney, both of which will easily be made by dividing the breadth of one end of the room into two such parts as shall be convenient’. Nevertheless, he did not recommend servants’ garrets above bedchambers