Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [54]
In many country houses, many household servants would be recruited from the families of tenant farmers and estate workers. In 1790, John Trusler recommended recruiting country dwellers of simple tastes and manners, in order to avoid ‘persons who had aspirations to ape the status of their employers.’ Another contemporary writer opined: ‘I have often thought of the great interest a nobleman, or gentleman of large estate, might always secure by only the proper choice of his domestics. Such an one cannot be without a great number of tenants, who might think their children honoured in the service of his lord-ship, and whose tenures would be a sort of security for the honesty and good behaviour of the servant.’31
By the 1730s the large numbers of well-born attendants, whether gentlemen or ladies-in-waiting, who had been such a feature of the aristocratic household in the previous centuries, have dwindled almost to nothing.32 Despite their disappearance, there still remained a distinctive hierarchy of servants, which reflected the divisions expressed by the seventeenth-century household. This fell into two distinct groups. There were the skilled and responsible upper servants, including stewards, male cooks, butlers, housekeepers, male secretaries, and sometimes chaplains and tutors, all of whom certainly wore their own clothes rather than livery, and there were the lower-ranking servants, who came under their management and control. The indoor menservants usually wore livery, while the women did the cleaning, or worked in the kitchens, looked after the laundry and worked in the dairy.
In this hierarchy, a steward was usually responsible for managing the house, the accounts and the administration. At the beginning of the century the same individual often acted as land steward, with additional responsibility for estate workers, tenants and estate rentals. Many houses also had a bailiff, who managed the home farm that supplied the needs of the house.33
Particularly in the larger houses, however, a separate house steward – in essence a house manager – remained an important fixture right up the end of the nineteenth century, reporting either directly to his master or to the land steward. John Mordant, in his Complete Steward, published in 1761, memorably described the house steward as ‘Domo-fac-totum, or Major Domo’. The house steward (occasionally known as a chamberlain) would have to oversee the complex operation when the family (meaning the whole household, including most of the indoor servants) decamped to London or one of the landowner’s other houses.34 In some households, the job of house steward and butler might be one and the same.
Giles Jacob’s Country Gentleman’s Vademecum, published in 1717, described the steward’s or house steward’s duty thus:
to take and state all Accompts, receive and pay all Monies, buy in the Provision for the Family, hire all Livery-men, buy all Liveries, pay all Wages, direct and keep in order all Livery-men (except the Coachman and the Groom) to be at His Master’s Elbow during Dinner, and receive all Orders from him relating to Government; to oversee and direct the Bailiff, Gardener, &c., in their Business; and also the Clerk of the Kitchen, Cook, & Butler, &c., to whom he delivers the Provision, Wine, Beer, &c., who give an Account of the spending [of] it.35
Some stewards were French, as their knowledge of French customs and manners was thought to give them a certain cachet, as well as making them useful if the family travelled on the continent.36
Under the steward, the clerk of the kitchens – a traditional role in the household – managed