Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [59]
Hannah Glasse includes many accepted techniques for cleaning and is clearly a great believer in fresh air:
For sweeping the stairs a little wet sand is recommended on the top stair, to help keep the dust down. All this you are to get done before your mistress rises. When the family is up, go into every bed chamber, throw open all the windows to air the rooms, and uncovering the beds to sweeten and air them; besides it is good for the health to air the bedding, and sweet to sleep in when the fresh air has had access to them, and a great help against bugs and fleas.69
Whilst scouring the house from top to bottom, housemaids were also expected to be properly modest in deportment and dress, and to be subservient, as is made clear by a note in the 1768 household book of the Duchess of Northumberland: ‘They are always to keep themselves clean & neat but not to dress above their station.’70
By the eighteenth century, the number of women servants in great country houses had swelled, and many had the most humble jobs. The former scullion, now a female scullery-maid, had to clean the kitchen and wash the cooking utensils used in the preparation of the meals – some of the most unforgiving work in the country house – as well as cleaning and preparing various foodstuffs, especially vegetables.
Hannah Glasse’s book gives the scullery-maid a messy and labour-intensive recipe for cleaning pewter, tin and copper: ‘Take a pail of wood ashes (either from the baker’s dyers or hot pressers, the latter is the best) half a pail of unslack’d lime, and four pails of soft water; boil them all in a copper together, stirring them; when they have boiled about half an hour, take it all together out of the copper into a tub, and let it stand cold, then pour off clear and bottle for use.’71
The laundrymaids too had a physically demanding job that was carried out in a series of outhouses, such as a washhouse and a dry laundry (with a range suitable to heat irons), often connected to the main service courtyard. They worked with their hands in very hot water, handling wet clothes such as shirts and neckcloths, bedlinen and towels, which then had to be starched, bleached, dried, pressed and ironed.72
The proper care of household linen was reckoned one of the most important demonstrations of good housekeeping and there were massive quantities of it. The inventory at Blenheim in 1740 lists ‘Damask and Diaper Napkins Sixty Seven Dozen and five, Table Cloths of the best Sort Ninety three, Stewards Table Cloths twenty Fine Sheets Eighteen pair, Servants Sheets Forty Five pair,’ and so on.73 At Shugborough in staffordshire in 1792, the inventory included ‘85 Damask tablecloths, 92 dozen damask table napkins, Damask breakfast cloths, 23, Damask tea napkins, 29 dozen,’ to which should be added seventeen pairs of ‘Holland sheets & pillowcases’, nineteen pairs of ‘second sheets’, and eighteen pairs of ‘second pillowcases’.74
Laundry work was largely done by hand. Sometimes washing was pounded with wooden bats, but it might also need steeping in a liquid such as urine or lye (an alkali cleansing agent made by soaking wood ash in water to extract potassium salts), as well as soap-washing and boiling. Bleaching was a regular event, and up until the early twentieth century most country houses had specially dedicated bleaching or drying grounds, where linen, which could easily yellow, was laid out on long grass to dry and bleach in the sun – preferably a midwinter sun.75
The dairymaid separated cream, churned butter and made cheese for consumption in the house. The dairy was usually specially designed to remain cold and was sometimes an ornamental feature of the grounds of a great house. It had to be kept very clean, as the author Thomas Hale observed in the Compleat Book of Husbandry (1765): ‘First thing, and the most important of all in a Dairy is Cleanliness. Not only the vessels and utensils but the very Floor, walls and ceiling, everything that is in