Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [63]
At the beginning of the century, gamekeepers were primarily concerned with the preservation of deer. Hunting deer, or stag, was a traditionally aristocratic pastime, and it became an important status symbol to consume, or to make gifts of, venison. Edward Bishop, the gamekeeper at Hursley, Sir William Heathcote’s estate in Hampshire, in the 1730s, was charged with looking after the deer population as well as the sheep on the park, whilst destroying vermin. He was also expected to kill game for despatch to London, or dispersal as gifts.105
With a sharp rise in the value and status of venison in the eighteenth century came innumerable problems with armed poachers, as illustrated by the Black Act of 1723. This specified that any armed men who were caught with blackened or disguised faces in any ‘Forest, Chase or Park’ where deer were kept could be put to death.106 Clashes between gamekeepers and poachers were commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In fact, an Act of 1671 had restricted shooting small game and birds to qualified people, namely owners of land with £100 a year, or leaseholders of land worth £150 a year. Lords of the manor were allowed to appoint gamekeepers to enforce these regulations and in 1707, new legislation authorised these gamekeepers to shoot game themselves. Those appointed could be either estate servants, or, increasingly, local gentry who enjoyed shooting pheasants and the like as a sport.107
As shooting gained in popularity during the eighteenth century, gamekeepers needed to raise the numbers of game birds, which meant protecting them even more rigorously against poachers, especially at night. One gamekeeper complained of his daytime concentration being ruined because he had ‘laid ought [out] Many cold Nights in your Woods and Plantations When the Rest of your servants Were a Bed’.108 Indeed, battles with poachers became a preoccupation of all gamekeepers.
At Longleat their numbers swelled from two keepers in 1750 to seven by 1787. By 1818, their numbers nationally were recorded as 3, 336.109 The relationship between sport-loving landowning employers and their trusted gamekeepers could be close. The portrait of Jack Henshaw, the gamekeeper of Philip Yorke, which hangs at Erddig, carried the celebratory verse:
A lover true to fur, and feather,
Who tired not, nor lost his leather:
Near forty years, through bush and bry’r
He beated for the elder squire.110
Gamekeepers may well have relished their outdoor role, free of many of the constraints of indoor service, as they were not expected to live in the main mansion.
4
Behind the Green Baize Door
The Eighteenth Century
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COUNTRY house required huge numbers of staff with increasingly specialised duties. The landowner, or his wife and/or the upper servants, had to not only recruit but retain them. So where did they come from, how were they managed and where did they live? As might be expected, they were often found locally or through the recommendation of a third party, such as a family friend. The letters of aristocratic ladies positively hum with information about potential servants, not least in seeking or giving references. Senior servants – especially stewards and housekeepers in larger households – former senior servants and trusted tradesmen might all be given the task of finding suitable people.
There were also agencies, special registries and newspaper adverts but, as John Macdonald’s memoir shows, word of mouth was very effective. The open market took the form of the ‘Statute Fair’, a country fair that was held every autumn in most market towns and was set aside for the hiring of labour of all kinds. Contracts would usually initially be entered into for one year.1
On 22 September 1736 one gentry