Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [69]
Lord Byron recorded his dissatisfaction with the English servant who travelled with him on the continent:
The perpetual lamentations after beef and beer, the stupid, bigoted contempt for everything foreign, an insurmountable incapacity for acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him, like all other English servants, an encumbrance. I do assure you, the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far), the [dishes] he could not eat, the wines which he would not drink, the beds where he could not sleep.34
The logistics of feeding servants were a continual source of comment, although the management of households on such massive scales must have been challenging. A good picture of the daily life, and especially diet, of a large establishment is revealed in the papers of the Marquess of Kildare (created 1st Duke of Leinster in 1766). His rules for the government of his household, again still referred to as a ‘family’ just as in the seventeenth century, survive in a manuscript version at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland.35 It offers a valuable insight into the richest and grandest household in Ireland of the period – his country house at Carton. It also gives an impression of the busy life of Lady Kildare, at the centre of a whirlwind of demanding people, writing in a letter to her husband: ‘Plagued by servants, worried by the children, my dearest Lord Kildare, I have not been able to sit down and write to you till this minute.’36
The steward was charged, among other things, ‘Not to allow of Cursing and Swearing about the House &c or any riotous Behaviour but everything done in the most quite and regular Manner [and] To see that every Person do their own Business in the proper Manner and times, and if not, to inform Lord or Lady Kildare of it.’ In 1769, Lord Kildare penned a note to the steward: ‘I will not permit any dancing to be in any part of the house without my leave or the Duchess of Leinster’s, which occasions neglect, idleness, drinking.’ The duke wrote another to his English butler on the subject of his pantry, saying that ‘he must not by any means admit the pantry to be a meeting or a gossiping place for the under servants’, which presumably means that it was.37
Most interestingly, Kildare’s ‘rules for the feeding of the Family’, in the absence of Lord and Lady Kildare, set out mealtimes and fare. Good provision for servants was not only a statement of the wealth and patronage of the household but a matter of good administration, as underfed servants could hardly be expected to perform well.
The upper servants (steward, housekeeper, clerk of the kitchen, personal maids and valets) dined in the steward’s hall at 4 p.m., on ‘Mutton and Broth, Mutton Chops, Harrico or Hashed, Roast or boiled Pork with Pease Pudding and Garden things, Stakes, Roast, or boiled Veal with Garden things when veal is killed at Carton’. Once a week there would be mutton or beef pie; on Sunday, roast beef and plum pudding. ‘Particular care must be taken that all meat is well and cleanly dressed and good of the kind.’38
The servants’ hall – meaning the lower servants – dined at one o’clock on ‘boiled Beef, Cabbage and Roots, every Sunday to have a Piece of Beef Roasted and Plum Pudding, or any other kind of Pudding’. Thursdays were boiled mutton or pork, with vegetables, and for supper there would be bread and cheese. Salted fish was served once a week, on Friday, possibly in deference to the Catholicism of some of the servants.39
Each person who supped in the servants’ hall was given a pint of ale, a common practice in country houses all over the British Isles until the end of the nineteenth century. Whilst there were different regulations about the provision of ale, small beer, which was much weaker, was available to all, ‘no Person of the Family to be refused . . . as much as they shall drink’, between breakfast and 6 p.m. Beer was regarded, as in the medieval and Tudor eras, as a kind of liquid bread, as ordinary water was then unhealthy to drink.40