Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [70]
When the Kildares were based at Leinster House, their town house, the smaller number of servants left behind at Carton were on ‘board wages’, which meant that their salaries were adjusted to reflect the fact that they had to supply their own meals but could have as much garden produce as they wanted. Married servants were not allowed to live in the house, and the steward was instructed that they were not permitted to eat or drink within its walls ‘except now and then, [and] they and their Wives may be asked to Dinner on Sunday to live in Harmony with them so far as to carry on their mutual business to Lord Kildare’s advantage’.41
The mention of the married servants’ dining arrangements is intriguing, as household servants were more often unmarried in English houses. The English agriculturalist Arthur Young, who had worked as a land agent at Mitchelstown Castle and whose survey of the improvements in architecture and agriculture was published in 1780 as A Tour in Ireland, commented on the high incidence of married Irish servants: ‘Marriage is certainly more general in Ireland than in England. I scarce ever found an unmarried farmer or cottier; but it is seen more in other classes, which with us do not marry at all; such as servants. The generality of footmen and maids, in gentleman’s families, are married, a circumstance we very rarely see in England.’42 In England at this time, there seems to have been a widespread prejudice against employing indoor married servants in English country houses, possibly because of anxiety about divided loyalties, but also to avoid multiplying dependants for the house – and the provisioning of such dependants.
Allowances were given for livery uniforms. From 1 January 1767, footmen at Carton were given 20 shillings a year for ‘a Pair of black Worsted Shag Breeches, for a fine Felt Hat with a Silver Chain Loop and Button, and a Horse Hair Cockade’. It was a case of take it or leave it: ‘Those who do not chuse to accept of it, to let me know that I may discharge them’.43
The duchess’s sister Louisa ran a famously meticulous household at Castletown and once wrote to her sibling: ‘As to servants I think we treat them too much as if they were dependents [sic], whereas I cannot think them so much so, for I am sure they give us a great deal more than we give them, and really if we consider it, ’tis no more than a contract that we make with them.’ This was a gentle reminder to the more conservative sister of the changing nature of the family or household in the traditional sense.44
The presence of the copy of the Kildare regulations at Alnwick Castle is an intriguing little mystery in itself. The castle was much restored as the principal country seat of the Duke of Northumberland in the 1750s and 1760s, when it had been virtually derelict. During this intensive building activity, there were also major attempts to monitor the activities of the servants, and the duke and duchess apparently requested a copy of all the household regulations drawn up for Lord Kildare. The archives contain a series of notes made from the late 1760s through to the 1790s, leading up to a final, all-encompassing version dated 16 August 1805.45 This document may have been modelled on the Kildare Household regulations and was perhaps inspired by the Northumberland Household Book of 1511/12, which was edited and published at about this time.
As well as illustrating the complexity of running large establishments, it reveals that the duke and duchess set great store by good household management as a reflection on themselves. It covers the duties of all the servants, the upper servants in particular, down to such obvious minutiae as who tends which fires in the house: ‘The fires, in all the Stranger’s Bed Chambers, and Dressing Rooms, are to be taken care of by the servants of those who inhabit them.’46 Guests would usually be travelling with their own servants or have servants assigned to them.
It is clear from the document’s conclusion that the duke’s household had not always been so well organised:
If any