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much of the year. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Lord Fitzwilliam was accustomed to leaving his house at Milton, Oxfordshire, in the care of his steward, housekeeper and chaplain for years at a time. Although he planned to visit Milton every year from 1687, he scarcely set foot there until 1709.60 As intermarriage between landed families often concentrated estates under one name, many of the wealthiest landowners had more than one country seat and like their medieval forebears would pass the seasons travelling from one to another.

Most major landowners also maintained a London house, or at least spent time in the capital. As the century progressed, they might also visit fashionable places such as Bath, or travel abroad, with the result that many country houses remained principally in the sole care of servants for many months together. Horace Walpole’s father, Sir Robert Walpole, famously spent only a few weeks a year at Houghton, Norfolk, when he became prime minister. In his absence the household servants would show the visiting public around his famous art collection.61

The architects of the great country houses paid increasing attention to the rational planning of the service areas, particularly the kitchens and rooms for the preparation of foodstuffs, ensuring their interconnectedness with the laundry and dairy as well as with the household apartments that they served. Many houses built in the eighteenth century exemplify the symmetrical arrangement of these apartments, with kitchens and stables arranged either side of the main block, perhaps connected by a semi-raised basement level in between.

The Complete Body of Architecture (1758), by the Palladian architect Isaac Ware, sets out the classical ideals of country-house architecture throughout the century.62 It included a number of options for the classical house, placing the servants’ accommodation in wings. It was in such devices, he argued, that the very nature of architecture is expressed, and his concept certainly expressed the well-established hierarchy of the upper servants. Furthermore, in Book III Ware emphasises the architect’s flair for making an aesthetic virtue out of a social necessity – indeed, suggesting that it takes a real architect to work out the best way to incorporate the services and offices into the whole ensemble.

‘The next [most important] consideration is for offices, and here comes the first principle of elegance and contrivance in the plan. [The architect] is not to put the kitchen under the parlours, or the stables in a corner of a yard: a bricklayer could do that, we are speaking of the business of an architect . . . here shall arise, with little more expence, a centre, its wings and their communication, the whole regular and uniform.’63

Having dealt with the plan of the main house, he addresses the issue of the two wings:

That on the right hand may contain the kitchen, and offices, belonging to it, and the other the stables. The front of the right hand wing may be occupied by a kitchen entirely . . . To the left of the stairs may be a servants’ hall, sixteen foot square; and behind that a larder, twelve foot ten by fourteen foot six. In the centre of the other wing may be a double coach-house; for which there should be allowed the whole breadth of the wing, with ten foot six inches width in the clear, and on each side of these may be the stables.64

Later, he notes that where kitchens and offices are sited in wings, which is ‘commonplace in the country, where the ground is generally the property of the person who builds’, for practical reasons ‘there must be places of waiting nearer the principal apartments, for those servants whose business it is to be about the person of the master and the lady’.65

Again Ware saw an opportunity to use architectural placing and divisions as a way of protecting the aristocracy from exposure to the lowest ranks in the staff hierarchy. However, by careful manipulation of the design you could, he argued, keep the senior servants close at hand, for convenience of communication.