Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [8]
As there have been many detailed studies of servants in different periods, this book is an intentionally broad sweep of history, bringing together the world of the medieval page with that of the Edwardian footboy, and the buttery and pantry of the Tudor mansion with the butler’s pantry of the nineteenth-century house. The subject has much to teach us about the human condition as well as about the nature, form and atmosphere of country houses. For many servants, their employment might have been just a job; some were hard pressed and discontented; others found their work so rewarding that they spent their whole working lives with the same family, perhaps advancing from menial roles to ones of considerable responsibility.
The below-stairs community, with its inevitable tensions and interactions, seems often to have been one of warmth and colour. Henry Moat, the famous butler at Renishaw Hall, whose role in the life of Osbert Sitwell has brought him his own entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, once wrote to his former employer, Lady Ida Sitwell, looking back fondly on his arrival in service in 1893: ‘You were a fine young lady then full of high spirits and fun. I would not have missed the career for the earth . . . I never felt lonely when I think of my past life, the cinema is not in it.’35
1
The Visible and Glorious Household
From the later Middle Ages to the end of the Sixteenth Century
BETWEEN 1400 AND 1600, the households of great landowners were many-layered and complex. Records of the lives of the servants responsible for all the manual work and the careful administration of these castles, abbeys and manor houses are varied and patchy, but one or two characters catch our eye. Some are more senior and long-serving, such as those servants kindly remembered with in legacies by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell; or those who moved on to greater things, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, who started life as a young page to the Countess of Ulster; or such figures as John Russell, usher to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who wrote a treatise on the duties of servants in the 1460s, or Penne, the butler at Wollaton, cited in the household regulations of the 1570s, required to keep his buttery ‘sweet and clear’.
Like supporting characters in a Shakespeare play, these attendants carry verbal messages and money, provide trusted intimacy, receive confidences, act as bodyguards or bear food and wine in ceremony to their lord’s table. Among them are henchmen or young gentlemen attendants, puffing up their chests and defending the honour of their respective households, just as in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They are the absent figures for whom Petruchio calls in The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, scene I:
‘Where be these knaves? What! no man at door
To hold my stirrup nor to take my horse?
Where is Nathaniel, Gregory, Philip?’
In this period the whole household, from the top to the bottom, gave attendance, physical help, safety and, most importantly, dignity to their lord and master. Their presence and activity ensured the display that underlined the position and power of their employer. In return they received, food, clothing and wages, security, and often not a little influence and opportunity of their own. In medieval English the term ‘servant’ was apparently used to describe someone employed to provide labour for a family and given lodging within the household; thus it was their accommodation within the (often peripatetic) household that defined their role.1
The households of the great landowners were slickly managed with some sophistication, far from the grungy chaos so beloved of film-makers. From the 1300s it is apparent that today they would be more akin to the running of a smart military regiment or a very grand hotel, with great emphasis laid on etiquette, discipline and carefully kept accounts. The aristocratic household was certainly complex, serving many functions at once.2
Lordly magnificence