Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [9]
The numbers involved in these households right up into the late sixteenth century could be breath-taking – although the household itself could shrink or swell as necessary. The Earl of Warwick travelled to London in the mid-fifteenth century with 600 liveried servants; William Cecil, Baron Burghley, employed 120 in 1587; while at the end of the sixteenth century 144 served the Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham Castle. Royal households, which set the standards, held the largest numbers. The 1318 Ordinance lists 363 servants in Edward II’s household, with 129 in the stables alone, whereas Henry VII’s is thought to have comprised over 800.3
In the thirteenth century around ninety great magnates ran what we would describe as ‘great households’, with roughly another forty-five bishops, abbots and priors living in similar style. And despite our modern view that this was a dangerous and insecure time, the numbers of these households apparently continued to grow, so that by the end of the fifteenth century it is now thought that there were perhaps as many as 1,500 landed individuals maintaining an aristocratic lifestyle.4
The Earl of Derby’s household in the mid-sixteenth century numbered between 115 and 140, only six of whom were women. The preponderance of males was probably, as suggested above, a reflection of the need for physical security, as the servants of a great household could still in theory be called on to act almost as a private army. In the household of courtier Sir Thomas Lovell in 1522–3, there were still only five female servants out of a total of at least ninety.5
The medieval and Tudor aristocrat expected a life of comfort, protection and elegance for himself and his immediate family, provided by tolerably well-mannered, cleanly dressed, deferential and dutiful attendants, who would in turn need trusted, more manual assistants. They, too, needed to be well cared for, to ensure their loyalty, trust and obedience, and in order to carry out their duties effectively. In such a household even the most menial servants would expect a greater degree of comfort and permanence than they would as an agricultural labourer.6
The senior servants – the leading household officers – played a particularly critical role in maintaining order and prestige. They would have been responsible for the management of houses and estates, and all that that entailed, overseeing maintenance, heating, cleaning and, above all, sustenance. The feeding of not only the family but a whole multitude of attendants and servants, as well as the hospitality shown to visitors of all ranks, lay at the heart of medieval culture, and was often on a massive scale.
We may be surprised by the survival of words in contemporary life that link us to this distant-seeming world. The word ‘waiter’ meant originally an attendant who literally waited until needed, for whatever purpose. The word ‘menial’ literally meant those who worked for the household, from the old French word mesnie, derived from the Latin mansionata. This survival also extends to some of the distinctly English rituals in such places as City corporations and guilds, or Oxford and Cambridge colleges, such as the habit of having a separate high table for the Masters and Fellows of a college, and for the pudding course to be taken in a different room from the dining hall.7
This applies not only to these traditional, rarefied environments, self-evidently rich in historical reference, but to our everyday lives, for even the word ‘bar’ in an English pub comes from the plain, practical, wooden-plank surfaces of the buttery in the medieval great hall, from which the beer was served. It is a strangely comforting thought, as well as