Up and Down Stairs (7 page)

In the Earl of Northumberland’s household, the next rank of household officers – made up of gentlemen – are listed: the ushers, carvers, servers (sometimes known as sewers), and the waiters and henchmen. These would largely be drawn from noble or gentry backgrounds and would provide immediate attendance on the earl while simultaneously learning the skills of serving described in John Russell’s treatise.

The next rung down are the ‘yeomen’, skilled individuals working under the gentleman servitors, as well as the choristers of the chapel. Below them come the yet more ‘hands on’ servants of the day with very specific responsibilities suggested clearly by their titles. The word ‘groom’ at this date does not have the sole association with the stables that it has in later times, but rather means a dedicated male attendant, and originally a young boy.
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There would be a groom for every office: the ewery, the pantry, the cellar, the buttery, the kitchen (the larder), and the hall, plus a groom porter, a groom of the stirrup,
a groom of the palfreys (saddle horses), and a groom of the supterman (reserve horse), as well as a groom of the chariot (or carriage).

Even the grooms might have their underlings, including ten children for the offices of the household: one for the wardrobe, one for the kitchen, one for the scullery, one for the stable, one for the carriage, one for the bakehouse, one for the arrasmender (who took care of valuable tapestries), one for the butchery, one for the catery (catering department) and one for the armoury. There was also one man whose job it was to ‘serve the grooms of the Chamber with Wood’ – for the open fires.
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Most large medieval and Tudor households employed musicians, who came rather low in the pecking order. Additional entertainers were presumably employed on an ad hoc basis. The Earl of Northumberland’s household included three minstrels, playing a tabouret, a lute and a rebec or early form of fiddle. Some households, like that of Sir Thomas More, also kept a fool, a practice that was especially popular at court.
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The Northumberland household list records one footman, two falconers, a painter and a joiner (the latter to assemble, or repair, household furniture). There was also a huntsman in charge of deer hunting, including the preservation of game against vermin and poaching. There was a ‘Gardener of the place where my lord Lyeth for the time to have meat and drink within’, presumably a hunting lodge. (This is believed to be the hunting tower described by Leland where he is thought to have kept his ‘secret household’ during audits.)

There were ten in the accounts office, including two clerks of the foreign expenses, one clerk of the works, one clerk of the wearing book, and two clerks to write under the clerks of the foreign expenses. The whole number, at the time of this survey in 1511/12, ‘of all the said persons in Household is 166’.
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There is some evidence that the full number was not permanently in attendance, but served in rotation.

Every particular of the house’s activity is accounted for in this book, showing how scrupulously a large household had to be run to avoid chaos, or, more importantly perhaps, embezzlement and theft,
problems still current today in any large establishment. Considerable economic management was required, so the book sets out in meticulous detail the provision of all meats, fish and hops for brewing. It also covered liveries, which we will look at later in this chapter. There was also stipulation that all bread should be baked on the premises and not bought in, and that beer likewise be brewed by the household itself. To give just one example, the breakfasts allowed for each level in the household were specified down to the exact quantities of bread, fish and beer each was to receive. Beer would be brewed on site and was regarded as a kind of healthy liquid bread rather than an intoxicant.
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To modern eyes, these households seem more like tribes or villages than a single entity. They were a complex organism of interrelated activities and duties.
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In principle, servants were often employed for a year at a time, although even in the greater households many carried on working for the same masters for decades. There are even recorded cases of contracts being dissolved between masters and servants by virtue of the unacceptable behaviour of a master.

However, there were also numerous examples of generous bequests reflecting long and harmonious relationships based on great loyalty and mutual trust and, no doubt, the need to give long-serving retainers some security in their old age. Many great landowners had special relationships with particular hospitals (that is, almshouses), such as the Bishops of Winchester with St Cross, and the Duke of Suffolk with God’s House at Ewelme.
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Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham, who died in May 1345, left numerous bequests to his servants. These included 40 marks to his chamberlain; 10 marks and a robe and the apparel of the hall to William the porter; 20 shillings to his chaplain; and 5 marks for clothing to his confessor. One cook, John of Bridgford, received 10 marks and a robe, together with the brass and wooden vessels of the kitchen. His pantler and butler (here a combined post), John of Colne, received 10 marks, a robe and the vessels of the pantry and buttery. There was even a bequest of 5 marks to a maidservant, Alice de Wadnowe.
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Luttrell was also notably the commissioning patron of the great Luttrell Psalter with its famous illuminations, now preserved in the
British Library. Those illustrating psalms 113–14 show food being prepared in a kitchen, and then being carried by servants (including the loyal John of Colne) to be served to Sir Geoffrey and his household. The miniatures are considered so distinctive that some of the figures depicted at the table may be actual individuals.
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It is possible that some servants provided support and loyalty beyond expectations. A valued friendship between master and servant was later recorded by the 9th Earl of Northumberland: ‘And in this I must truly testify for servants out of experience, that in all my fortunes good and bade, I have found them more reasonable than either wyfe, brothers or friends.’
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Service in a great household in the late medieval and Tudor periods was looked upon by most of those employed as something of a privilege – and the complex hierarchies of staff would have reflected those of society at large. Even the yeoman servants (who had more everyday work) enjoyed a degree of security and patronage. They could also expect what was then a reasonable standard of living, certainly in terms of subsistence, food and drink, as well as lodging (all of which formed a substantial part of their wages). Not surprisingly, because of the degree of intimacy mentioned, servants might often be drawn from the same families, generation after generation. For instance, the surnames of servants in the accounts of John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, in 1462, are largely the same as those for the 2nd Duke in 1525.
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Some servants, like our friend John Russell, might remain in noble service for their whole careers, enjoying impressive promotions. In the fourteenth century, William de Manton was wardrober to Elizabeth de Burgh; by 1340 he had become the clerk of her chamber. Later still he was her executor and after her death he transferred to the household of her son-in-law, the Duke of Clarence. In 1361–5 he had reached the post of keeper of the wardrobe to Edward III.
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Households would break up on the death of a nobleman, not least because by that time an adult son might well already have a full household of his own.

If, as the Northumberland Household Book makes clear, the household servants were mostly male, they were also predominantly
young; indeed, a significant proportion of the young male servants were effectively attached to the house as part of their education, to learn etiquette, discipline and all manner of social polish, as well as to benefit from their proximity to powerful men. It is important that we see this process through medieval rather than modern eyes. For such service was not considered servile; rather it was an expected and necessary part of the life of a young aristocrat.

These young attendants, from noble and gentry backgrounds, would serve for a designated period as if at a finishing school. This weaned them from reliance on their own household servants and prepared them for the duties they would command of others when they were heads of their own establishments. It made them familiar too with protocol on great occasions and taught them personal conduct as well as domestic organisation. It was also intended to give them political connections that could lead to advantageous marriages or positions at court, and certainly to lifelong alliances.

Daniele Barbaro, the sophisticated Venetian ambassador to England in the 1540s, regarded the practice of sending children away at seven or nine, for seven or more years, as somewhat cruel and remarked on their ‘want of affection’ for their children. He asked English nobles why they did it and they replied: ‘in order that their children learn better manners. But I, for my part, believe they do it because they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves, and that they are better served by strangers than they would be by their own children.’
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The young Geoffrey Chaucer was famously a page in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster (d.1363), and the wife of Prince Lionel, one of the sons of Edward III. Indeed, the earliest documentary evidence for Chaucer’s life are payments in her household account books for clothes and a gift ‘for necessaries at Christmas’.
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In the late fifteenth century, the child Thomas More waited in the household of Cardinal Morton. As William Roper, More’s son-in-law, recalled in his biography,
Vita Thomas Mori
: ‘In whose witt and towardnesse the Cardinall much delightinge, would often say of him unto the nobles that dyvers tymes came to dyne with him: This child here wayting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.’
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Well-bred young men would often receive a certain amount of formal education, sometimes with a cleric or later a professional schoolmaster in the nobleman’s household. They were often following in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, going to the same households for their education – much as later landowning families had attachments to different public schools and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. This habit was beginning to decline during the sixteenth century, when children might equally be sent to grammar schools, or to university, or to the Inns of Court.
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Roger Ascham, who was employed as tutor to Princess Elizabeth, wrote a famous book, published in 1570, when such household-based education was still very current. Its lengthy title was:
The schole-master, or plaine perfite way of teaching children to understand, write and to speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed for the private bringing up of youth in Ientlemen and Noblemen’s houses
. His book was in part inspired by a conversation concerning the scholars of Eton who were running away as a result of too heavy beatings. Ascham’s father had been steward to Lord Scrope, and he himself had been educated not at a school but in the household of Sir Humphry Wingfield.
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Most attendants in a medieval and Tudor household were rewarded with ‘liveries’, literally a living allowance. Originally, this meant more than just clothing (which later became the principal meaning associated with the word) and certainly covered money, food and goods, such as candles and wood. Clothing was usually dispensed as cloth, in a quantity and colour chosen to reflect the status of the recipient. Livery badges were worn in addition, often showing the family crest or coat of arms. Academic gowns in universities still continue this tradition of reflecting hierarchy in differentiated dress, as do the judiciary.
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These liveries acted both as a payment and also as a badge of belonging, an expression of being part of a great household, much like an army uniform. This meant that anyone wearing a livery would automatically come under the protection of that lord. Neat uniforms all in the same colours helped underline his prestige. In the household of Sir William Petre, secretary to Henry VIII, ordinary servants were given new clothes in spring and autumn. In the winter they wore
grey frieze, a coarse woollen cloth. In the summer this was replaced by grey marble, a parti-coloured worsted cloth that was woven to resemble the flecked veins found in marble.
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Most servants would be fed by the household, except grooms and pages of the marshalsea (or stables, derived from the old English word meaning ‘seat of the horsekeeper’) who were more likely to be paid cash wages in lieu of food. Numbers of portions served are recorded in household checker rolls, in terms of units of four (a mess) in which food was served.
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The upper servants who ran the great households must have been men of considerable ability and have identified very closely with their masters. George Cavendish, gentleman usher for the household of Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and chancellor of England, described in detail his experiences as Wolsey’s ‘gentleman usher’. He served Wolsey both at the height of his fame and in his final disgrace, ‘contynually duryng the terme of all his troble until he died’ in 1530. Cavendish’s account gives us a glimpse into the most prestigious non-royal household on the eve of the Reformation.
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Wolsey was, according to his biographer, served by a great number of ‘noble men and worthy gentilmen of great estymacion and possessions wt no small nomber of the tallest yomen [i.e. yeomen] that he Could get in all this Realm’. The physical appearance of the servant was as important a factor in the sixteenth century as it was for footmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mr Cavendish thought it quite right for a nobleman to prefer ‘any tall & comly [i.e. handsome] yoman unto his servyce’.
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