1 - Servants: the problems

Summary

This is a book about servants, as ‘servant’ was understood in the past. To the modern mind, ‘servant’ evokes images only of grooms, housemaids, cooks. Three centuries ago, it would have called forth the image of a host of ploughmen, carters, dairymaids, and apprentices. Servants were youths hired into the families of their employers. Hundreds of thousands of them were accounted for by Gregory King, and then concealed in his famous table of ‘Income and Expense of the Several Families of England, Calculated for the Year 1688’, subsumed under the caption ‘Heads per family’, just as the servants themselves were contained within the households of farmers, tradesmen, artisans, handicraftsmen, Temporall and Spirituall Lords. Servants constituted 13.4 per cent of the population in sixty-three scattered listings of parish inhabitants, dating from 1574 to 1821; from the figures available we can infer that servants, most of whom were youths, constituted around 60 per cent of the population aged fifteen to twenty-four. In other words, most youths in early modern England were servants; that so few are now is one of the simplest differences between our world and theirs.

That so many youths were servants has many consequences. As Macfarlane put it, ‘the institution of servants and apprentices helped solve the problem of what to do with children between puberty and marriage’. While servants and apprentices waited for marriage, they had opportunities to learn skills and save their wages, free from the responsibility of maintaining themselves.