From Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ to Robert Altman's _Gosford Park_, the English country house plays a role in the imagination as it has in English society and history. It is a role that has changed greatly over the centuries, as has the role of the servants who ran the places. As Jeremy Musson describes in _Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant_ (John Murray), we seldom hear the word "servant" anymore, but "service" was what everyone used to do through the sixteenth century. Lords served the king, children served parents or went to the households of their parents' contemporaries to serve. A carryover from the time is the closing of a letter, "Your obedient servant." In medieval English, "servant" was used to mean someone who labored for a family and was lodged within its home. But "family" meant something else at the time, too, and covered everyone who lived in a household, taking on the meaning of mere kin during the eighteenth century. Such service signifies a particularly intimate relationship, often as fraught with difficulties as any family tie but often giving sustenance in both directions. The Earl of Northumberland wrote four hundred years ago, "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 wyfe, brothers or friends." Musson gives plenty of instances where the relationship did not go so well as that, but still the contributions of servants to the country houses through the centuries were an essential part of British history, and this is a lively and important volume to understand them and their places.
One of the important changes over the centuries was the increasing participation of women as servants. Medieval and Tudor kitchens were staffed by men; this might be because the large-scale cooking required workers who could carry heavy utensils and food supplies. A cookbook of 1684 mentions alarm at the fashion for French male cooks, who, as Musson says, "remain much in evidence for the next three centuries." There were often sexual impositions by masters upon female staff (Musson reminds us to read Pepys), but sometimes there were fairy-tale ends to affairs. Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh had been a famous rake, but in 1825 he was 71 years old. That didn't keep him from being transported when he heard a new dairymaid singing, and he proposed marriage on the spot. The girl was shocked, and Sir Harry calmed her by saying, "Don't answer me now, but if you will have me, cut a slice out of the leg of mutton that is coming up for my dinner today." It turns out that the cook was irritated at the adjustment of the mutton, but the dairymaid had him, and they were happy for the rest of his life. Any household needs to get its cooking and cleaning work done, but upper English families had a particular need for footmen. In medieval and Tudor times, a footman was the insignificant servant who would run (hence the term for him) ahead of traveling nobles to announce their arrival or to run messages. By the eighteenth century, footmen were a sign of status, well dressed with powdered wigs, traveling at the back of the coach rather than running ahead. They were so important for show, and so derided by the public for the ostentatiousness of their post, that they were a target for a tax on male servants in 1777, a luxury tax to help pay for the war against the colonies.
A system of country house service which had changed through the centuries essentially vanished forever in the twentieth. Workers had wider horizons by then, and girls could work in the shops, factories, or offices. World War One sent 400,000 servants to the trenches or to the factories that supported the war, where they found that the work was often comparable and the bosses less intrusive. Increased taxes on the great estates, and a modern desire for privacy, reduced the number of servants. Sir Earnest Gowers, writing about the threats to national heritage in 1950, said, "There is not now the labour available for domestic service; there is not the desire to do it; and there is not the money to pay for it." There is still a need for cooking and cleaning, but it is far less seldom done by live-in servants (and they are called "staff" now) than by firms that specialize in such services for hire. Some people still need a butler, but a director of a butler placement firm says, "Today, a butler is not so much about formal entertaining, but managing staff, sorting out the digital camera, iPod, Blackberry and house technology; liaising with contractors; and being the first port of call for bills and administration." Musson thus brings service into the 21st century. Much of what the servants were doing a hundred years ago would have easily have been recognized by their Tudor predecessors, but many of the traditions (and the excesses) described in this fascinating book are now gone forever.
