What was a Servant? (original) (raw)
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'For His Good and Faithful Service' : Being a Servant in Later Medieval England
'We are All Servants': The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe (1000-1700), 2022
Building upon previous work on servanthood in later medieval England, this study makes particular use of deposition evidence to explore the nature of the work of servants and their ties to their employers. It argues that servants were more often related by blood or marriage to their employers than has hitherto been noticed. This chapter was published in a collection edited by Isabelle Cochelin and Diane Wolfthal published by the Toronto Centre for Rennaissance and Reformation Studies.
"We are all servants" --The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe
Service in premodern Europe was a ubiquitous phenomenon in daily life but also constituted a key concept for defining relationships between individuals. Servants were men or women, of high or low status, poor or wealthy, children or elderly, Christian, Jewish or Muslim, and with few or great expectations for their future. For some, service was a lifetime occupation but for many it was a finite period in their life cycle. Even kings considered themselves to be servants in relation to God. Our approach seeks to conceive the history of service in the longue durée, starting around 1000, when primary sources become more abundant (thanks to the increasing reliance on written texts) and ending before the turning point of the late seventeenth century, when the conception of service changed significantly. Our approach is both empirical and theoretical: we examine service as a socio-historical reality and as a concept that defines personal and work relationships.
Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha, Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia, vol. 1, (Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, pp. 227-256., 2019
The terms naukar-naukari and banda for servants and dependents are in common parlance certainly in the Hindi-speaking South Asian subcontinent today, both used quite innocently of their historical and etymological roots in a Persian and Turkic world of the Middle Ages. There are several such words in circulation with long histories: terms such as 'ishq or gham, whose finely tuned Sufi implications are perhaps accessible only to music aficionados with nostalgic appreciation of Hindustani songs of a generation ago. The loss of meaning of banda and naukar-naukari, slave and servant, however, is of a different order altogether since they were linked to larger social and political structural organisations where, even in the past, these two terms were perhaps most susceptible to ambiguity. As I hope to show in this Interjection, the mode in which slave and servant were cast in the textual literature of the Middle Ages and early modernity possessed a great elasticity of meaning that was always inferred contextually: crystal clear to those who used it, if somewhat more ambivalently received by those to whom it was addressed. In other words, we may remark today at the pliability that surrounded the usage of these terms but that would be from an entirely modern perspective; as a part of a lived experience of service, participants were well aware of their precise location in a range of stratified interpersonal relationships, the complicated manner in which these were frequently reported alerting us to the great investment that people attached to their meanings.
Frequently eighteenth-century service is described as a life-cycle stage used to build up the financial wherewithal to set up house. As such it was central to the way youth or girlhood was traversed, and studies of adolescent years rightly emphasise the importance of service. However, this narrative, while largely accurate, is also problematic. What happened when service did not end with marriage, or when a woman remained single well into adulthood? In practice, servants were found among both the married and single, and among the young and the old. Concentrating on the eighteenth century, and incorporating material from Nordic Europe, this article teases out some of the nuances in the context and experience of service that partially disrupt the established narrative.
Servants in rural Europe, 1400–1900
Women's History Review, 2018
As farmers and farming communities increasingly grapple with issues of sustainability and environmental impact in seeking to address labour shortages, the social and economic aspects of agricultural production in a free market economy as framed by current commentators and policy makers, have begun recently to gain fresh attention. The ways in which agricultural production has been impacted, and managed, relative to the ebb and flow of labour supply-itself affected by what was once referred to simply as 'the Land' (soil, climate, the effects and requirements of the long durée of food production), by war, famine and plague, not just the vagaries of market and demand-already has a long and complex history. Yet, as Servants in Rural Europe demonstrates, approaches to the subject to date have been rather selective in terms of the forms of labour studied, the periods and places addressed, and the sources used. It is not that the topic has never been covered. If we look just at nineteenth-century Britain for example, recent rural histories such as those by Nicola Verdon and Alun Howkins, and earlier accounts by Pamela Horn and G. E. Mingay among others, have considered the place of 'servants' in the rural economy. Together with women's and social historians like Leonore Davidoff, Caroline Steedman and Alison Light, they have addressed in particular the part that servants, especially girls moving from petty places on farms to more established service positions in market and industrial towns, may have played in the gradual process of internal migration from country to city. Though often neglected by historians, as Pamela Cox observed, the primary sources often recognise the prevalence of servants within the working population as a whole: to bemoan, as C. S. Orwin did in 1944-45, the loss of the 'High' farm or the 'great' house as the training ground for domestic servants, or to note, as in the 1881 Census, the very large size of the service category as a whole. In 1881, one in every 22 persons, across all ages, 'was an indoor Domestic Servant'. Proportionately, 'their numbers were "lowest in the mining and manufacturing parts, higher in the agricultural districts, and highest in towns, especially in such towns as are the habitual resorts of the wealthier classes." In 1881 for example there were 57,602 Norfolk-born women in London and the southeast .' (Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, pp. 12-14) The commonplace nature of service was even recorded in art. In Richard Redgrave's Going into Service (1843) we see a girl leaving her (country) home, dressed in smart clothes (ready for a more distant, formal, domestic position after her petty place), saying farewell to her grandmother, brother and sister. But, despite these textual and visual sources, it is often difficult to track the movement of specific individuals (they would probably, as Howkins argued, have moved in stages, commensurate with their sex, age and skill), and to trace their experiences, which varied locale by locale, case by case. Even for those who remained in the country, the difficulty of tracing 'service' at the level of individual experience is made more difficult because this was a very fluid, largely young, population, working within many forms of 'service'. So far I have addressed only the story of 'domestic service': when we turn to 'farm' service, we see fewer accounts in the literature, with less in the Early Modern period than in the Modern, bar the groundbreaking work of
"Introduction", Servants' Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century, vol. 1
Servants' Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, 2019
Why has domestic servants and service been a marginal theme in the histories of South Asia? The introduction to this volume brings past and present, everyday and structural modes of explanation together, with a close analysis of the historiographical gaps and trends to answer the question.
in “We are all servants”: The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe 1000-1700, 2022
A spell for bards, wizards, and warlocks, advertised on the web, promises to conjure up an unseen servant, "an invisible, mindless, shapeless force that performs simple tasks at your command. " 1 Numerous publications, including some in this volume, have shown that sometimes close relationships arose between master and servant. 2 But the ideal of the unseen servant also has a long history, reaching back to medieval and early modern art and architecture. If employers were fond of their servants, they rarely commissioned art that visualized this. Instead most images of servants depict them either as negative foils for the master or mistress or as secondary figures who are pushed to the side, cut off by the frame, overlapped by other figures, cast in shadow, seen from the back, or otherwise represented as of little importance. 3 Furthermore, when the patrician class wanted at times to display a large assembly of servants wearing livery or the lord's emblems as a sign of their wealth, status, or magnificence, this display rarely included the low status workers who washed the dishes, scrubbed the floors, emptied the chamber pots, and lugged water or firewood up and down stairs. One ideal was to keep such servants "far from the eyes, ears, and nostrils of household owners, " as Guido Guerzoni puts it. 4 This essay explores French, German, Italian, Dutch, English, and Flemish images from the twelfth through the seventeenth century that portray the servant as invisible. The first part examines how servants' physical labour was rarely visualized, and, when it was depicted, it was shown through a visual code. The second part demonstrates how wages were generally not represented, even when the accompanying text mentions them. 1 https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Unseen%20Servant#content. Accessed 1 June 2020. I would like to thank Isabelle Cochelin for including me in the conference that she organized, inviting me to co-edit this volume, and for her invaluable comments on an earlier version of this article. This essay developed from my forthcoming book, titled Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700, under contract to Yale University Press. 2 See, for example, the essays by Laumonier and Couling in this volume. 3 For exceptions to this rule, see my forthcoming book cited in note 1.
Good to Think with: Domestic Servants, England 1660-1750
This article surveys scholarship dealing with domestic service in England at the latter end of early modernity. Neglected by British social historians of 'productive' working classes, servants began to attract serious interest only after demographers of the 1970s showed that in the north and west of pre-industrial Europe youths of all social ranks passed several years in 'life-cycle service'. The concept has proved controversial, but fruitful for study of the family and of the many functions performed within the extended household. In the 1980s feminism, and the revival of servant-keeping, stimulated interest in modern domestic workers, to whom those of earlier times were often assimilated. Th e focus has since shifted to radical changes (feminisation and proletarianisation) taking place in the later eighteenth century, and away from the complex hierarchies typical of great houses onto middling-sort servant-keeping. Recently historians have investigated the agency enjoyed by eighteenth-century servants, and aff ective aspects of household relationships. Archival research, facilitated by digitalisation, studies of material culture and household spaces, willingness to read between the lines and against the grain, now off er greater insight into the experiences of and cultural forms used by this group of labouring-class men and women.
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