What was a Servant? (original) (raw)
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.
The Lay Servant in Franciscan Homiletics and Household Management Books
"We are All Servants": The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe (1000-1700), 2022
This article discusses the representation of lay servants in two important genre conglomerates produced in the Franciscan order (homiletic texts and household management books) between the 13th and the 17th century. The focus is on long-time structural elements behind the (gendered) representation of lay servants and on the potential repercussions of this representation for the reputation and position of servants.
The History of the Family, 2005
Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a btrueQ servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed bfilthyQ tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the btrueQ servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants. D
Resumen. En este artículo, basado principalmente en fuentes bibliográficas, intentaré bosquejar una panorámica de las características y la distinta importancia del servicio doméstico en las diversas regiones de la Europa moderna. En primer lugar resumiré el contenido de algunos influyentes estudios publicados hace décadas por autores como Philippe Ariès, John Hajnal y Peter Laslett. Debido a su papel pionero en la investigación, estos trabajos merecen una cierta atención pese a que sus conclusiones hayan demostrado ser parcialmente incorrectas en la actualidad. Después discutiré los resultados de recientes investigaciones sobre la materia, centrándome en las similitudes y diferencias existentes a nivel europeo, y mostrando los límites de las más recientes y fascinantes hipótesis, como las de David Reher, sobre los lazos familiares en la Europa del sur y el norte.
The Place of a Servant in the Scale
This article examines the servants and shopkeepers who play a surprisingly central yet critically unacknowledged role in Henry James’s fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that James’s frequent depiction of lower-class life is a sign not of an unsuspected interest in class but of his familiar interest in consciousness.