DOMESTIC SERVICE IN YORKSHIRE 1650-1780 JANE HOLMES SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy AT THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NOVEMBER 1989 For my father and mother, George and Marion Holmes CONTENTS Page No List of Tables 3 Acknowledgements 4 Abstract 5 Abbreviations and Conventions 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1. Servants of the Gentry: Life in the Country House 47 Chapter 2. Servants of the Gentry: Master and Servant Relations 111 Chapter 3. Servants in Husbandry 140 Chapter 4. Apprentices 188 Chapter 5. Deviant Servants 235 Chapter 6. Literary Images of Servants 269 Conclusion 297 Appendix 315 References 317 Bibliography 362 2 LIST OF TABLES Page No 1 Wages of Servants in twelve Country Houses in Pounds 77 2 Comparison of wage rates for twelve Country Houses with Hecht, in Pounds 81 3 Top Ten Trades to which Apprentices Bound in York 202 4 Origins of Apprentices - Distances travelled to York 213 5 Some common reasons for discharge of apprentices, brought to Quarter Sessions 225 6 Types of crime (committed by servants) in the Quarter Sessions and Assize Court records 238 3 Acknowledgements My thanks are due first and foremost to my supervisor, Dr J A Sharpe, for his valuable advice, help and support throughout the research and writing of this thesis. I wish to thank also Mrs Marion Holmes, who typed and retyped several drafts of the thesis with great patience, skill and fortitude. Finally there are three people to whom I owe a great debt: my parents, George and Marion Holmes, for their unfailing love, encouragement and support, and John Whittaker, for his constructive advice and great patience. Without all of these, this thesis would not have been written. ABSTRACT This study is an investigation of domestic service, arguably one of the most distinctive phenomena in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The adherence to a particular region, Yorkshire, has no purpose other than to aid the investigation by working with a more coherent body of evidence and making use of the wealth of materials which exists in this county. It is not generally felt that domestic service differed in character in Yorkshire any more than in other areas of the country, other than that certain customs such as hiring fairs may have survived longer in this region than elsewhere. The study aims to highlight and bring together different types of service in pre-industrial England and in addition to investi- gate master and servant relations as well as the more fundamental aspects of service such as wages and conditions of service. This study fills a gap in research on service in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Studies based on English and French evidence have produced important and detailed records, but servants and the lower orders of society in pre-industrial England have hitherto been remote from our understanding, an almost invisible and barely audible group. Attention has largely been concentrated to date on the nineteenth century, for which more records are extant, and for which first-hand, oral accounts from ex-servants can be used, which have added to the appeal of this subject. 5 The conclusions reached in this study support and extend existing ideas on service in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By considering different types of servants, the study allows for comparison between the experiences of servants in differing environments and emphasizes the diversification of this occupational group in early modern England. Moreover, the study's concern with master and servant relations sheds light on the changes in social consciousness both before and during industrialisation, changes which impinge on the fundamental ideals of society - on the relations between the upper and lower orders and on the nature of authority and patriarchalism. 6 ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS Libraries and Record Offices British Library, London (BL) Public Record Office, London (PRO) Bradford District Archives (BDA) Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York (BIHR) Calderdale District Archives, Halifax (CDA) Hull City Record Office (Hull CRO) Hull University Archives, Brynmor Jones Library (Hull Univ) Humberside County Record Office, Beverley (HCRO) Leeds Central Library (LCL) Leeds District Archives (LDA) North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton (NYCRO) Rotherham Central Library (RCL) Sheffield City Library, Archives Division (SCL) West Yorkshire Archives Service, Wakefield (WYAS) Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Leeds (YAS) York City Archives (YCA) York Central Library (YCL) Journals Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series (YAS Rec Ser) Family and Estate Papers Chichester Constable (DDCC) Cholmeley (ZOG) Constable of Everingham (DDEV) Duke of Leeds (DDS) Gascoigne (GC) Gossip of Thorp Arch (Acc 2401) Grimston (DDGR) Lister of Shibden Hall (SH) Munby (Acc 54) Newby Hall (NH) Spencer Stanhope (Sp St) Stapleton of Carlton Towers (DDCA) Sykes of Sledmere House (DDSY) Temple Newsam (TN/EA) Vanbrugh (YM) Wentworth Woodhouse (WWM) Wharncliffe Muniments (WhM) 7 INTRODUCTION The one hundred and thirty years between 1650 and 1780, the time span of this study, lay between two of the most significant events of English history, the consequences of which reverberated throughout the whole of English society. The Civil War left an indelible impression on the fortunes of landed families, on the nature of government and the question of authority. The Industrial Revolution, which according to traditional historioEraphy completely changed the face of English society and its economic foundations, was stirring by 1780. 1 In the intervening period society was taking stock of itself, readjusting, reaffirming and reconsidering those fundamental aspects that had been so severely tested and thrown into such confusion by the events of the mid-seventeenth century. The social and political revolution of the 1640s is coming to be seen as having a somewhat more beneficial effect on society that its immediate aftermath might have suggested. Recent historians have suggested that the "days of shaking" had dissolved some of the more turbulent elements of society and brought to a premature head underlying problems that 2 would have exploded. The dramatic events of the revolution forced the ruling classes to re-evaluate their political attitudes in the light of what had happened. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 relations between the monarch and the ruling elites had finally worked themselves out and established a broader balance, producing a firmer constitutional base and sowing the seeds of the modern "state". Among the lower orders change was also taking place. The check on population growth which occurred after about 1640 created a level- ling out of society both physically and subconsciously, which was the basis for the birth of the more stable and settled social 8 3 context of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Conversely, the Civil War and ensuing social revolution had given a political voice to the lower orders, the Diggers, Levellers, sects, and others like them. Never before had the common people been so politically organised nor vociferous. Popular radicalism was shortlived, but in the national consciousness its emergence brought debate over social relations more to the fore and the attitudes of social levels to one another remained problematic into the ensuing century. One of the most crucial aspects of society which contemporaries felt was at stake in the mid-seventeenth century was that of order. Disorder was greatly feared as precipitating the collapse of the whole social hierarchy, and the time-honoured concept of order was fundamental to English society and remained so, well into the eighteenth century. It had strong connotations with the ideas of rank, degree, status and authority. The basic prescriptions for order were the concepts of degree and authority and it is from these that some of the greatest historical debates and themes of early modern England have arisen - the power and hegemony of the state, the nature of patriarchy and deference and the extent to which English society at this time was represented 4 by classes or degrees of people. Contemporaries described the social order of the seventeenth century in terms of a hierarchy made up of degrees of people. Society formed a vertical pyramidal structure. At the peak were the ruling classes who formed the minority in terms of numbers; the wider sections of the pyramid represented the middle and lower orders of society, with the poor occupying the very base and noticeably forming the widest and most numerous layer. The most famous exponent of the social structure in the late seventeenth century was Gregory King, whose detailed table of the "Ranks, Degrees, Titles 9 and Qualifications" of people in 1688, whatever its inaccuracies, has been taken as the basis for many interpretations of the social 5 structure at this time. Other commentators, earlier and later than King, agreed on a hierarchy of three or four degrees of people descending from the nobility and upper gentry, down through the professional and merchant classes, the yeomanry and finally to the common people 6 who included labourers, husbandmen, artificers and servants. The idea that this was basically a "one-class society", with all the power and wealth vested in a small minority at the top of the 7 social scale was expounded by one historian in the 1960s. This idea has not been well received. Broadly speaking, the two-group model of the haves and havenots, is too simplistic, even for English society in the seventeenth century, and it tends to distort the detailed layers within the hierarchy. Moreover, the use of the word "class" is now generally unpopular amongst historians, and deemed to be incom- 8 patible with the notion of hierarchy. Class is seen as being essentially a nineteenth century phenomenon, brought about by industrialisation and the economic forces of growth. As J C D Clark has said, the idea of class "merely provided the perspec- tive in which economic matters were viewed, a perspective drawn from a group loyalty prior to industrial capitalism being carried over and applied in a new age ..