Servants
In Tudor Hackney the word “servant” covered many different possibilities. In the twenty-first century the term almost certainly brings a vision of a domestic drudge, or at best of a besuited butler. Five centuries ago, most people were someone else’s servant – and until quite recently, it was usual to sign formal letters “I remain your obedient servant”. It is only in the term civil servant that the word now retains its connotations of work beyond the domestic sphere.
Ralph Sadleir worked in Thomas Cromwell’s household, and referred to himself as Cromwell’s servant. Thomas More, when he was accused of treason, called himself “the king’s good servant, but God’s first”. A grand household would employ lots of different kinds of servant, some of them of a high status. Some, but not all, of them would be involved with the tasks of cooking and cleaning.
Everything in a Tudor house was harder work than it is today. To take just one example, imagine that Ralph Sadleir needs some hot water for a bath At Sutton House, the water is drawn up from a well (still there). So first someone needs to turn a handle to let a bucket on a roller and chain down into the well, then draw the full bucket back up and carry it into the kitchen – perhaps eight times for a bathful of water. The water is then heated in a large copper over the kitchen fire, and the hot water carried upstairs, this time in large jugs, and poured into a movable wooden bath set up in front of the bedroom fire. The bath would usually be lined with a linen sheet. When Sadleir has had his bath the dirty water is scooped into buckets, carried back downstairs and the water taken outside and thrown into the midden pit (drain).
All heating is by means of wood or coal fires or of wood-burning stoves, which of course need lighting, constant tending, and the ash to be cleared and carried. The bigger and more important the room, the bigger the fireplace and the more work the fire took to keep going.
In the kitchen, at Sutton House and in all gentry houses, all tasks take longer than in the twenty-first century, and many are much harder work. Not only is all water and fuel to be carried, but food and cooking are a complicated business. At Sutton House, much will be produced on the home farm, and almost all cooking is done from scratch.
A household of the size of Sutton House would be likely to need at least a dozen servants to run it – without counting the gardeners, grooms and farm workers who work out of doors. We know the name of one of them, Gervase Cawood, Ralph Sadleir’s house steward, whose account book survives.
Sadly, the surviving records, although they tell us about Sadleir’s increasing riches in terms of holdings of land, do not record the names of the other servants. However, it is likely that many of them were Hackney people. It is also likely that most of them were men.
In the grandest households, almost all the servants, including the cooking and cleaning staff, were men. Women were employed as companions to the lady of the house, as nursemaids for the children and as laundresses. In a smaller establishment such as Sutton House, there were likely to be a higher proportion of women servants.