Up and Down Stairs | Jeremy Musson | Review by The Spectator

‘Servants’ and ‘service’ have not always meant ‘servility’. From the Middle Ages right through to the 16th century, everyone was servant to someone: a lord was servant to the king, a lesser lord to a greater. Children likewise served in the households of their parents’ equals: service was what one did before God, and before one’s superiors, in class, or age. And many servants were for display as much as utility: as the consumer durables of their time, their number gave their masters’ prosperity in physical form.

Gradually, as the world of family and servants became less closely entwined (by the end of the 18th century, ‘family’ meant ‘kin’, not merely all those who lived under one roof), servants became those who performed menial and unpleasant tasks. Musson, an architectural historian, is particularly deft at showing how this social separation found architectural shape, as country houses began to express the widening physical gap between employed and employers: servants’ halls began to appear, and servants no longer slept intermixed with the family. As soon as technology permitted, bells were wired in so that servants could remain out of earshot and yet within call.

While service was, for most of history, a harsh, never-ending cycle of toil and poverty, the myth of a golden age of domestic service stubbornly lingers. About this, Musson is ambivalent, focusing on examples of the lifelong devotion of servants to their upper-class employers, yet at the same time recognising that John Macdonald, an 18th-century footman, was closer to the norm, with 25 masters in his nearly 50 years of service: one every 20 months. And while some larger estates paid annuities or allowances for long service, that was, of course, at the whim of the employer. If the servants were sacked, or became ill and unable to work, or if the household was broken up on the marriage or death of their employers, not only did their jobs vanish, so did their homes. In 1893, Musson notes, the House of Commons Select Committee heard that ex-servants made up over 30 per cent of the residents of the Birmingham workhouse.