Household Servants in Early Modern England

Until relatively recently, household servants have been much neglected by social historians, their small place in historical writing viewed chiefly through the eyes of their employers and moral critics. This socio-cultural survey of household service presents servants as major agents of change, assisting in the spread of new fashions, tastes, habits, and mores. Richardson portrays household service as a field of employment that impinged on most aspects of economic and social organisation of the time, and introduces servants as ‘cultural amphibians’, highlighting not only servant vulnerability but also the potential for servant ‘power’. Richardson draws on a wide variety of cultural sources including a substantial body of servants’ own self-representations and their representation in works of literature to examine the most indispensable sector of employment in early modern England. Reviewed in this study are the effect of wages, conditions of service, mobility, sexuality, the feminisation of the occupation, relationships between servants and master-servant relationships, the dialectical interactions between servants and the law and London’s role as the focal point of the eighteenth-century ‘servant problem’. Accessibly written and interdisciplinary, this lively study will be of particular interest to specialists or students seeking a comprehensive understanding of the two centuries after the Reformation. It also provides the enthusiast with a deep and sensitive understanding of the individual life stories, of the struggles, vulnerability and secret power of Britain’s previously overlooked servant class.