Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > Servants
Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times
Part 7: Servants
by Alan Roberts
A survey of inhabitants would not be complete without mention of servants and apprentices who comprised the bulk of young people entering and leaving the parish. Although a vital part of the occupational work force, household servants, indentured 'servants in husbandry' and craft apprentices go largely unrecorded in parish registers. Register entries from 1698-1707 record only four Appleby servants and no-one is specifically identified as an apprentice in the register. Bequests to servants in the wills and references to servants' chambers and bedding in the inventories nevertheless indicate that servants were far more numerous that these registration figures seem to imply. Evidence has already been presented to suggest that almost all the gentlemen and perhaps a third or more of the yeomen in each parish kept servants.
Service was largely 'transitional'. A large proportion of servants were adolescent children who were counted as part of their master's household. Those old enough to be 'servants in husbandry' had a place in a graded hierarchy of farming occupations that included waggoners, carters, ‘aged retainers', horse lads and farm stewards. Yet servants had no independent status within the village social order; their position varied according to that of their master. A. Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin’s biographer, estimates that approximately two-thirds of men and three-quarters of women between puberty and marriage lived away from home as servants and apprentices. Servants provided two advantages to employers: a convenient and socially acceptable solution to the problem of under-employment among the poor and access to a valuable source of labour, which was available whenever needed. The advantages were not all one-sided, however. A stint in service was seen as fit preparation for young women anticipating marriage and provided valuable experience and opportunities for saving capital to young men hoping to take up farming.
The two different types of servant, those who lived in as menials and those who were employed as farm labourers, are not clearly differentiated. Nor is there much information about their social origins. Most of the Appleby servants named in the records appear to be new to the parish. Servant maids such as Alice Lov, Elizabeth Home and Ann Bale in Appleby were obviously new to parish since none of these surnames occur elsewhere in the registers or parish listings. One of the few servants whose origins can be traced was Thomas Mould's maid, who came from nearby Stretton.
The most common type of domestic servant referred to in the wills was the 'maid servant'. This title attached to young girls who were taken in to assist in household duties or to take care of aged householders in their declining years. In his will, drawn up in 1618, John Perkins of Austrey reveals the close affinity that could develop between master and servant. In his will John promises each servant living in at the time of his death an annuity, together with a ewe and a lamb (the customary token). On Ann Farren, his maid servant, however, he bestows the special reward of a cottage in Potterstotton in Warwickshire mindful of 'the great paynes she hath taken with mee in my weakness'.
Although such gifts are rare, decedents commonly provided appreciatory bequests for services in their infirmity. Several wills and inventories record small payments to servants for wages or services. William Heyfield of Appleby records payment of £3.10.0 to his mother's maidservant, Mary Wilcox, for wages. Later, as a widow, she purchased a parcel of ground in Appleby.
The function of service as a stage in the occupational life-cycle is highlighted in the wills and registers. Marriage sometimes offered a way of leaving service and setting up as a smallholder, as is shown by Thomas Heer's elevation from servant to husbandman in 1607 after marrying his employer's eldest daughter. Although servants in husbandry are not clearly identified as such in wills their presence is suggested by references to farmers' men.This is the term most commonly employed to describe a male servant. William Mons and another, referred to merely as 'Robert' in the Appleby register, were both Mr Dormer's men. Edward Watkins was Henry Cooper's man and Adam Richardson was Richard Swayne's man. In common with the menial servants who lived in and worked about the yard, servants in husbandry were protected from endemic food shortages and other privations by their attachment to households at fixed rates. Their economic status varied according to their responsibilities and length of service.
The only pre-1700 servant inventory to survive from Appleby dates from the late Elizabethan period. The comparative wealth of the decedent suggests that he occupied a special place in the servant hierarchy, as a servant in husbandry with his own smallholding. John Cotterell was one of Andrew Meverell's men who had been given a small bequest on his master's death in 1572. A few months later when John came to draw up his own testament he again identified himself as a servant. However, his goods and chattels clearly reveal him to be a smallholder as well. John's inventory shows that he had the lease of a house together with strips of common field arable sown with winter corn, pease and hay and pastured beasts, worth altogether £14.4.8. Thomas Heire of Austrey, the other servant whose inventory was enrolled in the Leicester archdeaconry court in 1588, was also comparatively prosperous by smallholder's standards. His goods together with a lease worth £4.10.0, 'corne and grasse in the fielde' and livestock, came to £21.16.10. The kitchen and scullery maids who slept on trundle beds in the kitchen, or the stable lad who slept in the chamber above Mr Walker's cowhouse in 1663, were poor by comparison and it is hardly surprising that none of the younger, menial servants left inventories.
Unfortunately it is not possible to acquire more than an impressionistic picture of servants' movements within individual parishes. As members of various households servants are rarely recorded in tax listings and census returns, and only rarely mentioned in other sources. Research so far however, tends to suggest that there was a rough balance between young people entering and leaving individual parishes. The pattern that emerges recent studies is of short-term hirings of one or two years duration, within a comparatively small recruitment area. There were hiring fairs at Ashby, Atherston and Polesworth where servants assembled to seek contracts of employment for the coming year. Appleby residents probably attended Ashby's Michaelmas hiring fair on 22nd September as well as the one in Polesworth described by Marshall in 1790 as one of the largest hiring fairs in the country with by then 2,000 to 3,000 annual hirings.
A handful of eighteenth-century settlement certificates issued by the Warwickshire quarter sessions provide a glimpse of the distances travelled by servants. A typical case is that of Michael Harrison, the son of an Austrey husbandman, who took up his first employment with Mr Sharmans of Newton Regis in the early 1700s. Michael evidently extended his contract another year before taking up a new contract at Fazeley, near Tamworth, where be was apprenticed to a baker. A number of other settlement cases concerning servants and apprentices confirm the general picture of short-term moves. Yet, despite their numbers, servants appear to have made little impact on the existing social structure. They were not treated as a separate status group. The contracts of employment which guaranteed their support usually prevented them from becoming a charge upon the parish.
Sources and Notes
6 out of 31 Appleby yeomen wills include bequests to servants. Cf. 11 out of 30 yeomen inventories list servants' bedding, chambers &c.
A.S. Kussmaul, 'The Ambiguous Mobility of Farm Servants', ECHR, 2nd Series, 24 (1981), 224. and Servants in Husbandry, 24.
A. Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin, 209.
P.R.O. PROB 11/7/53; Appleby PR: 1578; Alice Lov and Elizabeth Home were servants of Andrew Meverell, gent.
L.R.O. wills, Thomas Mould, 1666/9.
P.R.O. PROB 11/132/71.
L.R.O. Accompt of Ann Heyfield, 1665/44; purchase of a parcel of ground in Appleby in 1656 (DE 797).
From a sample of 96 settlement eighteenth-century settlement cases Kussmaul has calculated that 42% of servants married immediately on leaving service and further 28% within three years. Marriage usually signalled departure from service: Servants in Husbandry, 84-5; Cf. Elizabeth Wilson left the employ of Robert Broomfield, an Austrey carpenter, to marry a day-labourer in 1595.
L.R.O. Appleby PR: 1653, 1686, 1628, 1690.
P.R.O. PROB 11/7/53. L.R.O. wills and inventories, John Cotterell, 1572; wills, William Brown, servant, 1712; John Hines, servant, 1728. Brown's inventory was appraised at £1.7.2, both his brothers were cordwainers.
L.R.O. PR I/9/36.
L.R.O. wills, Thomas Heire, servant,1588. inventories PR I/61/122; e.g. references to a servant's bed in a kitchen chamber, 1672 (PR I/73/131), to a trundle bed in a chamber over the house, 1686 (PR 1/88/61), to a maid's chamber, 1705 (PR 1/112/75)
W. Marshall, Rural Economy II, 19; An account of the hiring fairs in J. Skinner. Facts and Opinions Concerning Statute Hirings 2nd ed., London 1861; Ashby's hiring fair mentioned in Nichols II, 614; List of hiring fairs in Kussmaul, op. cit. 159-161.
W.R.O. Settlement Certificates: Michael Harrison [n.d., MS damaged].
©Alan Roberts
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