The household has been treated by economists with curious negligence. The founder of political economy showed so little insight into the real nature of the work carried on there as to class those whom he described as menial servants with unproductive labourers.[13] The later classical economists have followed his lead. Marshall, it is true, shows throughout his books an appreciation of the position and responsibilities of the housewife and the mother which is foreign to most of his colleagues.[14] But he has never attempted to analyse the economic functions of the household, or to show its varying relations to the rest of the community; neither has he pointed out the peculiar factors which differentiate the position 124 and remuneration of the women employed in domestic activities from those of all other workers. On the other hand, the more modern school of economists, those who devote themselves to the history of economic development in the past or to the intensive study of special economic institutions in the present, have equally failed to discuss with any adequacy the organisation of the household.

The economic historians describe with minuteness the rise and fall of gilds and chartered companies, the workings of different methods of education and of poor relief in successive epochs. They rarely indicate how the various forms of industrial organisation translated themselves into the domestic expenditure of the people. It would, for instance, be very difficult to extract from the pages of the economic historians an answer to the question, “What were the conditions determining the supply of domestic servants at the close of the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century respectively?” It is not easy to answer definitely even simpler and more fundamental questions than these. It is often stated, for example, that the household arrangements of the serfs on the mediæval manors were rude and uncomfortable to the last degree,[15] but it is certain that this is not so universally true as has been thought. Some at all events of the more 125 prosperous inhabitants of the manors possessed household furniture and equipments of a kind not inferior to the outfit of the casual labourer to-day. Sheets, for example, are mentioned several times in extant inventories. But much more investigation than has yet been possible would be necessary before it could be determined whether these instances of a higher standard of comfort are or are not exceptions to a general rule.

When one turns to even more important questions—such, for instance, as the industrial position of women at different epochs—it is equally difficult to obtain precise and detailed knowledge. Without a very lengthy and elaborate investigation of the extant original materials, many of them scattered in municipal chambers in distant parts of England, it would be quite impossible to say on what terms women were admitted as members of 126 the gilds and fraternities which extended over the whole area of industrial life in the Middle Ages. The character and organisation of the household and the position of women in the Middle Ages are subjects still practically untouched by the economic historians.[16]

When we turn to modern times, a little more material has been collected. There is an investigation by the Board of Trade into the wages of domestic servants, and a book on domestic service by Professor Lucy Salmon of Vassar College. It deals of course mainly with American conditions, but cannot be neglected by any English student of the economic relations of the household.

Humanitarianism has prompted studies more or less elaborate of the dietaries and housing conditions of the working classes, especially in towns,[17] but it would be idle to pretend that there has been yet more than a beginning made of the task of determining how for each class of the community its share of the national income as stated in money is translated into the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life, into house-room, fuel, food, cleanliness, clothing, insurance, domestic service, recreation, and culture. The generalisations available are of the most meagre description. We can, for instance, say with tolerable certainty that the agricultural labourer spends three-fourths of his income on food, the town labourer two-thirds, 127 the artisan a half, the middle-class man from a third to a fourth; but there is practically no reliable information with regard to very large incomes, or to sums spent on clothing in any section of the community.

Moreover, there is one class—large, growing in importance, and an essential element in modern civilisation—about whose domestic expenditure we have no scientific knowledge at all. This is the class which may be named “the routine brain-workers,” the people who as clerks, book-keepers, salesmen, typists, &c., are responsible for the routine administration of modern commerce. They have been compared to the nervous system, for like that system in the animal body they serve for the communication and the mechanical record of the life of the community on its industrial side. With them may be classed elementary school-teachers, reporters, and the lower ranks of the Civil Service, though I should not be prepared to say that some of these—especially the teachers—ought to be regarded as performing only routine brain-work. But all these workers can be conveniently studied together in that their labour is carried on under somewhat similar conditions—it is sedentary, highly regimented, exhausting to the brain and nervous system, and is generally remunerated by a fixed salary, &c. They earn an income larger than that of the manual labourer, but considerably less as a general rule than that of the professional man. There is a total absence of information as to the domestic expenditure of 128 this class. It is sometimes declared that its less well-paid members suffer as severely from poverty as do sections of the working-class, and that the poor clerk is really much more to be pitied than the well-to-do trade unionist, the skilled manual worker.

Yet if it is important to know how the wealth of the country is produced, it is of equal importance to know how it is consumed, and that whether the consumption takes the form of porridge and flannelette for the child of a dock-labourer, of drink and admission to a football match for the miner or cotton-operative, or of a gardener, and a holiday in Switzerland for the hard-working doctor or stockbroker. Domestic expenditure should be investigated as impartially by the economist as are the variations of plants or animals by the biologist. His one aim should 129 be the discovery and statement of truth, as complete and as unbiassed as he can make it.

Hitherto, as I have said, this field of research has remained comparatively untouched. In the first place, economists have generally been men, and have naturally devoted their energies to the elucidation of the problems of industry and business which concern men most closely. Few women, on the other hand, have until recently received any training in economics, and it has never occurred to them that the familiar and wearisome problems of the rent, the butcher’s bill, and the children’s clothes, together with the difficulty of finding a satisfactory cook, may have a wider aspect than the narrow and personal one. But even as it is, the few women who have distinguished themselves in the sphere of economics have in a note or a casual remark pointed out distinctions between household management and other branches of industry which cast a flood of light on the whole subject. There is a paragraph in the second volume of “Industrial Democracy”[18] which lays down the difference between the underlying principles of business and of the administration of the home in a few words which might serve as the text for a volume. It is precisely this difference, first clearly indicated by Mrs. Webb, which constitutes the second ground for the common neglect of this branch of economics. A factory or a shop is run for profit; a household 130 simply to provide comfort and convenience for its members. To put it in technical language, in the world of industry we are concerned with exchange values, but in the home with use values alone. From this distinction, overlooked by reason of its obviousness, there flow a large number of consequences which will be discussed later. At present we are only concerned to show that economists, with their eyes fixed on trade and the mechanism of trade, very naturally neglected that section of life in which values, material and immaterial, were being continually created, but for use alone, not for commercial purposes.

The wife who cooks her husband’s dinner, or caters, organises, and keeps accounts for him, is really engaged in work which in any rational interpretation of the word has far more right to be called productive than is much of the labour employed in manufacture or business. But the work accomplished by the wife in the household has never yet received its full acknowledgment from the economists. The truth is that, although they constantly warn students to avoid the vulgar error of confusing money wages with real wages, they themselves have been so biassed by the commercial conception of profit-making that they have almost completely overlooked even the purely economic value of much work, such as cooking, cleaning, and clothes-making, which is carried on within the home, not for profit-making or for a salary, but as part of the duties attaching to the status of wife and mother. It is acknowledged 131 by the economists themselves[19] that although in theory they have set aside a section to be devoted to the discussion of “consumption” as other sections deal with “production” and “distribution” of wealth, yet in practice the treatment of consumption has been meagre and ineffective. This, perhaps, is inevitable—it is certainly regrettable—and women economists would be performing a most useful work if they were to undertake a careful and detailed investigation into the consumption of wealth at different epochs and by different classes of the community, and one, moreover, for which their connection with housekeeping, which is only the practical application of the science of the consumption of wealth, would have already partially prepared them.

There is still another reason why a scientific treatment of the consumption of wealth has been delayed. It could not be developed until medicine and hygiene had provided us with satisfactory standards of the needs of the human body. When food, for example, was still regarded purely as a matter of individual likes and dislikes, it was impossible to discuss at all adequately the sufficiency or insufficiency of the food consumption of a given class. But now that we know that the varying tastes simply express in different ways the need for so much proteid, carbo-hydrates and fats, we have a firm basis on which to work. It is true that it is not yet quite so firm as we could 132 wish; the scientists have not yet succeeded even for a single class in fixing a dietary standard which would be accepted by all in particular, and recently the investigations of Professor Chittenden have suggested that the amount of proteid hitherto thought essential may be excessive. Moreover, little attention has yet been paid to the need of different food for different work. Yet it seems probable, to say the least, that the sedentary worker, using his brain and not his muscles, may require lighter and daintier food than the labourer in the fields or the docks, and may really suffer as seriously if that better food be denied him as does the latter if he fails to secure a sufficiency of coarser and cheaper nutriment. This question would be of great importance in investigating the expenditure of the clerk class. But although the scientists have here failed to provide the students of domestic expenditure with all the data required, yet there is sufficient knowledge of the general principles of dietetics to enable us to base our study of food consumption on a fairly sound basis.

It is true, again, that it is easier to deal with the grades of society practising the roughest and 133 least-skilled labour than with those engaged in the higher forms of brain-work, but we can at all events set ourselves to discover what is the average distribution of the expenditure of men earning £1000 a year, and can afterwards appeal to the hygienists to decide for us what kind of food, house-room, and recreation is essential for a man who makes his living by the higher activities of the intellect. A very close connection between economics and hygiene is essential if the division of our subject that deals with consumption is to be adequately treated.

So, then, a scientific study of the economics of the household would fall into two divisions—(1) an endeavour to describe the industrial development of each country as it affects family life, house-room, food, and clothes; and (2) a descriptive account of the domestic circumstances and the expenditure[20] of each class of the community at the present time. Under each of these headings 134 special sections should treat domestic service, the work of woman beyond the household, and the organisation of household work as compared with different branches of industry and administration. Finally, a supplementary section should set forth the practical applications of the conclusions arrived at, and should endeavour to help the housewife or, it may be, the superintendent of an industrial school, college, or boarding house in the administration of the income at her disposal.

But much more careful investigation into the question of how incomes actually are spent is essential before we can deal satisfactorily with the even more difficult problem of how they ought to be spent. And there is, too, another factor which must be taken into consideration. Economists in defining wealth commonly admit nowadays that it includes collective and immaterial well-being of various kinds.[21] But having made this admission, they straightway put it aside and proceed to discuss wealth as though it consisted exclusively of material exchangeable commodities. Yet clearly the real income of a family is increased if the children have easy access to good free schools or to ample open spaces. It will not be possible to estimate precisely the money value of opportunities of this description. But we should at least notice their presence or absence for each class and for each stage of national development. It is clear that in the present paper no attempt can be made 135 to deal with the problems of the economics of expenditure or of the household save in the merest outline, and therefore the following pages are to be taken simply as a sketch to be filled in by more extensive and more throughgoing investigation later on.

In the first, the typical economic institutions are the manor and the gild; in the second, domestic manufacture and convertible husbandry are predominant; and in the third the factory system and capitalist farming take their places.[22] Trade, too, undergoes a similar evolution. In the first period it is intermunicipal rather than international. In the second period, within each nation trade is free and unfettered, and a considerable amount of territorial division of labour and regional specialisation results. But external trade is regulated by governments on the principles of the mercantile system. In the third period, with the increase and improvement of the means 136 of communication, international trade becomes more and more important, markets are immensely widened, and the economic organisation of society reaches the complexity possessed by it to-day, which reacts in many half comprehended ways on the household and on family life.

The main characteristics of these divisions of English industrial history are, on the whole, clear and well-marked. But the transition periods are more difficult to describe. It has often been pointed out that the two industrial revolutions, as they have been named by some writers, bear a certain resemblance to each other. Both involve a reorganisation of industry which results in increased productivity on the one hand, but in the demoralisation of certain classes of the workers on the other hand. Both therefore require a revision of the system of providing for the destitute. Both, too, produce the most far-reaching effects on home-life and the economy of the household, and influence profoundly the position of women. Both, too, are alike in that it is not easy to fix dates to the periods within which the revolution in industry takes place.[23] But roughly 137 we may regard the late fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth as a time of stress and strain, due to the appearance of new methods both in agriculture and in industry, especially in the wool trade; and in the same way the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was a period of sudden and violent economic transition. In both cases alike the changes in agriculture preceded somewhat the changes in industry, and the revolution made itself felt in different ways and at different times in the various districts of the country. There are still backward areas in the south of England and in the west of Scotland where life has been very little affected, notwithstanding trains and steam-engines, by the alterations in industry which have produced the roaring mills and clattering shipyards of Lancashire and the Clyde.

In the mediæval period, outside the small and scattered towns, the prevailing form of economic organisation was the manor. We have to imagine 138 the surface of England dotted over with stretches of cultivated land, with areas of waste, moorland or woodland intervening. Each stretch of arable land was cultivated more or less in common by groups of serfs, who lived generally in one long village street, with the church and the lord’s hall near at hand. Usually, in addition to the arable land worked on the complicated “three-field” system soon to be described, there were also hay-meadows down by the river, sometimes permanent pasture held in common, while the waste was available for extra pasturage, and for cutting turf and wood for fuel. Each serf possessed, besides, a small croft attached to his house, and sometimes an orchard and rude garden. The arable land was divided into three large fields, not shut in as are our fields by hedges, but lying open. Each field, again, was partitioned into numbers of strips more or less regular in shape, and each serf possessed a certain number of these, not, however, all lying together, but intermixed “mingle-mangle” with the holdings of his neighbours. He was not allowed to cultivate these, or indeed any of the land save his own tiny croft, as he pleased, but was compelled to follow the traditional method of farming according to the customs of his manor. Usually the rotation was wheat or rye in the first year, oats or barley in the second year, fallow in the third year, while the other two fields followed the same course a year and two years later; so that in each year one field was fallow, one grew wheat or rye, and the other oats or barley. The 139 animals belonging to the serfs and their lord were pastured on the arable fields when the crops were taken off, and on the fallow field. The lord of the manor also possessed strips in the common fields, and was regarded as the owner of the common and waste, subject to the pasturage and fuel rights of the tenants. He did not receive rent quite as we understand it, but each serf owed him dues calculated in labour, in kind, and occasionally in money.

For instance, on the manor of Tidenham, in the time of Edward I., one serf worked for the lord for five days in every alternate week for thirty-five weeks in the year, two and a half days every week for six weeks in the summer, and three days every week for eight weeks during August and September (the three festival weeks of Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost were holidays). Then, in addition to this regular weekly work, he could also be required for extra work, commonly called boon-works or precariæ. “He made one precaria called churched, and he ploughed and harrowed a half acre for corn and sowed it with one bushel of corn from his own seed, and in the time of harvest he had to reap and bind and stack the produce, receiving one sheaf for himself on account of the half acre.” And he had to plough one acre for oats. In addition, there were dues in kind—one hen at Christmas, five eggs at Easter, eight gallons of beer at every brewing, and also small payments in money, commuted, one would conjecture, for payments in kind, i.e. one penny for every 140 yearling pig, and one halfpenny for those only of the half year.[24]

In other cases the tenants paid dues of lambs, of fish, of honey, of clews of net yarn, of straw, &c. One of the tenants of the great monastic establishment at Glastonbury had to find thirty salmon, “each as thick as a man’s fist at the tail.”[25] A curious form of labour due is described in the Boldon Book. The tenants of certain manors in Durham had to build each summer a hunting-lodge for the bishop and his retinue when they came to take their pleasure in the moors in the west of Durham.

At different periods and in different districts the subdivisions of the tenants vary greatly, and for complete details the reader must be referred to the special works on the subject. But two classes can usually be distinguished—(1) the villeins, who possessed oxen and worked the larger holdings (often about thirty acres—called virgates or yard lands); and (2) the cotters, who held about five acres, and whose domestic animals consisted of pigs and poultry. In addition there were often found socmen, who were personally free; and, at the other end of the social scale, slaves, who, largely through the influence of the Church, were manumitted before the end of the Middle Ages.

The most striking feature about the manors is that each was almost completely self-supporting. 141 Each manor provided corn, meat, eggs, milk, cheese, poultry, &c., for its own inhabitants. Fuel, and perhaps game and rabbits, came from the waste. The furniture was of rude wood, and the clothes would be sheep-skin and coarse cloth spun and woven from the wool grown on the sheep that were fed on the manor lands. The ordinary serf would very rarely either receive or spend coin of the realm. Salt he would buy and the metal pots and pans used for cooking, and, as Ashley suggests, tar.[26] But the greater amount of the goods required for himself and his family would be produced under what the economists call “natural economy,” i.e. they were made by the people who intended to use them, directly, without the intervention of money or any mechanism of exchange.

Together with this self-sufficiency would go a considerable amount of co-operation. Economists are not yet agreed as to the precise extent to which co-operation was used in the manorial village. But we know that tenants frequently lent their oxen to one another to make up the necessary team; that in some of the Durham manors there was a communal smith, who received payment in the possession of a strip of land; and that the tenants owned a common oven. It was customary, too, for one shepherd or swineherd to guard the sheep or the pigs of the whole community. The village mill, when 142 first established, was also a common boon to the whole body of serfs, but later on the obligation to grind their corn at the lord’s mill and to pay the dues came to be regarded as an onerous burden.

A curious and important person on the mediæval estate was the bee-keeper. Particulars are given of his duties and rewards in one Durham manor by the Boldon Book.[27] He does no regular weekly work, the care of the bees apparently taking the place of this, but he must take part with the other serfs in the boon-works necessary at harvest and other times of pressure. As honey was almost the only source of sweetness in early mediæval cooking, it can be understood why the bee-keeper ranked only a little below the shepherd. The Boldon Book, unfortunately, since its aim is to define the relations between the villeins and their lord, does not tell us whether he superintended the bees belonging to his fellow tenants. On the analogy of the shepherd and swineherd, we should assume that he did.

How, then, are we to describe the domestic life of the various sections of rural society at this time? Unfortunately, very little material exists on which to draw for the account of the household arrangements of the serfs. They have naturally left no account-books; they enter rarely into the literature of the period; there are no remains of their houses or clothing, and it is, in 143 fact, far from easy to decide how they did live. But it seems probable that a rude and dirty plenty, procured by long hours of toilsome open-air labour, was the prevailing characteristic of the serf household. The house would be of clay or wattles or wood, probably without windows—and those certainly unglazed—and with a hole in the middle of the roof to let out the smoke, the fire being placed in the centre of the floor. The furniture must have been rough but solid, its most valuable items being the brass or iron cooking-pots. On the other hand, I do not believe that, in the more prosperous villein households at all events, the level of domestic comfort was so low as has sometimes been represented. Rough cloth was probably woven or sometimes bought. There is one case on record where, in return for a small piece of land, one family undertook to do the weaving for another, and Gasquet mentions[28] that to the common Christmas feast on one of the Glastonbury manors some of the tenants brought their own napkins, “if he wanted to eat off a cloth.” I see no reason to doubt that some at least of the villein households were provided with coarse coverings for bed and table. On the other hand, it seems doubtful whether any form of artificial light was commonly used in the poorer households. The food, too, would show what to us would seem strange contrasts of plenty and of poverty. It would include neither tea nor 144 coffee, neither sugar nor spices, nor yet potatoes. On the other hand, there was probably, save at times of famine, a sufficiency of bread,[29] and eggs and dairy produce would be used in quantities now quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working-man. The butter, it is true, was not of a high standard, for it was usually liquid, but the children must have had milk to drink and cheese and eggs to eat. Even the poorest serfs apparently kept a few fowls, since their dues are so often payable in eggs, and some of the eggs and the chickens would be available for family consumption. But their meat must have been much poorer than ours. Fresh mutton and beef were rarely eaten, except in the case of animals who had died a natural death. The others were much too valuable for draught purposes, for milk or for wool. Among the maxims of an old agriculturist of the thirteenth century we find the following remark: “If a sheep die suddenly, they put the flesh in water for so many hours as are between midday and three o’clock, and then hang it up, and when the water is drained off they salt it and then dry it. But I do not wish you to do this.”[31] In the autumn, animals which it was 145 impossible to keep during the winter, owing to the absence of root-feeding, were killed and salted down. Occasionally, however, fresh pork would be used, and no doubt every now and then a wild beast or bird from the common or waste would find its way into the housewife’s iron pot. The food, then, would be rough and sometimes unwholesome, but on the other hand it contained many most desirable forms of nourishment which are absent from the labourer’s diet to-day, and which are, it might be observed, those specially suitable for children.[32]

The fuel used was wood or peat, or in some cases dried cow-dung.

On the whole, then, the household arrangements of the mediæval serf were primitive, and in times of famine he and his family must have endured great hardships. The winters, too, when the tracks were deep in mud and artificial light was absent or scarce, must have been recurring times of considerable suffering. But on the other hand, fresh air and easy access to the land were benefits hardly valued until in later times they have been lost to whole sections of the population.

(2) The Lord of the Manor—his House and Household

There is more material available for the description of the household of the lord than of his serf. Account-books, directions for household administration, 146 and in the fifteenth century very curious rhymed rules of behaviour and of precedence are available. Naturally, however, it is of the king’s household and of the households of the nobles and of the great monasteries that we know most. Very little can now be discovered of the details of the domestic arrangements of the master in possession of one manor only, and it is not certain that we should be justified in supposing that what we find to be true of the great household will necessarily hold also for the smaller one. For example, in the families of which we have records the great majority of the servants are men, cooking in particular being in the Middle Ages a masculine vocation. But is it safe to assume that the same would be the case in the household of a simple knight? It must therefore be clearly understood that what follows has reference mainly to royal and noble families.

The domestic buildings of all manors were on a more or less uniform plan. They were grouped round a quadrangle, one side of which consisted of the great hall where dinner was served, business transacted, and where servants and the humbler guests slept at night. The door was at one end, usually protected by screens, behind which was another door leading to the buttery, and above which the musicians’ gallery was often placed. Opposite the door was a raised daïs, where stood the table reserved for the master, his family, and important guests. In the body of the hall dinner was served to the rest of the household. A private 147 chamber called the solar or bower, reached by a staircase either inside the hall or placed in the quadrangle outside, was kept for the special use of the lord and his family. There occasionally they took meals, though it was regarded as a sign of luxurious self-seeking to avoid the formality and bustle of the meals in the great hall. In the solar, too, beds were placed for important guests, and any particularly valuable articles of furniture would be kept there. On the other sides of the quadrangle were the chapel, granaries, storehouses, dairies and bakehouses, and the kitchen. This was often placed at a little distance to guard against fire. The cooking was usually carried on at an iron grate placed in the middle of the floor, and pictures show us that sometimes it was even done in the open air. Refuse was carried off by an open drain running across the centre of the kitchen.

As an illustration let me quote an account of a typical manor-house of the twelfth century. “The manor-house of Ardleigh consisted of a hall with bower annexed. Also a kitchen, a stable, a bakehouse, two stores for corn (granges) and a servants’ house. In the hall were two moveable benches, a fixed table, and a buffet.” [33]

In course of time other rooms were added, and the furniture and equipment became more elaborate. But until Elizabeth’s reign the great hall where master and servants dined together was the central feature in the wealthy English home.

The food was derived from the manor, and purchases were only made of such things as could not be produced in England, notably red wine,[34] spices, almonds and rice, all much used in mediæval cookery. Sugar, too, would be bought, when it replaced honey for sweetening purposes. But the corn, meat, milk, cheese, and eggs would be all home-grown, and as it was easier in the state of transport at that time to bring the family to the food than the food to the family, part of the duties of housekeeping consisted in so arranging the sojourn of the household as to draw food-supplies from each manor in the most convenient way. The great Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grossetête, gives elaborate directions on this head to a widowed friend of his, Margaret, Countess of Lincoln.

“Every year at Michaelmas when you know the measure of all your corn, then arrange your sojourn for the whole of that year and for how many weeks in each place according to the seasons of the year and the advantages of the country in flesh and in fish, and do not in any wise burden by debt or long residence the places where you sojourn.

“I advise that at two seasons of the year you make your principal purchases, that is to say, your wines, your wax, and your wardrobe.”[35]

And there follows a list of the fairs recommended by the pious bishop.

The materials of mediæval food, then, would be 149 similar to the diet of the serfs already described, but would be used in greater plenty and would be supplemented by luxuries imported from the East and bought at the fairs. If we keep in mind these conditions, as well as the leisure and the large supply of labour available, we shall understand why mediæval cooking was so elaborate; for, contrary to ordinary opinion, it was distinguished by a large number of complicated made dishes. Small birds were commonly roasted, but other forms of meat were stewed or minced. They would in this way both be more easily dealt with at the open fire of the mediæval kitchen, and more easily served in the mediæval dining-room, where knives and spoons were the only implements in common use. Moreover, there was what seems to us an extraordinary liking for violent and mixed flavourings and brilliant colouring. Bucknade, for instance, was made of meat hewn in gobbets, pounded almonds, raisins, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, onions, salt and fried herbs, thickened with rice-flour and coloured yellow with saffron. Here, again, is the recipe for mortrews, a dish mentioned in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

“Take hennes and pork and seethe them together. Take the flesh of the hennes and of the pork and hack it small and grind it all to dust. Take bread y-grated, and add thereto and temper it with the self-broth[36] and mix it with yolks of eggs, and cast thereon powder fort,[37] and boil it and do thereto powder of ginger, saffron, and salt, 150 and look that it is standing,[38] and flour it all with powder of ginger.” The lavish use of eggs, pork, and chickens in this recipe could be paralleled in many others, and is evidently to be connected with the custom of receiving manorial dues in kind at stated intervals. Hundreds of eggs would be sent in by the tenants at Easter, and the problem of the housekeeper would not be how to lessen the consumption of eggs in order to keep down the bills, but how to get through those in store before they were hopelessly spoiled.

For the earlier period menus are not available, but a curious rhymed treatise on servants’ duties dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, entitled “John Russell’s Boke of Nurture,” has been reprinted by the Early English Lent Society[39] in the volume entitled “Meals and Manners of the Olden Time,” and from it I extract the following:—

The service in the wealthy mediæval manor was as elaborate as the cooking, at all events in the later period. The Bishop of Lincoln finds it necessary to warn the Countess of Lincoln not to permit slovenliness among her retainers. She is not to allow “old tabards, and soiled herigauts, and imitation short-hose.” But even this widow lady is served with considerable pomp. “Command that your panter[44] with the bread and your butler[45] with the cup, come before you to the table foot by foot before grace and that three valets be assigned by the marshal each day to serve the high table and the two tables at the side with drink. And at each course call the servers to go to the kitchen, and they themselves to go always before your seneschal as far as you until the dishes be set before you, and see that all servants with meats go orderly and without noise to one part and another of the hall to those who shall be assigned to divide the meats, so that nothing be placed or served disorderly.”[46]

In the “Boke of Nurture,” which refers of course 152 to a much later period, the service is even more elaborate, and we gather indeed that the dinner was a social function at which all classes of the community met together. Even the poorest were not forgotten, as there was a special officer whose business it was to distribute alms of broken meats to the beggars waiting at the door. The rules of precedence were most elaborate, and the serving seems on special occasions to have risen almost to the rank of a solemn ritual. In addition, dinner was accompanied by music and sometimes enlivened at intervals by pageants and shows.

Domestic service in these great households was very different from what it is to-day. There was, in the first place, no fixed line drawn as there is now between the menial and the non-menial classes of the community. The higher servants were often people of nearly the same social rank as those whom they served. Sir William de Mortimer was the head-steward of Bishop Swinfield, Sir Gilbert Brydges the steward of Gloucester Abbey.[47] Young men who entered the service of a lord might one day be called on to carve or serve wine, and the next day might sit at meat in the same room.[48]

Through the account-books and the household ordinances of the period, we can trace four grades of household servants—squires or gentlemen, valets or yeomen, grooms, and pages. The last grade had been recently introduced into the royal household 153 in Edward IV.’s time, and they did not eat in hall. “A page etyth in his office or with his next fellow, not in the halle at noe place, taking dayly one lofe, one messe of great meate, half a gallon of ale; one reward quarterly in the counting-house, twenty pence of clothing when the household hathe at every one of the four feasts, one napron of one elle and part of the King’s great rewards given yearly amongst them in household.”[49]

The last quotation illustrates also the method of remuneration. The money received was a very minor and unimportant factor. The servants were paid mostly in kind, and the share of each in food, fuel, and clothing is very fully and carefully stated. The chief porter of the Abbey of Gloucester, for instance, had a chamber next to the abbey gate. His weekly allowance was three white loaves, called myches, and two called holyers, with seven loaves of squire bread; for ale every quarter 3s. 4d. On every flesh or fish day he had a mess of flesh or fish of the first course, as much as was set before two monks. He had a gown every year of the suit of the gentlemen of the Lord Abbot, and in addition 13s. 4d. per annum. These fixed rations of food clothing &c., are called livery, a term now restricted to clothing alone.

It is noticeable that these servants are almost all men. Washerwomen (lotrices) are women, and there are occasionally notices of young girls 154 in attendance on the lady of the house. But so far as our information goes, cooking and cleaning and serving are carried on by men, though mention is made of women pastry-cooks who in monasteries, to avoid scandal, had to be accommodated in a separate kitchen, called the pudding-house.[50] But in the Middle Ages domestic service was not, as it is now, regarded as a menial occupation to be left, save in some of its higher branches, exclusively to women.

I can find no trace at this period of any difficulty in obtaining service. Bishop Grossetête assures the Countess of Lincoln that she can easily obtain servers if she needs them, and the young men addressed in the rhyming exhortations preserved in “Meals and Manners” evidently regard it as promotion almost beyond their hopes to become members of a lord’s household. Whether this would be equally the case if we had information about the smaller households, it is not easy to say. But when we remember that the alternatives were laborious and monotonous work at agriculture or the chance of finding a place in the gilds or fraternities which monopolised the trade in towns at that period, we can believe that the plentiful fare, the lively society, and the not too strenuous[51] work required of a serving-groom 155 or yeoman would be regarded as a prize worth striving for and worth keeping.

In 1303, a certain Alan de Bedeford, a baker of London, was sold up for arrears of taxes, and the following were the goods seized by the inexorable tax-gatherer: “One brass pot weighing 18 lbs., value 2s. 6d., and another brass pot weighing 13 lbs., value 21d., and one kettle value 14d., the total whereof amounts to 5s 5d.”[52]

In 1337, an inventory was preserved of the goods of a felon. It was probably exhaustive, and may therefore be taken as indicating with tolerable precision the standard of household comfort of a London burgess at that time. It is too long to quote in full (the list of garments in particular is rather tedious), but it is interesting to note that it includes a mattress, three feather-beds, five cushions, six blankets, seven linen-sheets, four table-cloths, six whole brass pots of varying value and one broken one, one candlestick and two plates of metal, two basins and 156 one washing-vessel, a spit, a frying-pan, and a funnel.[53]

Further study of wills and inventories would yield a fresh store of information with regard to mediæval household equipment, and might not improbably upset some preconceived ideas as to the ordinary standard of life at that time.

(b) The Position of the Household from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

(1) The First Industrial Revolution and its Effects

The fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century were marked by great economic changes. The manorial system, modified before this period by the gradual commutation of labour dues and especially by the catastrophe of the Black Death, was replaced on the one hand by enclosures for sheep-farming and on the other by convertible husbandry, when the farmer possessed or rented his own separate holding and managed it as he pleased, using the same land alternately for pasturage and as arable.[54] At the same time, the gild organisation of industry was replaced by the system commonly known as domestic manufacture. This spread largely in the country 157 districts, and profoundly influenced home life and the position of women. At the same time both home and foreign trade greatly increased, and “natural economy” was almost entirely replaced by “money economy,” the necessities of life being no longer produced by the family for their own use; men worked instead for payment, and then with the money so earned bought in the market the goods they required.[55] These changes, like the corresponding changes at the end of the eighteenth century, brought greater wealth and pomp to some classes, increased comfort to the bulk of the people, but called into existence a new class of landless labourers, whose needs and importunities finally led to the establishment of the poor-law.

It would require a volume to describe how these changes reflected themselves in the daily life of the people, and at present I must content myself with noting very briefly the main effects of this first industrial revolution.

In the country two classes appeared: the labourer, who, although he might possess a small piece of land of his own[56] or at the least had grazing rights over a neighbouring common, yet 158 depended for his livelihood on the wages paid by his master. So far I have not discovered any reliable source of information with regard to the family expenditure of this class.[57]

Next there was the farmer either renting or owning a farm. Very often farming would be combined with spinning or weaving wool. Agriculture of this kind, partly for subsistence and partly for the market, supplemented by the practice of domestic industries, remained the dominant type in England until the introduction of capitalist farming in the eighteenth century, and indeed can still be found in backward districts. The part played in it by women can be illustrated by a curious account of the duties of the wife of a husbandman given in Fitzherbert’s “Book of Husbandry” (1534).

“First in a morning when thou art waked and purposiste to rise, lyfte up thy hands and blesse thee.... And when thou art up and redy, then first sweep thy house, dress up thy dysshe-board, and sette all things in good order within thy house. Milk thy kye, suckle thy calves, sye up thy mylke, take up thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband’s brekefaste, dinner, souper, and thy children and servants, and take thy part with them. And to ordayne corn and malt to the myll, to bake and brue withal whanne need is. And meete it to the mill and fro the mill, and see that thou have thy measure again 159 beside the toll or else the miller dealeth not truly with the or els thy corn is not drye as it should be. Thou must make butter or cheese whan thou maist, serve thy swyne both morning and evening, and give thy poleyn[58] meat in the morning, and when tyme of the year cometh, thou must take heed how thy duckes henne and geese do lay and to gather up their eggs and when they wax brodie to get them.... And in the beginning of March or a little before is time for a wife to make her garden and to gette as many good seedes and herbes as she can and specially such as be good for the potte and to eat. [Then come lengthy and technical directions for sowing and working up flax and hemp] and thereof may they make shetes, bordclothes, towels, shirts, smocks and such other necessaries and therefore let thy distaff be always ready for a pastime that thou be not idle.... It is convenient for a husband to have shepe of his owne for many causes, and then maye his wife have part of the woll to make her husband and herself some clothes. And at the very least way she may have the locks of the sheep either to make clothes or blankets or coverlets or both. And if she have no wool of her own, she may take wool to spyn of cloth-makers and by that means she may have a convenient living.... It is a wife’s occupation to wynowe all manner of corns, to make malt, to wasshe and wrynge, to make haye, shere corn, and in tiyme of nede to help her husband to fyll the muck-wain or dung-cart, 160 drive the plough, to load hay, corn or such other. And to go or ride to the market, to sell butter, cheese, eggs, chekyns, capons, hennes, pigs, geese, and all manner of corns, and also to bye all manner of necessary things belonging to the household and to make a trewe reckoning and account to her husband what she hath paid. And if the husband go to the market to bye or sell, as they oft do, he then to show his wife in like manner.”

According to Harrison[59] the standard of comfort among the agricultural classes rose markedly at this time. Chimneys became common, pewter plates and silver or tin spoons are used in place of “tinn platters and wooden spoons.” A farmer thinks his gains very small “if he have not a fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more in odd vessels going about the house, three or four feather-beds, so manie coverlids or carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowl for wine if not a whole nest, and a dozen of spoons to furnish up the suit.”