Abstract
Around the year 1591, a maidservant named Alice Periar became pregnant by her master, Mr Medcalf of Great Hallingsbury in Essex. Her mistress tried to bribe her to lay the paternity on a former servant but, when Alice refused, her mistress hired a man to take her to London and she gave birth in the porch of the church of St Botolph’s Aldgate. Her mistress sent her money and came to see her, telling her to carry the child into the City and leave it at a certain door. Alice complied with these instructions, after which her mistress found her another service in London.2 A century later, the matrimonial dispute of Harrington c. Harrington3 came before the London consistory court. The wife of the Earl of Warrington’s steward demanded a separation from her husband on the grounds of adultery, because he had got their maid Jane Burton pregnant. It seems that Burton’s mistress had discovered this when she returned from the country, whereupon Burton promptly left the house and her service to go to a midwife’s where she gave birth to a male child.4
This work stems from my forthcoming thesis, ‘Domestic Service in London, 1660–1750: Life-cycle, Gender, Work and Household Relations’. A relational database of over 1500 domestic servant biographies was constructed, mostly taken from London consistory court depositions kept at the Greater London Record Office (hereafter GLRO), series DL/C (London Consistory Court Records) — other church court depositions have been used, and those sources are referred to when cited. I would like to express my thanks to the staff of the GLRO for their assistance, to Peter Earle and Paul Johnson for their advice and encouragement and, for help with this paper, to the editors.
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Notes
Judith Bennett prefers the term ‘familial patriarchy’, but I shall substitute ‘household’ to avoid appearing only to be addressing husband/wife or parent/child relations: see J.M. Bennett, ‘Feminism and History’, Gender and History 1 (3) (1989), 251–72, esp. 260.
Or in an earlier legalistic usage, ‘patriarchalism’: G.J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1975). See also the discussion below on household manuals, p. 49–52.
For the most comprehensive up-to-date discussion of these records, see M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987); for their metropolitan peculiarities in the early eighteenth century, see
T. Meldrum, ‘A Women’s Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court, 1700–1745’, London Journal 19 (1) (1994), 1–20.
The only extant monograph on eighteenth-century English domestic service is that by J.J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1956), which embodies a few of the virtues and all of the vices of what he terms ‘the descriptive or impressionistic method’ (p.xii). See also
D.A. Kent’s criticisms in his ‘Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-eighteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal 28 (August, 1989), 111–28, esp. 112.
For a summary of current findings for the eighteenth century, see R. Porter and L. Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London, 1995), Introduction and Chap. 1.
For contemporary attempts at birth limitation or prevention, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), pp.223, 760;
L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1979 edn), pp.261–7, 307–8;
G.R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London, 1979), pp.133–4, 148, 151;
Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp.158–9;
S.D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), pp.114–15, describing a mistress who gave her servant herbal medicine to induce her birth. E.A. Wrigley produced statistical evidence for birth limitation in ‘Family Limitation in Preindustrial England’, EcHR 2nd ser., XIX (1966), 82–109, but toned down those findings in ‘Martial Fertility in Seventeenth-century Colyton: a Note’, EcHR 2nd ser., XXXI (3) (1978), 429–36.
DL/C/637 f.204 and passim. V. Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, 1988), p.83, showing husbands’ attitudes towards the need to procreate forcing wealthier mothers to put out their children to nurse, and pp.102–4, discussing medical opinion;
R. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (Harlow, 1984), pp.132–4. Even when breast-feeding became fashionable in high society in the late eighteenth century, some gentry women insisted on bottle-feeding or employing wetnurses:
L. Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660–1857 (Oxford, 1993), p.168; Fildes, Wet Nursing, pp.116–22.
Dorothy Marshall wrote, ‘as the Poor Laws had power not only over those who were actually chargeable, but over those likely to become so, their operation included the greater part of the lower working class under the designation of “The Poor”’: D. Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: a Study in Administrative History (London, 1926, 1969 edn), p.2; most servants would fall under such an all-embracing, blanket definition. But see the more recent discussions in
P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), Chap. 2, esp. pp.27–32;
G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), Chap. 1.
Amussen, Ordered Society, pp.38–41. Davies is sceptical about this literature’s worth as a source, noting the ‘monotonous similarity of highly generalised advice’ by Gouge and others: K. M. Davies, ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’, in R.B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp.58–80, esp. pp.62, 78.
S.D. Amussen, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds) (Cambridge, 1985), pp.196–217, and her Ordered Society, Chap. 2, esp. pp.36–8. For a well-known contemporary example, see R. Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (London, 1685, 2nd edn), p.24. Amussen and Schochet both point out that this view was contested, most notaby by Locke: Amussen, Ordered Society, pp.61–6; G.J. Schochet, Patriarchalism, p.246.
In other words, ‘the coercion of women into bed by men who use their powers as employers or social superiors to wrest sexual favours from them’: E. Shorter, ‘Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History II (1971), reprinted in R.I. Rotberg and T.K. Rabb (eds), Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton, 1980), pp.85–120, 91.
Shorter, ‘Illegitimacy’, p.89; for the debate that followed in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, see many of the essays in Rotberg and Rabb (eds), Marriage and Fertility. Shorter’s general point about the increase in the ratio of illegitimate births to all births across the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries has, however, been supported by the historical demographers: P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: Comparing Illegitimacy over Time and between Cultures’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R.M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp.1–68.
J. L. Flandrin, Les Amours Paysannes (XVI–XIXe Siècles) (Paris, 1975); C. Fairchilds, ‘Female Sexual Attitudes and the Rise of Illegitimacy: a Case Study’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History VIII (4) (1978), reprinted in Rotberg and Rabb (eds), Marriage and Fertility, pp.163–204, esp. p.166, and Appen. I, Table 3;
C. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Régime France (Baltimore, 1984), Chap. 6;
N. Rogers, ’Carnal Knowledge: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-century Westminster’, Journal of Social History 23 (2) (1989), 355–75, esp. 358, 363;
A. Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy and its Implications in Mid-eighteenth Century London: the Evidence of the Foundling Hospital’, Continuity and Change 4 (1) (1989), 103–64;
J.R. Gillis, ‘Servants, Sexual Relations and the Rise of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, in J. Newton, M. Ryan and J. Walkowitz (eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History (London, 1983), pp.114–45, esp. p.116; Patricia Seleski, in Chap. 4 of her thesis, concentrates on the decade 1800–9 and includes a transcript of the questions examiners asked applicants to the hospital: ‘Women of the Labouring Poor: Love, Work and Poverty in London, 1750–1820’, unpublished PhD thesis (Stanford, 1989), pp.15, 132–7 and n.25.
Fairchilds, ‘Female Sexual Attitudes’, p.171, Table 1 and p.185, Table 2, quote from p.175. See also S. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, 1983), p.255; Rogers, ‘Carnal Knowledge’, 359, Table 2.
Roberts, ‘Women and Work in Sixteenth-century English Towns’, 92–3; for the decline of concubinage in France in the early modern period, see J.-L. Flandrin, Familles: Parenté, Maison, Sexualité dans l’Ancienne Société (Paris, 1976), pp.176–80.
Fairchilds describes the French perception that master-servant sexual relations were ‘socially acceptable … part of the privileges of a patriarch’ (although it is not clear if this refers to particular social strata), and dates this from Greek and Roman slavery: Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, p.167; despite its probable frequency (and the anticipation of its dangers in the advice literature), it is not so clear that such ‘privileges’ were part of the English mode of mastery, although Stone has recently affirmed that ‘élite opinion on the whole was tolerant of adultery by the male, especially with women of inferior social status such as maidservants, kept mistresses or prostitutes’: L. Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 (Oxford, 1993), p.242.
DL/C/242 f.80, 2/6/1687, Susannah Yeareley. Elizabeth Benfield related how her master had left for Kensington to get cured of syphilis and her mistress was treated at home by several surgeons. She saw her master on his return pleading to his wife to stay, promising he would change his ways, but confessing that ‘he had lain with the cook maid in Kensington and that he was afraid that she had given him the foul disease’: DI/C/262 f.323, 4/5/1725. G. Walker and J. Kermode, in a reference to women accused of witchcraft but perhaps applicable here too, suggest that women’s ‘professed bodily ignorance might itself have been part of a strategy to portray themselves as good, “honest” women’: G. Walker and J. Kermode, ‘Introduction’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), pp.1–25, quote from p.15.
For the charivari (or its English equivalents) more generally, see E.P. Thompson, ‘Rough Music’, in his Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp.467–538, a phenomenon which ‘attached to the victim a lasting stigma’ (p.488, see also pp.513–14);
M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 105 (1984), 79–113; and for London specifically,
R. Shoemaker, ‘The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies 26 (July 1987), 273–304, esp. 278, where he discusses defamatory riot and disturbance; Meldrum, ‘Women’s Court’, 9–10.
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© 1997 Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe
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Meldrum, T. (1997). London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660–1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household. In: Hitchcock, T., King, P., Sharpe, P. (eds) Chronicling Poverty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25260-2_3
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