Household Administration Part 6

In the same way a standard of housing accommodation establishing the minimum of s.p.a.ce per head necessary for health is generally recognised; and on these and similar calculations, correlated with the cost of house-room and commodities, it will be possible to build up a science of consumption which will be really a science and not a series of guesses and vague generalities.

It is true, again, that it is easier to deal with the grades of society practising the roughest and 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 circ.u.mstances and the expenditure[20] of each cla.s.s of the community at the present time. Under each of these headings 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 cla.s.s and for each stage of national development. It is clear that in the present paper no attempt can be made 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.

II. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE POSITION OF THE HOUSEHOLD IN ENGLAND

English industrial history has been divided into three main epochs with intervening periods of transition. These are (1) the mediaeval period, (2) the period extending from Elizabeth's reign to the reign of George III., and (3) the modern period.

In the first, the typical economic inst.i.tutions 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 intermunic.i.p.al 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 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 cla.s.ses of the workers on the other hand. Both therefore require a revision of the system of providing for the dest.i.tute. 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 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.

The task before us, then, is to sketch as clearly as possible from the scanty material available the main features of domestic life at each one of these epochs, and to show how the changes in industry reflected themselves in the life of the household.

(_a_) THE HOUSEHOLD IN THE MEDIaeVAL PERIOD

(1) _The Serf--his Position and Domestic Arrangements_

In the mediaeval period, outside the small and scattered towns, the prevailing form of economic organisation was the manor. We have to imagine 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 part.i.tioned 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 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 precariae. "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 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 cla.s.ses 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. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 a.n.a.logy of the shepherd and swineherd, we should a.s.sume 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 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 bra.s.s 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 Glas...o...b..ry 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 coa.r.s.e 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 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 quant.i.ties now quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working-man. The b.u.t.ter, 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 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 mediaeval 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, 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 n.o.bles 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 a.s.sume 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 n.o.ble 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 b.u.t.tery, and above which the musicians' gallery was often placed. Opposite the door was a raised das, 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 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 mediaeval 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 Grossetete, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 mediaeval food, then, would be 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval kitchen, and more easily served in the mediaeval 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, 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, ent.i.tled "John Russell's Boke of Nurture," has been reprinted by the Early English Lent Society[39] in the volume ent.i.tled "Meals and Manners of the Olden Time," and from it I extract the following:--

Furst set forth mustard and brawne of boore, the wild swine, Suche pottage as the cooke hath made of herbis, spice, and wine, Beef, mutton, stewed feysaund, swan with the chawdyn[40]

Capoun, pigge, venisoun bake, leche lombard,[41] fritter, viant fine, And then a soteltie.[42]

Maydon Marie that holy Virgin And Gabrielle greeting her with an ave.

This is followed by two other courses rather lighter in character, though still including venison, peac.o.c.ks, quails, &c., and then comes dessert:

After this delicatis mo, Blanderelle or pepins with caraway in confite, Wayfurs to eat, hypocras[43] to drink with delite.

The service in the wealthy mediaeval 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.signed to divide the meats, so that nothing be placed or served disorderly."[46]

In the "Boke of Nurture," which refers of course 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 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 nap.r.o.n of one elle and part of the King's great rewards given yearly amongst them in household."[49]

The last quotation ill.u.s.trates 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 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 Grossetete a.s.sures 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 or yeoman would be regarded as a prize worth striving for and worth keeping.