Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

On January 4, 1662-3. "My wife did propound my having of my sister Pal again to be her woman, since one we must have."—Gosnell had been required to attend on her uncle, a justice.—"It being a great trouble to me that I should have a sister of so ill a nature, that I must be forced to spend money upon a stranger, when it might better be upon her if she were good for anything."

Here are a couple of entries that came close together in the register of Ottery St. Mary concerning marriages—

"1657, September 7. George Trobridge, Gentleman, servant unto John Vaughan, Esq., married Elizabeth, daughter of Nicolas Hancock."

"1658, April 8. Jonathan Browne, of Bridport, Gent, and Margaret Harris, servant to Richard Arundell, gent."

That Margaret Harris was a gentlewoman admits of little doubt. In the register of Woolbrough I remember seeing that the Yarde family of Bradley had a cousin or two of the same name in service in their house.

The usual term for a valet to a man of estate was—his gentleman, and a lady's maid-servant was—her gentlewoman. The apostle commands, "By love serve one another," and our forefathers do not seem at one time to have thought that domestic service was derogatory to gentility; and I do not myself see how that any one who considers that his supreme Master and Lord humbled Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and stooped to wash His disciples feet, can sneer at menial service. Nothing is menial but what is done in a base, cantankerous, unloving spirit. It is usually found that such domestics as come out of the lowest slums are they who are most particular not to do anything that is not precisely their work, who are most choice and most exacting. When the relatives of the family ceased to be servants in the house, then came in the daughters of farmers, the cleanest, most thrifty, obliging, sensible, and altogether admirable domestics that ever were. Who that is over fifty does not remember them? They were conscientious, they took an interest in the family, their mistresses liked—even loved them.

Then the farmers became too grand in their ideas to send out their girls into service, and consequently one class alone was drained of its young women, the labourer class, the uneducated, undisciplined, the class that had no idea of thrift; and is it to be wondered at that the girls' heads should be turned when they find in what demand they were? I do not mean to say that, taken as a whole, a more respectable, nice, honest, cleanly set of girls is anywhere to be found than our English serving lasses; but we live in an age of transition—they who were formerly only required as drudges in farm-houses, suddenly discover themselves in huge request, and that has upset them.

The trouble there is in households now about domestic servants is said by some to be due to the mistresses—they do not make friends of their slavies, as did the ancient mistresses of theirs. But how can they, when the girl does not stay in the house over three months or half a year, and when she belongs to a class intellectually, socially, educationally removed from her mistress by a great cultural gulf as wide as that which separated Lazarus from Dives?

There are few more charming figures in fiction and in retrospect than the "old blue-coated serving-man," devoted to his master's interests, and living and dying in his service; but I doubt whether he deserved the halo with which he has been invested. He was a bit of an imposture. Devoted he was to his master's interests, because he lived on his master, and just on the same principle as any parasite desires the welfare, the fatness, and full-bloodedness of the mammal on which it is itself battening. A French cynic in his will bequeathed to his valet "all that of which he has robbed me." There have been old and faithful servants, but that there were many of them unselfseeking I do not believe; and I remember a very considerable number of them who became intolerable nuisances—exacting, despotic, believing that the family on which they depended could not get on without them, as the fly said of itself when it sat on the coach, "How I am getting the carriage along!" I also know that a good many have carried on gross depredations on their masters for many years unsuspected and undetected, all the while believed to have but one object of love and care in the world—the master and his house.

If we were to make a graduated scale of servants, according to their merits and demerits, I should put the butler at one end and the coachman at the other; in the former the imposition reaches its maximum, and the minimum is in the coachman, or, to put it the other way, I think that the dear old coachman is the most genuine, true-hearted, and deepest imbued with love of his master and the family, and that there is the least of this unselfish love in the butler. Very ungrateful and unjust would I be were I not to acknowledge the excellence in the old coachman, for have I not one of my own, now indeed for his age dethroned from his box but not from my service, who carried me in his arms to the hayfield when I was a little fellow, hardly able to toddle, and who now loves above everything to take my youngest into the stables, and perch the little fellow on the back of one of the carriage horses. A worthy old servant, who had been with my grandfather, then my father, then with me, and—who knows? for he is green still—may serve my son.