In the first place, this cannot be understood until we have set aside our modern ideas of master and servant. The old point of view is picturesquely summed up in a pamphlet of 1598, quoted by Dr. Furnivall.
“Amongst what sort of people should then this serving-man be sought for? Even the duke’s son preferred page to the prince, the earl’s second son attendant upon the duke, the knight’s second son the earl’s servant, the esquire’s son to wear the knight’s livery, and the gentleman’s son the esquire’s serving-man. Yea, I know at this day gentlemen, younger brothers that wear their elder brother’s blue coat and badge, attending him with as reverent regard and dutiful obedience as if he were their prince or sovereign. Where was then in the prime of this profession Goodman Tomson’s Jack, or Robin Rush, my Gaffer Russet-coat’s second son? The one holding the plough, the other whipping the cart-horse, labouring like honest men in their vocation. Trick Tom the tailer was then a tiler for this trade; as strange to find a blue coat on his back, with a badge on his sleeve, as to take Kent Street without a scold, or Newmarket Heath without a highwayman. But now, being lapped in his livery, he thinketh himself as good a man, with the shears at his back, as the Poet Laureate with a pen in his ear.”
From this passage it is clear that at a time not very much earlier, serving was a profession in which every rank, except royalty itself (if indeed this is to be omitted, see pp. 1, 179 below), might honourably wear the livery of a man of higher rank. Indeed, under the system of entail, this was, in time of peace, the only possible livelihood for a gentleman’s younger son, unless he had a special aptitude for law or the Church. Debarred from all trade, he could only offer his services to some great man who was compelled by his estate to keep up a large household, and so earn his patronage to provide for the future. It was fully expected that boys so placed would be helped to opportunities at Court or abroad, and girls to good marriages. That these patrons really took an interest in their young servitors, and felt responsible for their welfare, appears in many accounts of help bestowed upon men who afterwards became famous in literature, or scholarship, or state-craft. And as for the girls, Dr. Furnivall quotes an amusing instance of a mistress who, when reproached with dismissing a gentlewoman without due cause, thereby injuring her chances for the future, immediately allowed her forty shillings a year towards her maintenance while she herself lived.
Among rich men it was the custom to receive a number of boys for training in this way. In the household of Lord Percy there were nine young “henchmen” who served him as cup-bearers and in various other capacities. To these he allowed servants, one for each two, unless they were “at their friends’ finding,” in which case they might have one apiece. Likewise, in his household, his second son was carver, his third, sewer.
But while in a rich man’s household, younger sons might receive as good a training as if they had been sent elsewhere for the purpose, the case of the younger sons of a poor gentleman might be sufficiently wretched. Orlando, in As You Like It, speaks feelingly on this point. Although his father had left 1000 crowns for his upbringing, he was so neglected that he says: “His (his brother’s) horses are bred better, for, besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders dearly hired;[[7]] but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth ... he lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education.”
The alternative to such a life of hardship was either to enter the Church or depend upon its charity, or to serve in the household of a man of rank. While only a few were fitted for the religious life or cared to undertake it, “many poor gentlemen ... left beggars in consequence of the inheritance devolving to the eldest son,” were supported by the charity of the Church, as we are told by an Italian visitor to England in 1496-7.
The case of an unmarried daughter living at home, though less desperate, was even in well-to-do families sufficiently uncomfortable, as is plainly hinted in a letter written by Margaret Paston to her husband in 1469. She implores him to find his sister “some worshipful place,” and concludes: “I will help to her finding, for we be either of us weary of other.”
The practice of sending children seven or eight years old away from their parents was ostensibly that they “might learn better manners”; but the Italian visitor mentioned above concluded uncharitably that the real reason was, the English had but small affection for their children, and liked to keep all their comforts to themselves, and moreover knew that they would be “better served by strangers than by their own children.” However absurd this may seem at first glance, I incline to think that the foreigner may have touched upon truth here, as is borne out by many instances of Spartan, even brutal, treatment of children by parents in those days. Still, the fact remains that the loss of home life and parental tenderness was balanced by gain in discipline, education, social opportunity, and the opening up of careers.
The education of the various children addressed in these treatises varied according to their social status. As early as the twelfth century certainly, and perhaps earlier, it was customary for “bele babees,” with boys and girls, to have a tutor either at home, or in the household of the great man with whom they were placed. If they went to school, there were at first the monastic and conventual institutions; then later, the universities and grammar-schools. But, in the case of girls like the Good Wife’s daughter, who sold homespun in the market-place, and had to be admonished not to get drunk often, I doubt whether there would be any education beyond her mother’s teaching.
The universities, at first, were frequented chiefly by poor men’s sons, and scarcely attended by the upper classes. In Chaucer’s time, the Clerk of Oxenford was lean and threadbare, and had but little gold, and his two Cambridge scholars were in no better case. Nearly two centuries later, Sir Thomas More says: “Then may we yet like poor scholars of Oxford, go a-begging with our bags and wallets, and sing ‘Salve, Regina’” (a carol) “at rich men’s doors.” However, gradually during the sixteenth century, a university education became so fashionable that rich men’s sons crowded in, and “scrooged” (I quote Dr. Furnivall) poor students out of the proceeds of endowments left expressly for them. Still, in 1517, the old ideal of a gentleman as yet held its own, as is amusingly related by Pace in his De Fructu. He tells how “one of those whom we call gentlemen, who always carry some horn hanging at their backs, as though they would hunt during dinner, said: ‘I swear by God’s body I would rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, and to hunt skilfully, and elegantly carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics....’”