Introduction

Matilda Bates was perched perilously in an apple tree in her master’s orchard. As she shook the tree and gathered the fruit, loud voices rang out from the riverside. Peering between the tree’s branches, she saw two of her neighbours washing clothes with their servants at the water’s edge. She thought she heard one call the other a ‘pockie whore’ , but she was busy collecting the apples and took no real notice of their squabble.¹

*

Sybil Bevor straightened her hat and smoothed the front of her gown. Both were borrowed from a fellow servant and she felt strange in these clothes. As a 40-year-old widow with five children, the wages Sybil earned from service paid for food and rent on their small house, not for such things as fine clothing. But appearances were everything in court.²

*

For two nights Anna Elie watched over her sick neighbour, Thomas Crodie. When he died, she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her master and mistress at his burial and dined and drank in honour of his life. Two weeks later, when Thomas’s wife and children also fell sick and the death toll in the city soared, Anna realised the plague had come to Gloucester.³

*

Isott Riches was in love with Frances Yarde. Her master and mistress disapproved of their courtship, but she didn’t care. Frances was a gentleman, and she knew he would take care of her; he had offered her a position serving in his own home. Isott was fed up with being ill-treated. As she told her neighbour, she hadn’t come to serve her mistress to be beaten, nor to be her drudge. She vowed not to tarry there long.⁴

* * *

What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Who were these women? Where did they come from? In what kinds of households did they work and what were they hired to do? How did they fit within the local communities in which they lived? This book writes a new history of female service through close analysis of the day-to-day lives of over 1,000 women in service like Matilda, Sybil, Anna, and Isott, captured in witness testimony from English church courts between 1532 and 1649.

These women are important. Around 60 per cent of 15- to 24-year-olds worked in service in early modern England, hired by rural and urban households across the country.⁵ Service played a key role in England’s transition to a modern state: economic growth was apparently fuelled by the labour of single women, who married late.⁶ But if this ‘girl power’ was at the root of economic growth, the labour that female servants carried out is nonetheless routinely relegated to the ‘domestic’ . Male servants ‘in husbandry’ , whose work in the fields directly contributed to the economy, are set apart from female ‘domestic’ servants who worked within the home to meet the family’s personal needs.⁷ This book reconceptualises the work that female servants undertook. We find Matilda Bates high up in a tree, gathering apples for her master in 1595. Her work was defined by the rhythms of the agricultural year and took place outside the home. The apples she collected were sold to fill the household purse or were added to the household’s food store. Matilda’s fellow servants washed clothes at the nearby river, not inside the home. These women were not restricted to domestic spaces, nor was their work limited to domestic chores. They were at the economic and social centres of their communities.

English service is described as a life-cycle experience, bookended by childhood and marriage and offering men and women the skills, knowledge, and wealth needed to establish their own households. It was a contractual relationship: masters and mistresses hired men and women for their labour in exchange for wages, bed and board. But this wasn’t Sybil Bevor’s experience. The terms and conditions of her service as a 40-year-old widow with several children were different. She negotiated service by the day and lived in her own home. Her income kept her own household afloat; she wasn’t saving for a future home. By reconstructing life stories of women like Sybil, this book reimagines service as finely graded, sometimes unbounded and flexible, experienced in a variety of ways by a variety of people.

We are used to thinking of service as structured, regulated, and operating within a rigid patriarchal framework that was codified in social, political, legal, and cultural practices. Household patriarchal order placed the male head in a position of privilege and power not only over his biological family but also over his servants and apprentices. The servant worked not to her own clock, but to her master’s pace and rhythms and under his watchful gaze. Or so the story goes.⁸ But this book extends the matrix of female servant social relations beyond the family and household. It looks outward to the key roles of servants like Anna Elie in their communities. Caring for her sick neighbour, attending his burial, and agreeing to testify in court to the oral will he made on his death bed, Anna actively engaged in the customs, routines, and practices of her neighbourhood. Women like her were not just household servants. They were integrated members of other groups and socio-economic units. They held multiple identities – as workers, neighbours, family members, friends, and even enemies – which simultaneously shaped their behaviours. They were deeply embedded in networks of sociability, charity, friendship and animosity, news and gossip, and credit and honour.

A central theme of this book is agency. In objecting to being beaten and treated like a drudge, what did Isott hope to achieve? How were her complaints received by society? Patriarchal labour relations relegated female servants to a position of disadvantage and deference, but these women could – and did – set their own agendas. Some directly breached the prescriptive codes and rules of behaviour demanded of them in legislation and literature. This book interrogates the structures of power that we imagine existed in early modern England and that set the boundaries of how we understand agency and freedom. What were the rules that servants like Isott were expected to live by, and how did they negotiate them? Rather than seeing refusal to accept ill treatment, poor pay, or lack of freedom as evidence of non-compliance or as a direct challenge to the patriarchal structures of service, this book reconsiders these structures altogether.

Polemical tracts, legal statutes, and sermons act as the formal face of the ‘institution’ of service. These texts are routinely taken not only as prescriptive, evangelising rhetoric that sought to teach people how to behave. They are also assumed to reflect practice. Studies of criminal activity committed by and against servants take these texts as a benchmark of behaviour and misbehaviour, conformity and deviance. These texts routinely set the parameters of service as an institution.⁹ The norms, values, strategies, and behaviours of institutions are of course laid bare at times of crisis or when problems arise.¹⁰ But unless we cast our net wider to look at a broader range of experiences, we cannot easily disentangle practice and experience from expectations of society and state. To what extent was service an institution, with rules, regulations, and strict membership? Church court witness testimony – which only in a few cases directly set out to measure or regulate these women’s behaviour – offers ample incidental evidence of everyday practices and behaviours of women in service. It allows us to recast the norms and values that underpinned this important form of labour.

This book stretches open the prescriptive codes of behaviour for women in service that were disseminated in legal treatises and didactic literature. By systematically analysing the characteristics of women in service, the patterns and conditions of their labour, and their place within the communities in which they lived and worked, a new picture of female service in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England emerges. The stories of Matilda, Sybil, Anna, and Isott are emblematic of a history that is heterogeneous and diverse.

Service has never been static. The occupational descriptor ‘servant’ hides both the range of experiences of service at any point in the past, and its shifting meaning over time. In early modern western Europe, service grew as a sector from the late Middle Ages. The Black Death wreaked havoc on labour supply and demand, prompting new legislation to control labour shortages caused by depopulation. In the fourteenth century, statutes mandated longer contracts and restricted wages and mobility in a bid to strengthen serfdom.¹¹ But this labour that compulsorily bound the peasantry to a lord and his land was never to recover. Power to enforce new statutes now lay with central rather than local or manorial courts, thereby reconfiguring lord–villein relationships and contributing, at least in part, to serfdom’s decline.¹² The competitive labour market that emerged from the late medieval period brought with it at least one key freedom: the worker’s right to leave their master. Master–servant relations were hierarchical but certainly less stratified than serfdom’s labour relations, whereby each individual serf was bound to a wealthy landowner. Men and women across the social spectrum worked in service, and all but the very poorest in society could be masters.

In the eighteenth century, agricultural service declined as agrarian improvements reconfigured the labour force once more. Demand now was for day labourers, not live-in servants. Domestic servants became a marker of status, widening the socio-economic gap between employing families and their servants.¹³ Preceding this long-run narrative of change, service between c.1530 and 1650 (the period this book covers) is considered relatively stable. Legally, the servant position was well defined. As with serfdom, legal interventions sought to regulate service, too. Wage rates were set locally for servants and other workers to control the labour market, and legal protection for both masters and servants was theoretically well established.¹⁴ But this was a period of socio-economic change. Living standards rose for many, and middling sorts prospered. At the same time, society became more polarised and labouring people faced heightened exposure to poverty.¹⁵ As this book argues, the stability of what service meant, how it operated, and how it was experienced was a legal fiction.

Female servants leave few traces in the archives. Their sex and social standing made them a largely illiterate group in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While female literacy was higher in towns and cities, most women in this book lived in rural areas, where far fewer could read and write fluently.¹⁶ Early scholarship on service relied on diary entries and correspondence of literate masters and mistresses.¹⁷ But these commentaries on service told only a partial story that privileged the views of a literate class. The servant perspective (as well as the attitudes of less literate masters and mistresses) was absent.¹⁸

From the late 1960s, a new agenda was set. Ordinary people in early modern England whose ‘voices’ were hard to recover, including largely illiterate groups such as servants, were teased out of the archives. Administrative and legal records became the bread and butter of this new history from below: settlement examinations, parish listings, household accounts, court records, and a compendium of other sources that documented labouring people were unearthed. Ann Kussmaul’s Servants in Husbandry applied statistical modes of investigation to some of these sources, focusing on agricultural servants between 1500 and 1800. Analysing service longitudinally through the lens of its eventual decline, Kussmaul tracked hiring patterns, lengths of contracts, and types of labour in these sources. Her pioneering work located rural servants within a broader history of agrarian change in England, but it was male experiences that were pivotal. Female servants, Kussmaul assumed, were hired not to contribute to the economic productivity of the household but to maintain the family’s lifestyle. The hiring of live-in farm servants, she found, waned as day labourers became a cheaper source of labour on the larger, capitalist farms of the late seventeenth century.¹⁹ As the argument goes, the decline of female live-in service came later with the advent of ‘modernity’ . Emerging job opportunities in the nineteenth century for women in shops, factories, and offices, alongside new time- and labour-saving technologies in the twentieth-century home, are among some of the reasons for the eventual decline of live-in service for women.²⁰ But female servants in early modern England were not solely hired for the personal care of the family. Entrenching their experiences within the domestic realm undervalues their economic role, overlooks the income-generating labour they carried out, and assumes the home was an economically unproductive space. We still know little about what female servants actually did in this period or the economic significance of their work.²¹

The second half of the twentieth century also witnessed pioneering new work in historical demography and quantitative methodologies. Leading the way was the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, established in 1964. Important findings for service emerged as a by-product of other research agendas. Historical demographers found that men and women in early modern north-west Europe married and formed households late in life (in their late 20s). Explanation was found in the labour patterns of young people in life-cycle service.²² Runs of census-like parish listings made it possible to reconstruct geographical mobility in early modern England. Parish population turnover was high, and servants were identified as among the most mobile in this itinerant society.²³ Their movements contributed to the urban population boom over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as droves of young migrant men and women flocked to London and other urban centres in search of service.²⁴ Historians sought to make sense of households that contained not just biological families but itinerant lodgers, servants, and apprentices.²⁵ Etymological studies found that when diarists talked of their ‘family’ , they routinely included servants. The concept of the ‘household-family’ was born.²⁶ Servants, then, were important to both society and its local structures.

A history of service also emerged from scholarship of early modern crime, law, and order. History from below was accompanied by an interest in quantifying crimes committed by and against different social groups. High numbers of female servants involved in domestic homicide, theft, infanticide, and bastardy were identified. In asking why, researchers explored the intersection of social structures and patterns of crime.²⁷ Studies of community policing, punishment of miscreants, and social tensions moved the history of crime beyond the study of individuals as faceless statistics.²⁸ Gender emerged as a crucial category of analysis as the patriarchal system of governance came under scrutiny.²⁹ Female servants were incorporated into a new research agenda in which order and disorder, power and vulnerability were intimately bound to gender. Here, servant–master sexual relations took centre stage. Martin Ingram showed that up to 70 per cent of bastardy cases heard in the church courts in the 1580s involved female servants, who ‘were in a vulnerable position and were sometimes seduced only after considerable harassment and even the use of force’ .³⁰ Bridget Hill argued that household sleeping and working arrangements made female servants susceptible to sexual advances.³¹ More recently, Tim Reinke-Williams claimed that ‘many masters believed they had the right to have sex with the women whose wages they paid, regardless of whether or not they consented’ .³² Troubling stories of sexual assault and rape have become a trope of female service. The distressing (often harrowing) stories of abuse experienced by some women at the hands of their masters are recalled throughout this book. But we shouldn’t assume it was the norm. Illegitimate birth rates were low in this period.³³ As Tim Meldrum pointed out, ‘acknowledging that some servants experienced the worst forms of sexual violence and abuse is to recognise the outer limits of sexual interaction, not to elevate them to the norm’ .³⁴

Women in service are rarely studied outside the context of their masters’ homes, binding them not only to patriarchy in its broad sense of male domination, but also more particularly to its narrower and literal meaning: ‘rule of the father’ .³⁵ While women’s history has widened the search for evidence of female autonomy and self-governance, histories of service have lagged behind. The lives of female servants are both defined and limited by household patriarchy, with prescription often speaking for practice. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature on household order has come to bear heavily on how we understand service. These printed polemical texts were circulated as a means of social engineering. To their male (often Puritan) writers, a well-ordered household which instilled principles of deferential hierarchy and good conduct created an organised and disciplined Christian society.³⁶ The family represented a microcosm of the state and religion; ‘the master is God’s vice-regent in his family’ , proclaimed Thomas Carter in 1627.³⁷ In 1598, John Dod and Robert Cleaver advised servants to be ‘as a dutifull childe is to his father; to bee reverent and lowly to them in all their words and gestures, to suffer and forbeare them, to obey’ .³⁸ If bonded labour had all but disappeared by this period, vestiges of unfreedom remained. Writing in 1622, clergyman William Gouge argued that servants ‘are not their own, neither ought the things which they doe, to be for themselves: both their persons and their actions are all their masters’ .³⁹ These writers defined the role of each household member, including servants, and (deliberately) failed to entertain the idea that servants had lives outside their masters’ homes.

Booksellers stocked these texts, and they appeared in inventories of the literate. There was, therefore, demand.⁴⁰ But we don’t know whether these texts were actually read, nor whether male householders actively instilled the ideals of household patriarchy.⁴¹ Realistically, the ‘godly household’ was an impossible ideal. Susan Amussen has observed that advice literature devoted more time to outlining how to govern than how to obey. ‘Failed patriarchs’ compromised household patriarchy as much as ‘unruly women’ .⁴² Many households had no patriarch: Laura Gowing pointed out that ‘households headed by a husband and father were only one – if the most conventionally recognized – kind of social unit’ .⁴³ Some servants in this book lived in households headed by widows, widowers, and never married men and women. They lived cheek-by-jowl with other non-family members: hired workers, lodgers, and the family’s extended (sometimes distant) kin. The classic household structure – husband, wife, children, servants, and apprentices – nonetheless set the rules of conduct in this literature. These rules invariably form the social and micro-political backdrop against which recorded observations of female servant behaviours have been studied.

Even talking about unruly women and failed patriarchs fixes patriarchy as a rigid governing concept. Not all women who challenged patriarchal order were seen as unruly, and not all patriarchs who allowed some liberties were perceived as failing. But in all cases, the patriarchal system was in some way compromised. This book resists privileging the social structures described in prescriptive literature and avoids ascribing autonomy or agency according to the rules it set out. The experiences explored instead help inform our understanding of patriarchy and agency, of freedom and coercion. They guide us in delineating the boundaries of these concepts, in recognising where the edges were blurred, and in appreciating where gender was just one of several organising principles at play.

Though the study of female servants has expanded over the last fifty years, we still know relatively little about their lives. Historical demographers have integrated service into explanations of marriage patterns and household structure, while economic historians have studied male service through shifts in agrarian labour relations and industrialisation. Within social history, servants’ criminal or illicit behaviour has loomed large. These strands of scholarship nonetheless fall short in reconstructing their quotidian experiences. As a holistic study of female service, this book intersects with scholarship on a range of topics – histories of the family, youth, space, community, law, labour, freedom, migration, and memory. Evidence of female servants’ everyday experiences recorded in church court depositions opens a window onto almost every aspect of their lives.

There were more than 250 ecclesiastical courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.⁴⁴ While secular law fell to criminal courts (local hundred, manorial, and borough courts; county-level petty and Quarter Sessions; and the Assizes, Star Chamber, and King’s Bench), ecclesiastical courts were underpinned by canon or spiritual law.⁴⁵ They issued marriage licences and administered wills and probate, and were effectively responsible for the moral and spiritual life of early modern society. Litigation demanded a significant proportion of the courts’ time and personnel. Accusations of sex outside marriage, infrequent attendance at church, drunkenness, and other disorderly behaviour were among a litany of offences for which parishioners were presented. The church court investigated claims of clerical disorder and prosecuted negligent or even irreligious clerics. Aggrieved parishioners could litigate in this court against neighbours and strangers, friends and foes for transgressions including defamation, breached marriage contracts, tithe disputes, disagreements over administration of wills (testamentary disputes), and contested church seating arrangements. The church court sought to mediate and resolve antagonisms between parties.

Witness testimony forms the source base upon which this book primarily depends. Despite their orderly and often formulaic structure and appearance, church court depositions are unruly and unpredictable beasts. At times it is with tedium that I’ve trawled through repetitive narratives replicated from deposition to deposition and case to case. But in shaking out the contents of this archive, other emotions surfaced. Taunts, jests, and invective exchanged over garden hedges still bring amusement. At the other extreme, harrowing accounts of a husband’s abuse of his wife were particularly difficult to read. I regularly unearthed more than can be understood, feeling frustration at a tantalising scrap of reported speech that has now lost its meaning, or a titbit of evidence from which the wider story can no longer be recovered.

It is easy to forget that these are not unmediated accounts of events. Despite swearing oaths, at least some witnesses gave false or prejudiced testimonies.⁴⁶ Simon Dansie deposed in the Hereford court that Watkin David Bever of Radnorshire had confessed to him that he had falsely testified under oath in a 1599 matrimonial dispute. Despite being reminded of the dangers of committing perjury, Watkin had told an untruth in court to ‘keepe a man and his wife together’ .⁴⁷ What we read therefore shouldn’t be taken at face value; the ‘fictions of the archives’ , as Natalie Zemon Davis described court documents, reflect the legal, social, and cultural worlds in which they were produced.⁴⁸ Frances Dolan has reminded us that ‘many who read depositions most carefully seem to locate evidence of an elusive speaking subject when a deposition appears to depart from convention, to exceed legal formulae’; instead, she argued, the conventional might actually be more plausible.⁴⁹ Aspects of testimony might function as plot devices. The volume of church court suits in which witnesses recall peering through holes or chinks in walls, doors, and windows to unmask incriminating behaviour marks these descriptions out as legal motifs, suggesting three-way collusion in storytelling between the litigant, their legal counsel, and the witness.⁵⁰

Nor are depositions verbatim transcripts of the words witnesses spoke, diligently copied out by court clerks. Testimony was moulded to fit legal conventions and the story arc of the case. This archive was in part constructed by the court notaries, who filtered witnesses’ words and redrafted them into the third-person narratives we read today (see Figure 0.1, for example). Malcolm Gaskill’s tripartite model of early modern records – of conduct literature reflecting how society should behave, literary sources (such as ballads and pamphlets) intonating how people seemed to behave to contemporary commentators, and legal documents representing people’s actual behaviours – overlooks the administrative and legal role of the court in constructing its records.⁵¹

The challenges of analysing court material are well known. We should be especially wary of thinking that women’s depositions are direct evidence of their rarely heard voices. Witnesses were coached by male counsel and their words were placed in the hands of male scribes. The thousands of men and women who filed into the Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, Wells, and Winchester courts to testify between 1532 and 1649 all encountered and interacted with these scribes. Teasing out where a witness’s story ends and a notary’s editing begins is virtually impossible. Each deposition was read back to the witness, though whether the signatures, initials, and marks inscribed at the foot of each testimony are indicative of consent, compliance, or even coercion is lost to us. The witness’s accomplished signature, short lettering, or shaky subscription next to the notary’s long, flowing script remind us that this was a physical interaction between court officials and witnesses over four hundred years ago. Testimonies were made collaboratively.

Though imperfect, depositions are nonetheless a guide to the plausible. An account of a witness reaping in a field at noon and hearing defamatory words pass between her neighbours tells us something about plausible working patterns, even if the event is entirely fictitious or subject to the imperfections of memory. Truth lies on a spectrum. The testimony may or may not have been precisely her own words or even an account of what happened at that time on that day. But to pass as a truthful account in court, the tale she told reflected her own experiences in some way. Day-to-day life was folded into the fabric of the credible story she related. The snippets of everyday practices, interactions, and behaviours recorded in the testimonies of many witnesses were also often incidental to the cases themselves. Systematic study of depositions offers the possibility of writing a history of female service from a compendium of scraps of evidence of servants’ lives. This does not make it an incomplete history, but rather one that captures the enormous variation of service and catches a glimpse of women like Matilda, Sybil, Anna, and Isott at various points in their lives.

Like any detailed study of one type of source, the conclusions of this book are bound to the context in which the source was produced. In other words, the litigation heard in these ecclesiastical courts shapes the evidence recorded. Chapter 1 outlines in detail the ways in which the institution of the church court comes to bear on the female servants in this book. But, I argue, the depositions from which evidence is drawn broadly reflect the behaviours, practices, and experiences that were familiar to this disparate group of women who self-identified or were identified by others as servants.

In this book, all cases heard in the church courts of the dioceses of Bath & Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Winchester in the period 1532–1649 that generated witness testimony serve as a ‘meta-source’ . This meta-source amounts to a database containing details of almost 9,000 cases, over 15,000 litigants, and more than 27,000 witnesses. Full quantification of this archive ‘makes it possible to study the wider social and institutional context’ in which the 1,093 female servants identified within the records lived.⁵² Placing their experiences within the entirety of the archives from which they are drawn connects servants to and contextualises them within the broader practices, behaviours, and attitudes of wider society.

As narrative sources, depositions are typically analysed qualitatively. Their structure and arrangement make quantitative or systematic analysis a less obvious approach, though it is not without precedent.⁵³ This book synthesises quantitative and qualitative approaches to recover servant experiences, employing the ‘micro-exemplary’ methodology set out by A. W. Carus and Sheilagh Ogilvie.⁵⁴ Depositions are carefully interpreted to determine how evidence should be counted, and the linguistic challenges of the source in making these decisions are discussed throughout the book. Each case that contains evidence of one or more female servants has been transcribed and coded, allowing systematic qualitative analysis. These approaches are interdependent and ‘mutually indispensable’ to the book.⁵⁵ Quantification allows for the typicality of experiences to be assessed – did female servants routinely milk cows, for example? (The answer is yes, and is explored in detail in Chapter 6). Where numbers are small, the limitations of quantification are acknowledged. Qualitative analysis is simultaneously undertaken at every level in interpreting the statistics compiled from depositions. Patterns and commonalities in practices, labour, and behaviours are identified, as is the significant variation of servant experiences captured in this vast archive.

It is a conscious decision to focus on female servants. Male servants have received attention elsewhere, notably in agrarian histories. As Michael Roberts pointed out,

[i]‌n writing about women’s history there is a strong temptation to contrast their experience with that of men. Since our knowledge of social, as of political, history still largely concerns men, there is a danger that the study will degenerate into a search for the ways in which women ‘participated’ in social processes which are still defined in terms of male experience.⁵⁶

Roberts himself feared he had fallen into this trap, but he noted that ‘only when we have worked out ways of identifying the “female” characteristics of social processes can we then begin to re-write history from the human point of view’ .⁵⁷ This book is a history of gender. I write about distinctly female experiences but interrogate the enduring structures of patriarchy and agency that are male-centred and continue to shape the histories of women that we write. I, too, seek the ‘human point of view’ by pulling apart this archive.

London has been fertile ground for studying female service.⁵⁸ The metropolitan population pulled in droves of young migrant women (and men) from the countryside and other smaller urban centres with the promise of work. This migration contributed to the city tripling in size between 1580 and 1640 to as many as 380,000.⁵⁹ London was a unique setting for service. The intensely urban spatial and social dynamics of work and life were different here to those in small towns and rural parishes. The built environment placed households in closer proximity to one another and each house contained more people. Often two or more households, including lodgers, apprentices, and servants, lived under one roof.⁶⁰ But even by 1660, only a quarter of England’s population lived in urban centres.⁶¹ Most female servants in this period lived and worked in the countryside. Though similarities existed, their experiences were likely very different. In the increasingly commercialised metropolis, more masters and mistresses ran shops, practised trades, and carried out mercantile business. The work their servants carried out was not the same as a husbandman’s servant or the servant of a country gentleman. Female migrants who came to London in search of service might experience anonymity and freedoms that were not possible elsewhere. As Gowing put it, London servants were ‘probably both freer than their rural counterparts, and more vulnerable’ .⁶² Female servants outside the capital have received far less attention and so we know very little about rural servants’ lives, despite a wealth of information in court records.⁶³

This book examines female service in southern and western parts of England. The dioceses of Bath & Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Winchester covered six counties: Somerset, Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Hampshire. Their jurisdictions also spilled beyond modern-day county borders. The diocese of Hereford covered parts of Shropshire, Montgomeryshire, and Radnorshire, and the church court of the diocese of Bath & Wells governed parts of Dorset. The Winchester court also held jurisdiction over the Isle of Wight. The geographical reach of this study is illustrated in Plate 1.

The five dioceses were unequal in size and population. Bath & Wells, Gloucester, and Winchester represented medium-sized jurisdictions. In 1600, the population of Somerset stood at 169,984, Gloucestershire at 101,256, and Hampshire at 104,197. Exeter diocese was much larger, extending across Devon and Cornwall and containing a total diocesan population of 361,479. Herefordshire contained a smaller proportion of the country’s population, housing just 62,054 people in 1600.⁶⁴ Much of this southern and western landscape was rural but contained several urban centres. The largest included Bristol and Exeter, which by 1660 contained 16,000 and 11,500 inhabitants respectively, while Gloucester, Plymouth, and Winchester were significantly smaller, housing between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the period 1600–60.⁶⁵ Many smaller but economically significant towns were also littered across these regions, including Bath, Cheltenham, Crediton, Hereford, Southampton, Taunton, and Wells.

These dioceses contained a web of topographies, landscapes, and economies. Agriculture was primarily pastoral, as accounts of farming recalled in the courts’ tithe disputes reveal. Sheep were to be found pasturing upon the chalk lands of Hampshire. The diocese of Exeter was primarily an area of pastoral farmland and livestock production, containing less productive upland regions in the north and fertile land for corn production in the south.⁶⁶ Herefordshire was a ‘mixed agriculture’ county, or according to antiquary and sixteenth-century traveller John Leland, a landscape of ‘corn, grass and wood’ .⁶⁷ The parts of Shropshire that the Hereford diocesan court covered encompassed a variety of landscapes, including large areas of wood-pasture and open pasture, in which livestock farming flourished.⁶⁸ Gloucestershire contained woodland areas and regions of pastoral farming, with an internationally recognised wool-producing economy in the Cotswolds and the Vale of the Severn.⁶⁹ Its landscape supported a fluctuating rural cloth-working trade in the southeast of the county. Similarly, Devon’s pastoral farming maintained a strong textile industry, with cloth production central to the economies of Exeter and large towns such as Cullompton and Tiverton.⁷⁰ Tin mining was important to the Cornish economy, while coal mining was a significant industry in west Gloucestershire.⁷¹

Coastal settlements across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Hampshire connected England to the continent and beyond. Plymouth was a growing port with a burgeoning fishing industry in this period.⁷² Cornish villages such as Mevagissey and St Ives became important fishing centres.⁷³ Exeter enjoyed strong trade connections with France, exporting Devonshire broadcloth.⁷⁴ Bristol and Gloucester were important as organising and trading centres.⁷⁵ Bristol traded wares from Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire including cloth, lead, coal, iron, and calfskin.⁷⁶ Southampton remained a principal trading post in Hampshire but by 1600, trade had made its shift to London.⁷⁷

Some of these settlements were also important posts in the movement and migration of people. These were not closed communities.⁷⁸ This book offers important rural and urban counterpoints to the London-centric studies of female service to date, but many witnesses had migrated from across the country. Welsh-born witnesses were recorded and Welsh surnames (‘Jones’ , ‘Williams’ , and ‘Griffen’) and forenames (‘Evan’ , ‘Morgan’ , and ‘Rice’ , for example) appear across all five courts, but particularly in the Hereford and Gloucester courts. Depositions capture migration between Wales and Minehead in Somerset, as well as continental trade and sea travel from Cornwall to Newfoundland and Spain.⁷⁹ Just a little evidence of black lives emerges from this archive, though race is almost never explicitly mentioned. This book compares the experiences of female servants across these regions of England to understand the impact of economic, topographical, and social difference on their lives. This wasn’t a homogeneous country, and experiences were shaped by place.

This book has three parts. Part I sets out the book’s parameters, exploring exactly who female servants were and how they were recorded in the church courts. Chapter 1 identifies patterns and trends in the courts, outlining the geographical distribution of cases as well as building profiles of typical litigants and witnesses who filed into the courts. It establishes the scope of the courts’ business and explores how patterns of litigation influenced female servants’ interaction with church courts in this period. Chapter 2 looks more closely at the profiles of the 1,093 female servants identified in the records. The breadth and variation of experiences of service that spanned the social spectrum are laid out in this chapter, as is the idea of servant ‘identity’ . Chapter 3 sets out the demographic structure of service for women, challenging the idea that English service was uniformly coincident with only the premarital stage of life. Part I therefore offers a more detailed reconstruction of female servant lives for this period than has been attempted before, showing service to be contingent, fluid, and flexible.

Part II reconstructs patterns of labour. Chapter 4 outlines female servant mobility in comparison with that of other social groups. It examines the length of time they remained with the same masters and mistresses and explores how mobility shaped their experiences of integration and belonging. Chapter 5 presents new evidence on the conditions under which women were hired, young women’s ‘choices’ in finding work, and the contracts they negotiated. Here, I interrogate the extent to which women entered freely into a contract of service. In Chapter 6, the types of work these women were hired to do are analysed in detail for the first time, demonstrating the varied nature of female service and the inaccuracy of characterising it as domestic labour.

Part III traces the footsteps of service in three ways: spatially, socially, and temporally. Chapters 7 and 8 present social and geographical studies of service, considering how itinerant women established themselves in the communities in which they served. Chapter 7 reorientates our understanding of female service by locating the working and social experiences of these women beyond the domestic realm through quantitative analysis of the spaces in which their own testimonies and the depositions of others recorded them. Moving beyond a narrative of service that locates women almost exclusively within the home, Chapter 8 explores their interactions with members of the communities in which they worked and lived. The connections they developed and maintained over distance and time demonstrate their embeddedness within local communities. In Chapter 9, the role of geographical distance as well as memory in the formation and retention of communities for female servants is brought to the fore. While service was largely a life-cycle experiences, memories of service years later connected women to this work, the households in which they had served, and the land on which they had toiled. In this book, almost every aspect of this key institution is dissected: its demographic profile, mobility and migration patterns, literacy rates, work practices, and the nature of contracts. Early modern service was not the static or stable institution we thought it was. It was finely graded, fluid, and often contingent.