English Housewife in the Seventeenth & Eighteententh Centuries

Front matter

California State College.

at Los Angeles sevent

John F. Kennedy Memorial Library

Preface

N:: so long ago I opened an admirable book on domestic economy in which I found it stated

that, “scientific training can alone save the sorely taxed housewife to-day from becoming a slave to her domestic responsibilities.”

It isa misleading and unattractive statement and one which certainly does not convey the writer’s real meaning. There are no doubt housewives at the present time who, filled with a laudable desire to leave the world a little better than they found it, grudge every hour which is spent upon the proper care and management of their own households. Hemmed and pressed on every side by the ever-increasing demands of external work, social and political, they may protest that their own homes must be conducted upon a purely scientific basis with the minimum outlay of time and strength on the part of the mistress. These are however, we believe in the minority. An immense amount of outside work may or may not be done by the modern woman ; but as a rule she has the intelligence to know that the personal touch, the little original methods in which one housewife may differ from another and so lend a distinctive charm and interest to her own surroundings, are worth far more than the most scientific training and the more or less mechanical Ag vi THE ENGLISH HOUSEWIFE perfection thus achieved. The relations between mistress and servants, upon which the whole happiness of a household alike for its members and its guests must depend, can be achieved by no purely scientific axioms.

Three hundred years ago, the great lady whose education was at least as good as, if not a great deal better than our own, thought it by no means beneath her to devote the greater part of her time to the care of her household. True, there were no committee meetings, no public platforms on which she could raise her voice on behalf of any cause in which she happened to be interested. She claimed no rights, for she was content with her affections and her duties, which comprised not only her own numerous family, but that much larger one on her husband’s land, as well as the poor at her gates. She began life young and her span of years in comparison to our own was short, and perhaps this was one of the many reasons why she found her own sphere sufficiently satisfying.

We have travelled a long way since the days of the learned Tudor ladies and the competent and intelligent housewives of the early Stuarts. The struggle for the Higher Education of Women strenuously and successfully carried out in the nineteenth century, meant in reality little more than a re-building in modern form of an edifice which had crumbled slowly and surely under the influence of the Puritans, and could regain no foothold in the pleasure-loving days of the Restoration, nor in the stultifying early years of the century which followed, In the latter haif of it the women of intellect, of whom there were many, owed their erudition rather to their own enterprise than to the instruction received in those refined academies for young ladies where superficial

PREFACE vii accomplishments were considered the hall mark of gentility.

When, with much pain and difficulty, the new educational edifice for women was reared some fifty years ago it was inevitable that the pendulum should swing a little far, and that the more homely duties of our sex should have fallen for some years into lamentable disrepute. Now that we are re-awakening to the value of housewifery knowledge, scientific or otherwise, as an asset in women’s education, a plausible effort is being made to arouse those “homespun” instincts in the girls which were certainly not encouraged in their mothers. There is still much to be done to complete the work of which our immediate predecessors in the last century laid the foundation stone and built, as it were, the main structure. Some of us may find it in our hearts to hope that while the libraries of this educational edifice are kept at a high standard, and the kitchens are furnished in a manner worthy to attend upon them, time and inclination may yet be found for the further embellishment of the drawing-room. But for this perhaps, the pendulum must again swing back a little.

In the following pages I have tried briefly to trace the domestic life of the English lady from a period shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War until the accession of Queen Victoria. My intention has been to give some picture of her immediate surroundings, her domestic duties, her occupations, expenses and pleasures. In describing her home and its fittings I cannot pretend to any expert knowledge of detail in the matter of architecture, or furniture, etc., a general impression is all that it is within the limits of this book or my own powers to convey. But if it carry with it any of the fragrance

Vili THE ENGLISH HOUSEWIFE which, in these utilitarian days, seems always to linger in the atmosphere of a leisurely and picturesque past, it will, however inadequately, have achieved its object.

My warmest thanks are due to those who have most kindly given me access to their unpublished family papers, including diaries, accounts and recipes which are invaluable as illustrating the domestic life of the time. To Lady Bosville Macdonald of the Isles for the accounts and inventories of the Bosville and Osbaldeston households ; to Mrs. Jacomb Hood for her great-grandmother, the Baroness de Hochepied’s diary; to Colonel Frewen, C.B., for the use of his great-aunt’s recipes and accounts; and to Mrs, Way for the account books of her ancestor, Baron Hill, and his descendants. I have also to thank Lady Sackville for permission to include Lady Betty Germaine’s recipe for her famous Pot-Pourri at Knole; Mrs. Evelyn for the portrait of Mrs. John Evelyn, at Wotton House ; Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox for the photograph of her herb garden at Broughton Castle; Sir Albert K. Rollit for the description of the original herb garden at St. Anne’s Hill, Chertsey ; and Mr. Frank Schloesser for valuable advice and assistance. My thanks and acknowledgments must further be given to Margaret, Lady Verney, and to her publishers Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., for permission to make extracts from the “ Verney Memoirs”; to Mrs. Dorothea Townshend for the same permission with regard to her “Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork” and her “Letters of Endymion Porter,” and to her publishers Messrs. Duckworth & Co., and to Mr. Fisher Unwin respectively ; also to the Scottish History Society for permission to quote from Lady Grisell Baillie’s “ Household Book,” and to Mr. Lane, of

PREFACE ix the Bodley Head, for the use of quotations from “The Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe.”

Wherever possible I have gone to the original sources, but there are many comparatively modern books to which I must express my indebtedness, notably: “The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delaney,” edited by Lady Llanover (Richard Bentley & Son); “The Journals of Mrs. Papendiek,” edited by Mrs. Delves Broughton (Richard Bentley & Son) ; “A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I. and George II.,” edited by Madame van Muyden (John Murray); Jeafferson’s “Book about the Table” (Hurst & Blackett) ; “The Growth of the English House,” by J. Alfred Gotch (Batsford); and the many useful handbooks to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lastly I have to thank Mr. Guy Laking, C.V.O., for facilities to study the exhibits at the London Museum, Mr. Lenygon for admission to his show-rooms, and many kind friends whose advice and encouragement have been of very real assistance.

ROSE M. BRADLEY.

GREYCOAT GARDENS, September, 1912.

OTHER AUTHORITIES

“The Publications of the Camden Society”; “Home Life of English Ladies in the Seventeenth Century” by the author of “Magdalen Stafford”; “A History of the Cries of London” (Charles Hindley) ; The Sussex Archzeological Society’s Collection ; Traill’s “Social History of England”; “Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne” by John Ashton (Chatto & Windus); and many others.

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CHAP.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

Contents

PAGE

PREFACE ; : : , : + ee THE RETURN I THE TRAINING OF THE HOUSEWIFE ; ce THE COUNTRY HOUSEWIFE ‘ ey : 20 THE HOME . , ‘ ; : ey HOSPITALITY . . : : = 65 THE KITCHEN AND THE INVENTORIES 3 iG THE TABLE : 97 THE HERB-GARDEN AND THE STILL-ROOM . EE

THE SERVANTS : . 5 I31

Introduction

THE RETURN * * a little grey lady stole across the lawn in front

of the Manor House. She was very small, and her feet made no impression as she passed over the soft velvet of the turf. She was also very dignified, and it was easy to see that the place belonged to her. No one need have any doubt about that. Had she not lived here for three hundred years? She herself did not know about time, but she fancied she must have had a very long sleep, and she knew dimly that there were other people here now, but they were her people all the same, just as the place was hers,

She moved in her own small and stately fashion down the walk between the cut yew-trees. The sun was high, and it was quite time that she visited the

2 I

L the fresh sunshine of an early summer morning fish-ponds. She must see how the young carp were fattening. The Squire would be back presently, and there might be company. But here a little surprise awaited her. The fish-ponds were there indeed, two straight, narrow pieces of water, just as she had always known them, but what was this? On their surface floated a mass of flat green leaves from which peeped out many flowers—pink and crimson and great white ones with yellow centres, opening gloriously to the sunshine. These must be surely some strange new food for the fish; one of those horticultural experiments which came from Holland. But would the fish like it? She greatly doubted it. Meantime, where were the carp—all those new young carp, a present from a neighbour in the next county of Sussex, and the Sussex carp were always to be depended on? Nota sign of them. She bent down a little nearer, and her own pale, bewildered little face looked up at her from the water. There she saw the glint of something small and gold, and then another whisking in and out among the lilies. Very small and very gold they were. The little lady shook her head. The Sussex neighbour had disappointed her sadly this time; and all that stuff with the flowers would never fatten them fit for the table. Well—she must seek out her steward and speak about it.

Meantime there was her herb-garden to look to. She had been away so long. Surely the lavender must be nearly ready for cutting; it was time to gather her rosemary for drying. How glad she would be to tread once more the bed of thyme under her little feet and smell its crushed fragrance! She turned back across the greensward, Here it would be, behind

THE RETURN 3 the low beech hedge so carefully clipped and cut. But no, the hedge had gone. Well, there had been some severe winters; no doubt it had died, and perhaps the rose-hedge might do as well, roses did no harm in a herb-garden. But as she came nearer, the little lady opened her eyes very wide indeed. There indeed was her lavender, cut neat and hedge-wise, and still covered with flowers ; there was also rosemary, but not enough of it, she thought, rosemary being so invaluable in the stillroom. She hardly thought about the lavender or the rosemary at all, however, for within the little inner hedge she could see nothing whatever but roses—a perfect riot of them. Clusters of tiny roses, red and pink, trained over a long arch, something like the pleached alleys of her memory, and which stretched away to the other end of the garden, to where once had stood the little arbour of wych-elm where she had been used to rest herself. That had gone now, and the roses covered everything. There were roses she had never seen or heard of—flaunting golden creatures which nodded at her from the bed where her borage and fennel should have been; great white beauties which had usurped the place of her cherished southernwood, and everywhere the _ old-fashioned roses of her own memory, delicate monthly roses and the big, fat, cabbage variety. Yes, she had loved her roses too, but in their proper place. Surely this ramping fashion was a great extravagance—so much rose-water could not be needed ; and where were the herbs ?

The Squire’s lady of three hundred years ago passed her hand over her eyes and sighed. She remembered now that they were her children who were living here, and young people will have vagaries. Her only son who had lived to grow up had always been wild; she had heard that he was a great friend of that too merry monarch Charles II., but that was after her time. The dull, hard days of the Commonwealth had driven her away among the shadows. And these were his children, or his children’s children, she did not know —anyhow, they were also hers.

She went back and stood on the broad gravel sweep in front of the Manor House, and this gave her great confidence. Here it still stood with its gables and mullioned windows and twisted chimneys, just as she and her lord had built it so many years ago. The improving hand of Time had mellowed the grey, weather-beaten stone, and the sun no longer twinkled on little diamond panes in the window; but this was her house as she had known it, and she could not see the new wing to the south. Her initials entwined with those of the Squire were still there over the heavy porch—where they had stood together so often. Here she had watched her husband ride away to join the King’s army, and here they had proclaimed their boy’s coming-of-age to the assembled tenants,

These thoughts gave the little lady courage. She slipped into the house and up the wide oak staircase to her own bedroom. It was still there, though strangely altered. The heavy, carved-oak bedstead, which had been her pride, remained, but the curtains of thick crewel work on linen, which had kept herself and her maids busy at their needles and embroidery-frames through many long hours of the Squire’s absence, had been taken from the bed and hung at the large opened windows. The truckle-bed, where her maid Moll was wont to lie some-

THE RETURN 5 times when the lady felt ill or lonely and her lord was away, was gone. In its place was a luxurious sofa, which even her great grandchildren could hardly have known. Cushioned and springy, it was a contrast indeed to the day-bed upon which she had sometimes thought it a juxury to dispose herself. The elegant toilet-table and large mirror were certainly new, and just a little shocking to her. Could her son be so rich that his wife could have her table covered with gold and silver and crystal toilet ornaments, fit in her day only for the greatest in the land? But she had heard of terrible extravagance not so much later.

The poor little lady was getting tired and confused ; she did not like the large porcelain .bath, with its glittering brass taps in the inner chamber, where in oak chests and hanging cupboards she had been used to keep the more sumptuous portion of her wardrobe. She did not at first know what the bath was for, but when she understood she was distressed. It was not safe to bathe too freely, but was a habit to be practised with care. Had not Mrs. Alice Thornton nearly perished on her wedding-day from having washed her feet the night before, and that in mid-winter! In the bottles of salts and bath powders she found something vaguely familiar, and sniffed them daintily. Something of the sort was made in her still-room, and fortunately she could not read the labels which proclaimed them the products of Harrod’s or Bond Street.

Now she wandered through the corridors, through the saloons full of wonderful polished furniture in strange woods and designs, of cabinets filled with china ; dainty elegant chairs which could not be safe to sit on, undreamt of in her day. But there was much of her own still left ; the solid oak table in the dining-hall, the great oak presses which put to shame, she thought, the fanciful gimcracks of the later time. Her own beautiful Van Dyck portrait smiled down at her. Instinctively she put her hand up to her neck and wondered where her pearls had gone to. Then she remembered the fine silver tankards and flagons which had stood on the press below, and which had gone to raise soldiers for the King. She smiled up at the handsome cavalier in his suit of armour and his deep lace collar, and he smiled back at her reassuringly. For his sake she had been a very brave little lady, and he had been proud of her. She remembered how rudely Cromwell’s soldiers had thrust her aside when they searched the house for arms and treasure, which, thanks to her ready wit and courage, they never found. She had been alone in the house then with her little children, so many of whom lay in the family vault up in the church yonder.

She began to feel lonely now ; she had seen no living soul in the house or gardens, perhaps because in her heart she had not wished to; the place was to be once more her own. But at this moment the heavy oak door was pushed very slowly open and a tiny child in a white frock came cautiously in. Very slowly it came, stepping over the slippery polished boards—a strong, determined little boy of two years old, with a hint of curl in his short yellow hair, and blue eyes set wide apart which stared at her without a trace of shyness. Such a boy had been her firstborn—her John, whose splendid silver porringer had gone into the melting-pot with all the others to help his sovereign, and whose young life had been snatched from her before he was four. This one looked healthy enough, but you never knew. She wondered how many

THE RETURN 7 of his brothers and sisters were already in that old vault up on the hill.

But the child was now standing in front of her, planted solidly upon his two feet and a slow smile spreading over his chubby face. Her John would have looked at her just like that, but he would not have been quite so sturdy.

Then the small boy spoke. “I’m John,” he said, with a pretty self-importance.

The little lady stared. Ah! had she not known it all the time? This was John, her own little John, come back to her, cropped it is true like a Roundhead and without his satin petticoat, but her son and nobody else’s. She held out her arms to him in a strange forgotten transport of happiness. John suddenly turned shy and hid his face in his fat hands.

But at that moment a terrible sound, an insistent, repeated, shrill sound, pierced its way through the adjoining corridor. John, quite undisturbed, took courage to peep through his fingers at this wonderful little lady who was so like the pretty picture up there. But she had vanished, frightened out of her brief and shadowy existence. How could she know it was only the telephone bell ?

Chapter I The Training Of The Housewife

N the opening years of the seventeenth century the self-respecting English lady preferred to absent herself from the dissolute Court of James I. and

his Danish Queen, and to live in comparative seclusion on her husband’s estate in the country. Here she could attend to the education of her daughters, administer her household, and entertain her guests in a manner fitting the dignified traditions of her own upbringing in the great days of Elizabeth.

When Charles I. came to the throne the Court was speedily swept and garnished of its worst licence, and a purified atmosphere of home life and the example of domestic happiness were offered by the King to his subjects. But, none the less, the ladies stayed in the country. Even those whose husbands held posts at Court were in many cases content to go up to Whitehall and make their curtsey and return again to their own exclusive surroundings.

Possibly a certain suspicion of the French Queen, of her alien charm which to insular minds has always been suggestive of a frivolous upbringing, and a more definite and far greater dread of her papistry, convinced them that the country was still the safest place in which to train and educate their young daughters,

The education of women continued to be regarded seriously under the early Stuarts, though it is doubtful whether the high standard of the Tudor ladies was maintained, except in select circles. We know that the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s Court had a sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, and could usually speak French, Italian, and Spanish quite fluently. In Holinshed’s “Chronicles” Harrison tells us that “they read the Holy Scriptures and histories of our own or foreign nations. They wrote volumes of their own or translated other men’s into English or Latin. The younger ones played the lute and the cithern.”

It was, however, still the fashion in good families, and especially in the country, for the girls to learn from their brothers’ tutor, and in this way they would as a matter of course receive a classical education. Later in the century, when schools such as “Mrs, Priest’s genteel establishment for young ladies at Chelsea” began to open, deportment, drawing-room accomplishments, and a smattering of French became of far greater importance to the young person who was presently to make her curtsey to the “ Merrie Monarch” than a sound and educative knowledge of Greek and Latin. The Puritan influence as a whole was unfavourable to women’s education. We find Sir Ralph Verney endeavouring to dissuade his little god-daughter, Dr. Denton’s Nancy, from acquiring too much learning. Nancy, however, has her own views, and saucily replies that she means to outreach him in “ ebri, grek, and laten.” Let us hope that she also paid a little attention to her spelling, but judging by the letters of her contemporaries, this seems to have remained for long a matter which was governed entirely by caprice.

Certainly, to our ideas, instruction began painfully early in those days. As soon as they could walk, the children’s nurse was expected to teach them to read from their horn books. Here the precious printed page was enclosed in a horn frame with a brass or wooden handle, and carefully preserved by a piece of talc on either side from destructive little fingers. It was a practical plan and one to which we owe the survival of many specimens of these early lesson-books among the treasures of museums or the priceless relics of a cherished past in old country houses, but it also limited the child’s first explorations in the new field of letters to the sides of the one page, which must have added not a little to the weariness of these early lessons for both nurse and pupil. One horn-book, however, no doubt succeeded another only too rapidly, to be presently replaced by a bound volume.

The mental achievements of the infant prodigies of these days suggest that the Puritans may have had some reason as well as prejudice for discouraging female education, and that insanitary conditions, a curious diet, and medical treatment compounded of superstition and ignorance, were not the only causes which contributed to the appalling infant mortality of the time. John Evelyn’s little son Richard is almost too familiar an example to quote. But when we are told that at the age of two and a half he could read and pronounce English, Latin and French ; that at four he could write a good hand, was learning Greek, and amused himself with demonstrating the problems of Euclid ; that at five he “disengaged” his godparents as he now understood his own duty after a complete mastery of the Catechism, we cannot wonder that this poor little child, this “incomparable hopeful blossom,” did not reach the age of six !

And there were girls who were not far behind him. A pathetic instance of the rigorous training of mere babies in this age has come down to us in the description of the death-bed of the little Princess Anne, a daughter of Charles I. She is said by the chronicler to have been a very wise little lady “above her age” and she died when she was not quite four years old. “ Being told to pray by those about her at the last, ‘I am not able,’ saith she, ‘to say my long prayer’—meaning the Lord’s prayer— ‘but I will say my short one. Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death.’ This done, the little lamb gave up her spirit.” How much, one cannot but wonder, was this much-loved baby a victim of premature religious and mental development, and the over-anxiety of devoted parents for her future welfare !

Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, on the other hand, appears to have been one of those who was not at all the worse for her strenuous education. She boasts that as little Lucy Apsley she could read English perfectly by the time she was four, and “having a great memory was carried to sermons, and while I was very young could remember and repeat them exactly, and being caressed the love of praise tickled me, and made me attend more heedfully.” Her father had her taught Latin, and she mentions this as though it were no longer the invariable rule in Puritan households even as early as 1625. “I was so apt,” she tells us complacently—and indeed this armour of selfcomplacency may have gone far to preserve her—“ that I outstripped my brothers who were at school, although my father’s chaplain that was my tutor was a pitiful dull fellow.” Accomplishments of all sorts she despised, and she “absolutely hated” her needle, which must have been a sore trial to her housewifely mother and no small inconvenience to herself in years to come. She appears, indeed, to have been a sad little prig, for when other children were reluctantly brought to visit her, she “ tried them with more grave instruction than their mothers, and plucked all their babies to pieces.” No wonder she was not popular with the well-regulated little girls, her contemporaries, who loved their dolls with true maternal tenderness and were training to be those accomplished housewives who so well adorned the seventeenth century. Later in life Mrs. Hutchinson relates of her mother-inlaw, with an appreciation which no doubt had ifs roots in certain youthful reminiscences, that “notwithstanding she fold Mrs. Apsley] had her education at Court, she was delighted in her own country habitation, and managed all her family affairs better than any of the homespun housewives that had been brought up to nothing else” !

Book learning was by no means the whole of a little girl’s education at this period. If she learnt her horn-book at her nurse’s knee, she was also taught to sew her sampler by the same teacher at an equally early age. How surprised would she have been could she have looked forward three hundred years, and seen the tearstained efforts of her impatient, sticky little fingers framed and glazed, in the rare cases where such early specimens have survived, treasured by her descendants, or more probably by comparatively recent purchasers who have given fabulous sums for them at Christie’s. On the sampler they were instructed in all those intricate stitches with which in their own married homes they were to embroider their curtains and bed quilts and hangings and chair covers and the little caps for their babies.

Foreigners professed to be shocked at the severity of English parents towards their children, but as a matter of fact much of the formality of the previous century had already disappeared, and in spite of over-pressure in some cases and an over-conscientiousness in their moral training, there is no reason to suppose that the children who lived in the country did not have very happy lives in the seventeenth century. They played their games much as our own do at the present day. Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Hide-and-seek, and Barley Bridge. They were constantly with their mother, and no letter from a wife to an absent husband was complete without some pretty reference to the little ones, or a carefully written enclosure from the child itself offering its duty.

Mrs, Angela Porter’s letters are familiar to most readers, but we get through them such a charming glimpse of the value set upon the children of those days that we cannot resist quoting from them. She was the mother of Endymion Porter, a devoted servant of Charles I., and his children were left under her care at his country home on the Cotswolds while he attended Charles, then Prince of Wales, on his journey to Canterbury to meet the Royal bride, Henrietta Maria. Mrs. Porter writes to assure her son of his children’s welfare, Endymion being then in attendance at Whitehall. She reminds him that the situation is healthy and that they have every care. “In reference to what you say regarding their food, you must know that they have here butter and cheese in abundance. They have also very good cows, and before the children came they killed a sheep once a week and sent it to market, for beef they do not kill on account of the heat, and veal and lamb sometimes they buy in the market ; other times they kill when the cows breed.... I will inform you respecting everything, but I must now go and see my little ones to bed.” The arrangements for provisioning this household are a little mysterious to modern notions, but there is no doubt about Mrs.Porter’s grandmotherly sentiments, which are still more prettily expressed in another letter: “1 wish you could see me sitting at the table with my little chickens one on either side; in all my life I have not had such an occupation to my content, to see them in bed at night and get them up in the morning.”