History Today February 2010 | Volume: 60 Issue: 2 | Page 25-31 | Words: 3192 | Author: Richardson, R. C.

An Maidservant's Lot in Early Modern England

R.C. Richardson describes the fortunes of young women driven by poverty into domestic service in early modern England. A number fell victim to predatory masters and ended up with illegitimate children, only to be ejected from households into penury or, worse, executed for infanticide.

Servants carousing and mingling with their masters at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire by Peter Tillemans, 1726, in a rare depiction of a servants ball

The life of a maidservant in early modern England was one fraught with perils,with young girls often prey to the advances of their lustful masters. In 1693 the London newspaper The Athenian Mercury carried the story of a manservant who, with his employer’s active encouragement, married a maidservant in the same household only to discover that she was already pregnant with the master’s child. The employer said he was grateful to have ‘such cracked ware [taken] off his hands’ and gave financial compensation to the couple.Most maids made pregnant by their employers were not so fortunate.

Servant-keeping was a ubiquitous and defining feature of society in the 16th to 18th centuries – around 60 to 70 per cent of 15 to 24-year-olds, the majority of them female, were employed in domestic service, even in poor households as pauper servants. Most of them lived, worked and slept in close proximity to their employers, sometimes in the same room. Privacy, even in great houses with features such as corridors and backstairs, was often impossible to achieve. Poverty was an endemic aspect of life in service. There were many like the ‘poor maid’ in a 1567 Canterbury court case who possessed ‘nothing but her personal apparel and 16 shillings a year wages and no other goods’.

Maidservants, therefore, were often precariously positioned, both physically and economically. This made them sexually vulnerable to the whims of their masters and other men of the house as well as to lodgers, guests, manservants and apprentices. Some would-be maidservants newly arrived in London were procured by pimps or by patrons of disreputable labour exchanges almost as soon as they set foot in the capital.

There were maidservants too who exploited their sexuality to gain advantage. An early 17th-century Somerset maid giving evidence in a court case, unwittingly revealed she was flattered when she attracted the advances of her employer and ‘did not tell her dame because her master promised her new clothes’. Much later, in the following century, Jonathan Swift, in his satirical Advice to Servants (Dublin, 1745), advised housemaids on how to strike the best bargain when their sexual favours were solicited by their masters.At all costs, Swift urged, the eldest son of the house should be avoided ‘since you will get nothing from him but a big belly or a clap and probably both together’. In 1763,Mary Brown, a maidservant in Glamorganshire, was still blackmailing Dr Morgan, her former employer, who had fathered her illegitimate child six or seven years previously.

Church court records are filled with cases involving illicit sexual relations between master and servant. At the beginning of the 17th century, Edward Glascocke from Enfield, Middlesex, found himself in court since he had been discovered in bed with his maidservant as well as his wife. In the same period, church wardens in Stoke St Mary, Somerset were scandalised by disclosures of an employer’s open preference for his maidservant over his wife.When they went to work in the fields the maid rode on horseback while the humbled wife was made to walk. The master and maidservant slept in the same bedroom while the mistress of the house was consigned to another. In Glamorganshire in 1763 the death of a master produced revelations about his ‘vile life’ in keeping a maidservant as his concubine ‘to the great disturbance of his house and to the great grief and vexation of his loving wife’.A London moralist, J.Moir, warned parents in 1787:

You had better turn your daughter into the street at once than place her out to service. For ten to one her master shall seduce her or she shall be made the confidante of her mistress’s intrigues.

Masters would often consider it their right to molest their maids. It was made clear to a London maidservant in 1605 that providing sexual favours to the master on demand was simply part of her job. She was told:

Thou art my servant and I may do with thee as I please.

Martha Bevers, a late 17th-century maidservant from London, received a similar response when she protested against the unwanted advances of her employer. ‘What was it to her,’ the employer was reported as saying, ‘if he found her meat and paid her wages for nothing else but to [play] with him?’ In 1693 Agnes Hunter, maidservant to a brewer in York, was seduced by her master during his wife’s lying-in period and when she herself became pregnant was casually informed that such things had happened before in his household. The famous diarist and naval civil servant Samuel Pepys frequently took sexual liberties with the maidservants employed in his small household – over a third of them were molested – and he repeatedly found himself on the receiving end of the wrath of his ever-alert and affronted wife for so doing. He bitterly resented her calculated counter-attack of employing maids who were ‘very ugly’.

Promises broken

Concupiscent masters could turn nasty when the fruits of their sin became apparent and the family reputation was at stake. In Nottinghamshire in 1600 John Drayton sent away his maidservant to Worksop after having had an adulterous relationship with her. A similar case from Essex in the same year involved a maidservant forced to have sex with both the master and his son; it was the mistress of the house who dealt decisively with the pregnant maid, Susan Lay, by packing her off to London to prevent shame falling on the family. In 1669 a Cheshire maidservant, made pregnant by her master, was forced to name another man as the father in the face of her employer’s threat to have her put in the house of correction or driven out of the county. A 1716 case which came before the London Consistory Court centred on a widower-employer in St Giles in the Fields and his determination to enjoy sexual favours from two of his maidservants. One, offered five shillings as down payment, defiantly refused,‘asking him if he took her to be a common whore’. The other, more pliant, who succumbed, became pregnant and was then offered £10 to lay the paternity charge at someone else’s door. She firmly rejected the suggested sum and bargained for a higher price of £15 to enable her to retire obscurely into the countryside to give birth to her illegitimate child.

In other cases of employers’ sexual relations with maidservants, hard bargaining took place over compensation. A Hampshire clergyman in 1571, having had intercourse with his maid, declared that he would only be prepared to marry her if her father and brother could provide a suitable dowry. An early 17th-century Somerset master, John Goodins, having got his maidservant pregnant, fought hard for the best settlement he could get from her solicitous friends and neighbours before he would marry her. They offered £20; he held out for £30.

Unsurprisingly, when promises of marriage had been made to maidservants by predatory masters, nuptials often failed to materialise. In his study of the sex lives of 17th-century Somerset peasants, G.R. Quaife provides several examples of gullible or ambitious maids providing sexual favours to masters who glibly promised marriage when their spouses died. One such master told an incredulous neighbour that ‘he had leave of his wife to beget a maid with child and would marry her when his spouse was dead – and she should bear no shame’. Another deluded maidservant who had been seduced and then ditched by her randy employer told her sad story:

I yielded to his adulterous ungodly desire ... he having no child ... And his wife dying he [promised me he] would not only marry me but give me all the goods ... he had.

Bastardy cases involving maidservants were common in early modern England, as they were in other parts of Europe. Seven out of 12 servant cases in the Portsmouth Borough Sessions between 1653 and 1688 involved bastardy. Jane Nicholas, a maidservant buried in Wenvoe, Glamorganshire in 1763, died giving birth to her fifth bastard child. Bastardy cases centring on maidservants abounded in 18th- and early 19th- century London.Of the large number of maidservant case histories found in the edited volume of Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations 1733-66 (carried out by vigilant JPs) there was a significant number of instances where the man identified as father of the illegitimate child was either the maidservant’s employer or one of his relatives (son or nephew), or a lodger. Seventy per cent of the infants admitted to the Foundling Hospital between 1801 and 1810 had unmarried maidservants as mothers. The London Magdalen Hospital attempted to reclaim repentant prostitutes – some of them former servants – for a respectable life in household service.

The maidservant made pregnant by her employer was nearly always seen to be in the wrong. All the Chelsea cases and many others elsewhere led to the women in question losing their employment, applying for poor relief and giving birth in the inhospitable surroundings of parish workhouses. Indeed in the 17th century much heavier penalties imposed under the law – whipping and/or confinement in a house of correction – were commonplace; such was the punishment meted out to maidservant Thomasine Brown who bore an illegitimate child in Norwich in December 1633.

An illustration by Jonas Hanway shows one of the girls prepared by the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes in London

But the law could sometimes show a more humane face.At the Richmond Quarter Sessions in October 1607, a master was fined 40 shillings for dismissing a maidservant whose bastard he had fathered. At parochial level the mid-18th-century Sussex shopkeeper and parish overseer Thomas Turner spent much time patiently investigating paternity cases involving servants and, sometimes, masters, although admittedly this was prompted by his concern to indemnify his parish from financial responsibility for maintenance. No amount of sustained effort, however, from master, magistrates, neighbours and the man’s own family could prevail in 1802 to make George Thorp in Yorkshire marry Phoebe Beatson, maidservant of the Reverend John Murgatroyd,whose bastard daughter Thorp had fathered. Sometimes, as this case showed, the law proved too cumbersome or powerless to work effectively, especially in ‘raw, industrialising frontier country’ like the West Riding.

The close correlation between unmarried maidservants and bastardy cases was notorious. Less common, though still noticeable, was the tragic extension in some such cases to infanticide by desperate unmarried servant mothers to conceal the births and to shield themselves from the likely consequences of discovery and dismissal from their employment. By doing away with their newborn babies, however, they exposed themselves to a worse fate. An Act of Parliament in 1624 ‘to prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’ (which remained in force until 1803) imposed the death penalty for the crime.

A case in early 17th-century Somerset involved an anxious, and probably guilty, master offering his maidservant 20 shillings to destroy her unborn child. Ten infanticide cases featuring maidservants came before the Yorkshire Assizes in the second half of the 17th century, one involving a master in 1659 who had got his maid pregnant and then attempted to force her ‘to take physick for to destroy the said child’.A Norfolk maidservant was accused in 1665 of ‘murdering her bastard child and burying it in Plumstead churchyard’. In the 70 cases of infanticide which figure in the northern Assize circuit records of the period 1642-80, the vast majority of women accused were maidservants, giving birth in secret isolation in lofts, outhouses and privies and obliged to carry on with their work routines, almost immediately, as best they could. One of these unfortunate women, a Yorkshire maidservant,Grace Ward, confessed under examination in 1678:

She did not apprehend herself in labour till the child fell from her as she was standing by her bedside and … she said she knew not whether it had life in it or not but that so soon as she was delivered she laid it upon some straw and threw a coverlet over it and did not look after it till the morning her master called her down to her work and then the child was dead.

In Glamorganshire in September 1678 the death of a maidservant, Peggy Rees, brought forth revelations of ‘dynastic’ bastardy and associated crimes. A bastard herself, Rees had given birth to more than one illegitimate offspring and in one case was strongly suspected of taking ‘some remedy to kill’ the unwanted child. Eighty-five per cent of the infanticide cases dealt with on the northern Assize circuit between 1720 and 1799 involved maidservants. It was the same in Scotland in the same period. Simon Schama found the same high correlation between infanticide cases and servant maids in early modern Amsterdam.

Mary Ellenor, a gentleman’s servant in London ‘debauched by an apprentice coachmaker’ and found guilty of infanticide, was hanged in 1708. Sarah Allen, a maidservant in a Westminster public house, dismissed for her pregnancy and obliged to apply for poor relief, suffocated her baby in the workhouse, was charged, found guilty and executed in 1738.

All too rarely taken into account were the desperate circumstances which lay behind infanticide. The crime, so commonly associated with maidservants, was simply viewed as a brutal and extreme exposure of their natural depravity and was taken as an affront to the values and security of the wider community. Murdering mothers, it was felt, deserved the draconian penalty which the law provided. Only from the 1720s are there signs of an increase in acquittals in cases where the evidence was deemed inconclusive.

The strange case of Anne Green

An infanticide case like no other occurred in 1651 and centred on an Oxfordshire maidservant. Such were its extraordinary details that it was quickly and widely broadcast and celebrated. Two tracts rehearsing the story – Newes from the Dead (Oxford, 1651) and A Wonder of Wonders (Oxford, 1651) – appeared in rapid succession.Who wrote them is not clear.Visitors travelled far to see for themselves the young woman in question, Anne Greene, as her story appeared to verge on the miraculous.

Greene, who was around 22 years old, had worked as maidservant for Sir Thomas Read at Duns Tew, Oxfordshire, where she was seduced by her master’s grandson, who was aged only 16 or 17. She became pregnant (though she later claimed not to know of this) and months later was taken ill, went into labour and, in a privy, miscarried. She concealed the dead baby (a boy) with dust and rubbish in a corner,where it was later discovered. The circumstances were brought to the notice of her employer who then passed Greene on to a local JP – presumably one wellknown to him – who charged her with the crime of infanticide and referred her case to the next assizes to be held in Oxford.

There Greene was expeditiously tried, convicted and sentenced to death. No clemency could be expected. The condemned maidservant made a short, conventional speech before going up the ladder to the scaffold, asking her young cousin, who was present, to help her die quickly. This he did by pulling on her feet ‘with all the weight and force of his body on them’ as she swung by the neck on the rope. A soldier on guard at the execution beat her breast four or five times with his musket to further hasten the end and she was then left suspended for half an hour until there could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Finally, she was cut down and her body placed in a coffin which was then carted off to the Oxford physicians to await dissection.

As the medical men assembled and the coffin was opened, to the amazement of those gathered, Greene displayed signs of life.William Petty, fellow of Brasenose College and professor of anatomy in the University, was present ‘and perceiving life, declared there was a great hand of God in the business’. He directed hot cordials and oils to be administered. Greene was bled, heated plasters were applied to her body and her hands and feet were rubbed vigorously.A warm bed was prepared for her and a woman found who was brave enough to lie with her. After 14 hours she regained consciousness and uttered her first words:

Behold God’s providence ... Behold his miraculous and loving kindness.

Some, it seems, pressed for her to be taken back to the place of execution a second time to be properly dispatched but physicians and soldiers ‘co-operating with Divine providence’ intervened to keep her safe. Petty’s prescribed treatment was continued and by the following day Greene was much improved and, swollen neck, throat and stomach pains notwithstanding, she was able to drink a little and respond to questioning. Her recovery was complete within the space of a month and she withdrew from the city to be cared for by friends in the countryside, taking her prison coffin with her as ‘a trophy of her wonderful preservation’. Multitudes flocked to visit the Oxford miracle woman and the better sort of people, the prison governor included, contributed to a fund to relieve her wants.

Divine judgement of a different kind crashed down on Sir Thomas Read, her employer and initial prosecutor. He died three days after her miraculous ‘resurrection’.

‘Wonderful’ events of all kinds attracted popular attention in the early modern period; they were written up in eye-catching, moralising ways and became favourite reading matter. The dividing line between fact and fantasy was easily lost. But that Greene’s case and execution took place on the public stage and that leading scientists of the day were present places the record of these events on a more secure footing. Medical opinion in Greene’s case confirmed that this was an instance of miscarriage, not infanticide. Greene freely confessed to Petty and others everything about her seduction and dated her miscarriage to 17 weeks later. The medical men, therefore, confirmed that the half-formed, dead child she had delivered was consequently ‘not capable of being murdered’.

Poems from Oxford dons, some in Latin, rounded off the first of the two commemorative publications on the Greene case on a high note by dwelling on the miraculous nature of the events in question. But this was a man’s world laden with double standards and at least two of these little verses could not resist having a cynical dig. Tis more easy to recall the Dead/Than to restore a once lost maidenhead, quipped one of them. Another cruelly droned: Hocus pocus, fast and loose, dead and gone/Here again: women have more tricks than one.

But Anne Greene’s memory lived on. Thomas Fuller in his History of the Worthies of England, published in the 1660s, found a place for her story in his section on Oxfordshire, adding an afterword informing readers that the resurrected maidservant ‘is since married and liveth in the country in good reputation’.

Often, however, maidservants in the early modern period, especially in London, were considered to have loose morals. Daniel Defoe was one of a number of social commentators who depicted them in an unfavourable light:

London’s being overstocked with harlots is entirely owing to those numbers of women-servants incessantly pouring into it from all corners of the universe ...Many of them are ... running from place to place, from bawdy house to service and from service to bawdy house again ... so that, in effect, they make neither good whores, good wives, nor good servants.

In 1786, the writer John Trusler took it for an incontestable fact that ‘there are few servant maids in London ... but what are whores’. The artist William Hogarth was more balanced; his depressing sequence of images of The Harlot’s Progress contrasts starkly with his affectionate group portrait of his own household servants. Some maidservants, it is true, attempted to exploit the giving of sexual favours as a means to advancement. Samuel Richardson’s fictional heroine Pamela, by contrast, clad in the unassailable armour of virtue, held her would-be seducer at bay, becoming in due course not his mistress but his wife. Between these polarities lay the many maidservants who were simply the deceived, overpowered victims of lustful predators in the harsh and unrepentant man’s world they inhabited.

R.C. Richardson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Winchester. His new book, Household Servants in Early Modern England, will be published by Manchester University Press in March.