Abstract
In 1953, W. G. Hoskins profoundly shaped our current understanding of early modern privacy when he identified the Great Rebuilding, a boom in residential remodeling of the 1570s to 1640s, as an effect of a new desire for privacy that had filtered down from the aristocracy to yeomen farmers. A massive remodeling of England, the Great Rebuilding replaced medieval halls, large spaces for communal living and dining, with two-storied houses of many smaller, specialized rooms. Such small rooms, according to Hoskins, enabled a “withdrawal from communal life,” first for the master of the family and later for everyone else.1 This concept suits our modern sense that privacy involves freedom from others’ surveillance or knowledge; it also implies that prior to the Great Rebuilding, privacy had not been valued in the same way. Lena Cowen Orlin revises this narrative by arguing that the desire for privacy competed with an equally strong value placed on surveillance as a guarantor of order. Some of the changes in domestic architecture characteristic of the Great Rebuilding, she convincingly demonstrates, enhanced opportunities to observe others.2 This chapter examines domestic privacy from a new point of view: the relations between masters (or mistresses) and servants represented by household orders, or manuscript lists of directions to servants.
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Notes
W. G. Hoskins, “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640”, Past and Present, no. 4 (1953): 44–59.
C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 50.
Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 72; Alan Stewart, “The Early Modem Closet Discovered”, Representations 50 (1995): 76–99
See, for example, Katherine R. Larson’s examination of closets as spaces for intimate social and textual encounters in Amelia Lanyer’s Salve Rex Judaeorum (1611). Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19–59.
Society of Antiquaries of London, A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, Made in Divers Reigns: From King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, Also Receipts in Ancient Cookery (London: for the Society of Antiquaries by John Nichols, 1790), 154.
“Regulations of c. 1603 for the household of Sir Thomas Egerton”, EL 1180, Egerton Family Papers, Huntington Library; F. R. Raines, ed. The Derby Household Books (Manchester: for the Chetham Society, 1853), 8–10
Compare “Regulations of c. 1603 for household of Sir Thomas Egerton”, EL 1180, Egerton Family Papers, Huntington Library, with the second Earl of Bridgewater’s orders in Henry John Todd, The History of the College of Bonhommes, Ashridge (London: R. Gilbert, 1823), 47–55.
“R. B.”, Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of an Earle (London: R. Triphook, 1821), 7, 11. Mark Girouard estimates the date of these orders as around 1605. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 320.
This extensive manuscript combines household accounts and ceremonial orders. Collection of Ordinances, 16. See A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959).
For examples, see Ian Lancashire, “Orders for Twelfth Day and Night Circa 1515 in the Second Northumberland Household Book”, English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 1 (1980): 7–45;versity.
W. H. St. John Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne Priory in the County of Sussex (London: Country Life, 1919), 127.
Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1–25
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
On feudal household organization and the transition to patronage forms of obligation, see J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 188
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 156–64.
Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5–6.
See P. W. Fleming, “Household Servants of the Yorkist and Early Tudor Gentry”, in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989), 19–36
Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 22–43
Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender,1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (New York: Pearson Education, 2000), 16
R. C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 66
See David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 177–83
Ronald Lightbrown, “Isaac Besnier, Sculptor to Charles I and his Work for Court Patrons, c. 1624–1634”, in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 132–67.
J. G. Elzinga, “Browne, Anthony, First Viscount Montagu (1528–1592)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn., http://dx.doi.Org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3667, accessed December 10, 2012; Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150–80.
John Murdoch, The English Miniature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 73–84.
Keith Cunliffe suggests either “Alike in character and in face” or “The heart matches the outward form.” Quoted in Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (New York: Rizzoli, 1996)
Perhaps the Brownes commissioned another symbolic portrait of Catholic brotherhood; George Vertue notes that the withdrawing rooms at Cowdray held a picture of “two brothers hand in hand, a church behind.” George Vertue, Note Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931–32), 2:82.
Roy C. Strong and V J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620 (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983), 164.
See Gervase Jackson-Stops and National Gallery of Art, The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 119.
On this engraving as Protestant propaganda, see David Acton, “The Wars of Religion”, in The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 416–18.
Jill Finsten, Isaac Oliver: Art and the Courts of Elizabeth I and James I (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 21–33.
See also Timothy J. McCann, “‘The Known Style of a Dedication Is Flattery’: Anthony Browne, 2nd. Viscount Montagu of Cowdray and His Sussex Flatterers”, Recusant History 19 (1989): 396–410.
Lawrence Stone, Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 251–2.
John Smyth, The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and Manor of Berkeley, in the County of Gloucester, from 1066 to 1618, ed. John Maclean (Gloucester: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1883), 393.
John Gurney, “Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England”, Architectural History 43 (2000): 117.
James M. Rosenheim, Townshend of Raynham: Nobility in Transition in Restoration and Early Hanoverian England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 8–9.
Gurney, “Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House”, 113–20. See also A. H. Gomme and Alison Maguire, Design and Plan in the County House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 255–6.
Quoted in W. David Kay, “Epicoene, Lady Compton, and the Gendering of Jonsordan Satire on Extravagance”, Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999): 17.
François de Bassompierre, Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de Bassompierre to the Court of England in 1626, ed. John Wilson Croker (London: J. Murray, 1819), 126–8.
Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–2.
Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 59–83.
Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887), 6–7.
Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles the First: Containing a Series of Historical and Confidential Letters (London: H. Colbum, 1849), 1:33.
Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 12.
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© 2013 Mary E. Trull
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Trull, M.E. (2013). Privacy and Gender in Household Orders. In: Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282996_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282996_3
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