Servants in the Palace
When your royal characters come home to their palace, who does their laundry? Who does the bookkeeping? Who does all the logistical work involved in supplying a large household with food, clothing, firewood, candles, beer and wine, floor rushes, new horses and anything else you can imagine?
There are a few royal ordinances on the internet that show us how medieval kings and queens organized their households. The earliest one we have for England is the Constitutio Domus Regis, written around 1136. It lists all of the king's household staff and how much each of them should be paid in cash, wine and candles. This ordinance was followed by a more detailed statute of Edward I in 1279 (scroll down to section C), and another one for Edward II in 1318. These translations come from Stephenson and Marcham's Sources of English Constitutional History, which someone has kindly put online.
There was also a 1478 ordinance issued by Richard III, but I haven't found it on the internet. You can read about it in the chapter on the king's household in Rosemary Horrox's book Richard III: A Study in Service.
You can also see a similar set of ordinances for the kings of France, but you'll need some language skills to read them because they are, naturally, in Old French. In addition, Malcolm Vale's recent book, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, discusses how some of the great households of Burgundy and the low countries organized themselves.
It would take too much space to explain the duties of each type of servant in one post. However, there are a few general things to remember about medieval noble households. First, their numbers were not constant. Medieval barons moved regularly from one estate to another, taking some of their servants with them, but hiring others temporarily and letting them go when they moved on. The household could be joined at times by courtiers who stayed for awhile and then returned to their own estates. There were also vassals who owed the lord guard duties for a just a week or two a year.
Household ordinances may also create the illusion that servants' duties were more fixed than they really were. Kate Mertes has observed that in practice the job descriptions for many household offices overlapped, especially in smaller households and earlier centuries. Many servants were jacks of all trades who did whatever needed doing.
There is also the question of the gender of household servants. Household ordinances show that there were more serving wenches in legend than in reality. Medieval households were overwhelmingly male. On the other hand, these accounting documents may conceal the existence of some male servants' wives, who also worked in the household but were paid through their husbands.
For more information on medieval servants, you should see two books which are not available online. Kate Mertes' The English Noble Household, 1250-1600 and C.M. Woolgar's The Great Household in Late Medieval England are cited in nearly every discussion of English medieval servants.
Although there isn't time or space to go into much detail here, in the future I may write posts about the individual offices of servants and administrators. Stay tuned.
There are a few royal ordinances on the internet that show us how medieval kings and queens organized their households. The earliest one we have for England is the Constitutio Domus Regis, written around 1136. It lists all of the king's household staff and how much each of them should be paid in cash, wine and candles. This ordinance was followed by a more detailed statute of Edward I in 1279 (scroll down to section C), and another one for Edward II in 1318. These translations come from Stephenson and Marcham's Sources of English Constitutional History, which someone has kindly put online.
There was also a 1478 ordinance issued by Richard III, but I haven't found it on the internet. You can read about it in the chapter on the king's household in Rosemary Horrox's book Richard III: A Study in Service.
You can also see a similar set of ordinances for the kings of France, but you'll need some language skills to read them because they are, naturally, in Old French. In addition, Malcolm Vale's recent book, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, discusses how some of the great households of Burgundy and the low countries organized themselves.
It would take too much space to explain the duties of each type of servant in one post. However, there are a few general things to remember about medieval noble households. First, their numbers were not constant. Medieval barons moved regularly from one estate to another, taking some of their servants with them, but hiring others temporarily and letting them go when they moved on. The household could be joined at times by courtiers who stayed for awhile and then returned to their own estates. There were also vassals who owed the lord guard duties for a just a week or two a year.
Household ordinances may also create the illusion that servants' duties were more fixed than they really were. Kate Mertes has observed that in practice the job descriptions for many household offices overlapped, especially in smaller households and earlier centuries. Many servants were jacks of all trades who did whatever needed doing.
There is also the question of the gender of household servants. Household ordinances show that there were more serving wenches in legend than in reality. Medieval households were overwhelmingly male. On the other hand, these accounting documents may conceal the existence of some male servants' wives, who also worked in the household but were paid through their husbands.
For more information on medieval servants, you should see two books which are not available online. Kate Mertes' The English Noble Household, 1250-1600 and C.M. Woolgar's The Great Household in Late Medieval England are cited in nearly every discussion of English medieval servants.
Although there isn't time or space to go into much detail here, in the future I may write posts about the individual offices of servants and administrators. Stay tuned.