Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
'I have had them in my hands often’; Servants and The Material Culture of The
Eighteenth-Century Home.
Tessa Chynoweth
On the 24th September 1762, the servant maid Elizabeth Hall appeared before
the Court of the Old Bailey in London. Elizabeth, like many servants over the
course of the eighteenth century, was called to court to identify items that had
been stolen from her employers. As her employer knew she would, Elizabeth
recognised a cap and handkerchief that were presented to her, and stated for the
court that ‘This cap and handkerchief are my mistress’s’. The court, perhaps not
entirely convinced, approached Elizabeth again and asked ‘What particular
knowledge have you of the cap and handkerchief, whereby you can be sure of it?’
It is Elizabeth’s response to this question that forms the foundation of this paper;
she stated ‘I have had them in my hands often, I have washed and ironed them,
and have not the least doubt about it’. Importantly, Elizabeth positioned herself
not as a passive admirer aspiring to ape the fashion of her mistress, as is often
assumed, but as having a direct and distinct relationship with these goods; a
relationship that she constructed through her work.
This paper examines statements such as Elizabeth's for evidence of similarities
and differences in material encounters in the eighteenth-century domestic space.
The objects identified, and the knowledge expressed at court, varied between
social groups. Elizabeth, like many witnesses, constructed her knowledge
through domestic practice- she stated she washed and ironed the cap and
handkerchief. Through comparative analysis of these statements it is possible to
map domestic practices, and how those practices determined material
interactions within the domestic space. It is important to remember, however,
that these statement do not recall the totality of interactions, real or imagined,
between witness and object; rather, they are performances shaped by the
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
expectations of the court and the self-identity of the narrator.1 Clearly, the
knowledge of a mistress's cap and handkerchief generated through washing and
ironing was an acceptable form of knowledge for a servant- on the strength of
Elizabeth's appearance at court, and the testimony of her employer, the prisoner
was found guilty, and was sentenced to seven years transportation.2
This paper is based on a sample of cases taken from The Proceedings of the Old
Bailey, the printed records of the main criminal court in eighteenth-century
London. Although The Proceedings, like other court records, encompass a wider
range of voices than many eighteenth-century texts, they contain an inevitable
social bias.3 A multiple use right the law may have been, but founded on
principles of 'truth' to which certain social groups had greater access, some
witnesses had greater clout than others and appeared more frequently before
the court.4 In my sample of 341 cases of theft from the period 1750-1800, 158
individuals appeared at court to identify 279 objects, or groups of objects.
Maidservants, such as Elizabeth, were underrepresented in this sample. Only 48
of the 158 witnesses can be identified as servants, only nine of these as female
servants. This bias reflects a wider legal tradition that favoured male over female
witnesses, and perhaps suggests the difficulty for women of establishing, or
performing, ‘truth’ as it was understood in the eighteenth century.
We cannot know why individuals such as Elizabeth appeared before the court.
There does not seem to have been a statutory reward offered to them, and their
motivations for doing so have to be understood as part of the complex interpersonal relations between servant and employer; some may have been asked,
encouraged or compelled to appear by employers, neighbours, or friends, others
See L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London, (Oxford,
1998), esp. p.55 and N.Z. Davis, Fiction in The Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in
Sixteenth-Century France, (Polity, Oxford, 1989), esp. pp. 2-4.
2 Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 23 July 2014), February
1762, trial of Mary Sherman (t17620224-4).
3 On the Proceedings at a historical source see: See R. Shoemaker, ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings
and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of
British Studies, Vol. 47. No. 3 (2008), pp. 559-580; J. Langbein, ‘The Historical Foundations of the
Law of Evidence: A View from the Ryder Sources’, Columbia Law Review, (1996), pp. 1168- 1202.
4 For a similar bias in the seventeenth-century church court records see L. Gowing, Domestic
Dangers, pp. 48-9.
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
may have attended because of their own sense of moral duty or personal
obligation to assist in the prosecution of the crime. Some of the servants who
appeared at court will have correctly identified objects, others may have
misremembered or misidentified stolen items, unintentionally or otherwise.
These motivations, unarticulated even if consciously acknowledged, are now
hidden from the historian. What survives is a series of statements in which
individuals recognise, or claim to recognise, an object familiar to them.
Although maidservants like Elizabeth are underepresented, it was not rare for
servants to appear to identify goods: almost one third of identifications were
made by servants of some type. Although there are fewer servants than nonservants in the sample, each group identified a strikingly similar range of objects.
Servants identified items in all but three of my sixteen object categories.
Amongst other items, servants identified breeches, coats and gowns, silver and
pewter dishes, velvet, cotton and fustian, tea, sugar and butter, band boxes and
hampers, a set of drawers, a sheet, a book, a gun and two horse harnesses. These
items, which belonged ostensibly to their employers, were familiar enough to
these individuals to justify their appearance at court. These statements suggest
that an understanding of material culture simply as symbolic of it's owners
identity is overly individualistic, and that it is necessary to locate objects within
the plurality of domestic practices of which they were a part. 5 If, as Dinah Eastop
has suggested, material culture encompasses ‘the processes by which things and
people interact’ –an analysis of the material culture of the domestic space cannot
be fully realised until servants are included in it. 6
There isn’t time here for a full examination of each object type. This paper
focuses only on the similarities and differences in the identifications of the
largest object group, that of clothing (with reference to bed furniture and linen).
5
My understanding of domestic practice is informed by A. Warde, 'Consumption and Theories of
Practice', Journal of Consumer Culture, 5:2, (2005), pp. 131-153.
6 Cited in T. Hamling and C. Richardson (eds), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern
Material Culture and its Meanings, (Farnham, 2010), p. 6. For criticism of the focus on
consumption within material culture studies, and the need to examine the uses and practices of
objects see F. Trentmann, 'Materiality and the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics',
The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2, (2009), pp. 283-307, esp. 296-7.
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
Clothing was the largest object type identified by servants and non servants,
men and women, but was far more significant for the female group; clothing
represented 28% of male and 51% of female identification. When men appeared
at court to identify clothing, they tended to identify their own property.
Depositions were made to traditionally masculine pieces; men identified
breeches, waistcoats, hats and boots. Watches, shoe and knee buckles were also
common. It was rare for men to identify clothing belonging to other members of
the household, although male servants did this more often than other men. While
this suggests that the job of caring for the household linen may not have been as
gendered feminine as we assume, male servants rarely displayed an intimate
knowledge of these items: although Jacob Grimes, a merchant’s servant,
appeared at court to identity a sash, cap and jacket belonging to his master, his
role was simply to transport the items packed up in a trunk, and although he
later recognised these items, he stated first that he ‘did not know what was in the
trunk’. 7 James Parker too, a waiter in a coffee house in 1790, identified a linen
shirt of his master's through the distancing sense of sight; he stated ‘I know this
shirt to be Mr. Robinson’s; I looked over his linen when I sent it to wash’. 8
The limited nature of male knowledge is also suggested in the failure of men to
identify clothing, linen and bed furniture at court. John Roberts, for example,
appeared to prosecute for the theft of a cotton gown, four window curtains, a
child’s frock, a petticoat, a handkerchief, and two yards of lace in January 1800.
Although the property was identified at the top of The Proceedings as ‘the
property of the said John’, he was not able to identify it. The Proceedings
recorded that he stated he ‘went to the office on Monday, but I could not give a
proper account of the things; and the next day my wife went with me, and she
swore to them’.9 The publican Nicholas Alstrom similarly relied on his wife’s
knowledge of the household bed furniture: he stated that when he came to the
office he ‘looked at the sheet…but…could not swear to it till I had been home to
OBP, trial of Joseph Broadbent, Thomas White, 15 th January 1800, t18000115-19.
8 OBP, trial of Mary Dobson, January 1790, (t17900113-28). My emphasis.
9 OBP, trail of Isaac Hart, James Smith, Elizabeth Smith , Ann Pummel, 15 th January 1800,
t18000115-35.
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
my wife with it’.10 Interestingly, when a wife was not present, servant maids
seem to have been acceptable substitutes. When Brian Bird was robbed of a
variety of clothing and linens in 1750 the prosecution depended on the
knowledge of his maid: Bird himself noted that 'the servant maid can give a
better account of the particulars’.11
Perhaps more significant than the objects identified by different members of the
household was the ways in which that knowledge was expressed. Male
householders, for example, had a propensity to identify objects through the act of
consumption. When one witness appeared at court to identify a ring belonging to
him, he expressed his familiarity with the object through the purchase of it: ‘This
is my property’ he stated, ‘I bought it upwards of twenty years ago’. 12 Likewise, a
lodging-house keeper identified two beds stolen from him with the following
statement; ‘The beds are mine; one has a particular tick, and I bought it myself’. It
is interesting that although many women appeared at court to identify goods, it
was rare that such identifications were expressed in monetary terms. This does
not mean that women were uninvolved in the household economy only that,
subsumed within the legal confines of coverture, women's access to the discourse
of property as a legitimate expression of knowledge at court was restricted.
Importantly, women could demonstrate ownership at court through financial
transactions, but seem to have expressed this through male purchase; the widow
Elizabeth Sonner, for example, identified a cream pot as being bought for her by
her late husband; ‘my husband bought this cream pot many years ago, it is my
property’. 13
Aside from identification based on consumption, the majority of witnesses,
servants and non-servants, male and female, recognised items through their
work. That the majority of these items were located within a domestic dwelling
suggests the complex interplay between home and work in this period - at least
OBP, trial of Peter Asterbawd, Andrew Forsman, 15th January 1800, t18000115-12. Bed
furniture is an important area of female knowledge: Of 19 identifications, 14 are by women.
11 OBP, trial of George Taylor, George Loyd, otherwise Moses, 12 th September 1750, t1750091267.
12 OBP, trial of Joseph Yarwood, 16th January 1760, t17600116-10.
13 OBP, trial of Ann Sparkes, 16th January 1760, t17600116-9.
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
in the households that appear here. It is not the case that servants had a uniquely
laborious relationship to the domestic space, or that that space was classed as a
distinctly leisured one by their employers. There were, however, clear social and
gendered differences in the work done by different individuals within the space
of the home that determined knowledge of, and interaction with, particular
objects.
This internal differentiation in domestic practice is evident in the identifications.
When male non-servants testified to goods through their work, they tended to
identify goods made by them for purchase in a shop or business. The shoemaker
John Hoppey, for example, identified a pair of his shoes through his handiwork;
he stated 'I know the shoes by the make and work' and that the shoes 'have my
mark...Every man can swear to his own mark'.14 Likewise, a glassmaker
identified his product through a statement about the uniqueness of his work; he
stated: 'This is our property...there is nothing of the kind in town besides what I
make'.15 Although women rarely identified shop stock in such terms, there was
clearly a role for women within these spaces; Lucy Slade, the niece of a
haberdasher, identified her uncle's silver buckles through her role in the selling
of them; 'These are the buckles I weighed at his request, and which he ran away
with'. 16
A more common way in which women identified goods was through domestic
work. One married woman identified her belongings through her needlework
and childcare; she stated ‘this is my gown; it has my own work in it; this is my
baby’s frock that I took off that Sunday morning’.
17
Another witness, a widow,
also identified her property as such, stating ‘this bed furniture, sheet and pillow
case, are mine; they have my work upon them…they are all my property’.18
OBP, January 1800, trial of William Allman (t18000115-6), OBP, January 1790, trial of Ann
Miller (t17900113-12).
15 , January 1760, trial of Jesse Dixon (t17600116-16).
16 OBP, January 1760, trial of Joseph Tedar (t17600116-17).
17 OBP, trial of Isaac Hart, James Smith, Elizabeth Smith, Ann Pummel, 15 th January 1800,
t18000115-35..
18 OBP, trial of Mary Miller, 15th January 1800, t18000115-36.
14
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
21st-23rd August 2014, Sigtunastiftelsen, Sweden.
Servants too identified goods through their work, and through these statements
express an individual engagement with the material culture of the domestic
space. Female servants, like their mistresses, expressed an intimate, tacit
knowledge of clothing and bed linen. Like Elizabeth Hall, the servant Sarah
Lemon identified a bundle of stolen goods through her work; she stated ‘I have
had the care and custody of [the goods]’ ‘I know the articles contained..; I know
this shawl; I have just washed it, and hung it over the line’.19 Male servants too
identified items through domestic work done, and their identifications suggest
the different roles servants could be expected to perform within the house. It is
hardly surprising that the coachman Thomas Shales identified a pair of coach
harnesses, that William Gunston, servant to the haberdasher, identified
handkerchiefs, or that a butler John Waddington identified an expensive silver
tankard and butter boat.20 Waddington stated he knew the items by ‘continually
using them, and cleaning them, I have used them at different times [for] eleven
years’.21 Interestingly, when Waddington faltered in his identification of a spoon,
his fellow servant and probable housekeeper Mrs. Robinson came to the rescue,
she identified the items through explicitly tactile knowledge; she stated she
knew the spoon by a ‘crush’, she was, apparently, familiar with its ‘squeeze’.22
Like Waddington’s statement about continual use, servant identifications were
often expressed through a continued involvement in the domestic routine.
Priscilla Rayner, a cook, for example, identified six pewter dishes, an iron waiter
and a copper teakettle with the statement that ‘I know these dishes very well, by
using them every day’.23 Through their work, servants became entwined in the
everyday history of the household, and through their day-to-day duties built up a
sizeable knowledge of the material culture within it. It was common for servants
to identify goods through comparison with other items, and in doing so they
extended the domestic knowledge performed by them at court. Francis Granton,
servant to Sir Thomas Willson in 1770, for example, identified sixteen silver
OBP, trial of John Cameron, 13th January 1790, t17900113-29.
OBP, January 1790, trial of George Sanders (t17900113-51).OBP, trial of Elizabeth Turner, 16th
January 1760, t17600116-15,
21 OBP, trial of William Harding, 6th April 1785, t17850406-27.
22 OBP, trial of William Harding, 6th April 1785, t17850406-27.
23 OBP, January 1790, trial of Joseph Briton (t17900113-7).
19
20
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Practices and Performances; Between Materiality and Morality in PreModernity
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tablespoons and two silver candlesticks by their usual place in the household;
she stated ‘I know the plate used to be kept in the cabinet; a very great quantity
of plate was lost, more than is laid in the indictment’. 24
Through these identifications, similarities and differences in domestic practice
are made apparent. The domestic space emerges as a site in which material
knowledge and competence was shaped by practice. Individual objects fit into
this complex web of domestic knowledge in multiple and diverse ways. The
identifications confirm that material culture cannot be figured only from the
point of view of the autonomous individual, but must be located within the
context of domestic practice. Although less explicit than the type of consumption
history offered by male employers, servant depositions testify to a type of tacit
knowledge acquired and performed on a daily basis. It is impossible to know
what this knowledge, or the performance of it, meant to these individuals. It may
have been the case that these articulations reiterated the servants’ role and
therefore their subordinate position within the household. I would argue,
however, that it could also do the opposite, and that these statements could
foster a powerful sense of self-identity and domestic agency. The relationship
between knowledge and power is of course a slippery one; clearly we cannot
assume that because Elizabeth washed and ironed her mistress's cap and
handkerchief that she was a powerful member of her employers' household although we also cannot rule out that she may have felt this way as she stood in
the dock. These statements offer an invaluable access point to the complex and
overlapping intricacies of daily life, and help us to move away from an
antagonistic dichotomy of difference between the material worlds embodied by
servant and employer. In these statements real and imagined social identities
become apparent, and it is possible to explore the multiple ways in which
different individuals occupied the material world of the domestic space.
24
OBP, trial of John Lister, Isaac Pemberton, Sarah Hill, 17th January 1770, t17700117-37.
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