Servants were everywhere in early modern England: unmarried young people routinely lived in their masters’ and mistresses’ households, toiling away in private houses, farms, taverns, and shops. Service was part of the bedrock of society, but only recently, R. C. Richardson writes in chapter 1, has it come to the forefront of historians’ attention, as evinced by the thoughtful work of Tim Meldrum and Carolyn Steedman. This survey aims to fill a gap by providing an overview of early modern servants for scholars, students, and general readers. It focuses on domestic servants: Richardson does not define his terms, but farm servants and apprentices are generally excluded.

In his second and third chapters, Richardson offers a sketch of servants in drama, focusing on Shakespeare and Restoration comedy, then examines self-representations of servants, from Isabella Whitney to the servant poets and moralizing autobiographies of the eighteenth century. Other than a consistent emphasis on the importance of servants’ labor, he finds few commonalities, reflecting the diversity of service: while some writers upheld the status quo, counseling hard work and respectful obedience, others, like the “washerwoman poet” Mary Collier, hinted at a more radical critique of existing hierarchies.

Chapter 4 explains who servants were, how they were recruited, and what they were paid. While the households of Elizabethan nobles were largely masculine, most servants in humbler homes—and by the eighteenth century, in all homes—were female. Most employers kept only one servant, the lowly maid-of-all-work, but some hired continental and black servants for added panache. In the provinces, servants came from the immediate locality, while young people were attracted from far and wide to London, where the demand for servants was high. Although huge numbers of people went into service, for employers, it seems, good help was hard to find. Recommendations were unreliable, and register offices, first established in 1750, were worse. Maidservants flitted from here to there, often abandoning their positions to marry, and employers’ indignation at this disloyalty was only partly assuaged by their preference for hiring servants for short terms, thus (after 1662) barring them from the right to local poor relief. Although some faithful retainers were rewarded with pensions, many old servants ended their days in the workhouse. Career servants were advised to avoid this fate through thrift, but doing so was easier for some than for others: menservants always received higher wages than women, for example. In general, though, wages rose: first slowly, as a result of inflation, then rather more rapidly, with the increased demand for servants after the Restoration.

In chapter 5, Richardson explores servant life. Before 1650, servants slept in kitchens, hallways, and trundle beds in their masters’ rooms. By the eighteenth century, however, wealthy employers’ desire for privacy led to the creation of separate servants’ quarters. Servants’ dress was contentious, especially after cheap cottons became available. Moralists praised sober plainness as a means of differentiating between mistress and maid, but maidservants—well aware of the power of appearances—continued to spend their meager wages on apparel, while menservants increasingly objected to wearing livery. Medical care was also contentious. While employers were in theory bound to care for sick servants, not all did so. The large sums spent on some servants by conscientious masters suggest that illnesses could wipe out years of savings for those less fortunate. Similarly, some masters cared for their servants’ souls, insisting on attendance at church and providing some instruction, while others thought education dangerous and divine service a waste of working hours.

Chapter 6 examines the conduct books written by godly clergymen and later advice books addressed directly to servants. In early modern England, the household was the smallest unit of society and the foundation on which social order rested; thus, the mutual duties of servants and masters were rehearsed at length. However, as the following chapter demonstrates, the conduct of both parties often left much to be desired. Poor management, marital strife, improper sexual relationships, drinking, and gossip all threatened the orderly ideal. Another threat, employers thought, was the bargaining power held by servants in a metropolis that generated burgeoning demand for their labor. By the eighteenth century, as we see in chapter 8, popular authors moaned that the respectful servants of yesteryear were no longer to be had, as saucy, lazy chambermaids and footmen tyrannized over their supposed masters.

A final chapter briefly surveys the ways in which servants came into contact with the legal system: taxes, pauper apprenticeship, poor relief, testifying for legal courts, suing for wages, theft, bastardy, infanticide, and so on. Richardson concludes that servants were subjected to the law and used by it, but they also made use of it for their own ends.

As a survey of early modern servants, this book can be disappointing. Students may find the lack of terminological clarity and background confusing, and there is little on the sixteenth century. Richardson has chosen a thematic approach, but a chronological emphasis would have allowed him to tell a more compelling story about how service reflected the tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic changes of the early modern period. He mentions important changes, but too often, anecdotes are heaped together in an entertaining but bewildering diversity. Indeed, although the author takes Bridget Hill’s Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996) to task for being old fashioned, overly descriptive, and reliant on printed sources, the same criticisms might be made of his own work. Eighteenth-century gentry households and their relatively accessible records loom large here. A thorough, up-to-date history of early modern English domestic service would need to pay more attention to the archival sources where humbler servants appear. That remains to be written, but in the meantime, readers will find this lively book a useful introduction to the problems of service and the rich range of printed sources dealing with servants and their masters.