Sometime in late January of 1429, two women—Joanna (or Joan) Clifland and her new neighbor, Margery Baxter—engaged in a quiet conversation by Joanna’s fireside, huddled over their needlework. By the time the conversation ended, Margery had implicated herself as not only a heretic, but as a prominent figure enmeshed in a network of heretics and their supporters across the county of Norfolk. Joanna’s deposition is lengthy, but it is only at the end that she mentions, almost offhandedly, that her two servants, Joan Grymle and Agnes Bethom, had been present the entire time—and even directly addressed by Margery herself in her attempts at proselytization. What’s more, when called to testify, the younger of the two girls, Agnes, corrects one aspect of her mistress’s account in court. Sixty years earlier, in the archiepiscopal court of York, Ellen, the wife of Thomas Taliour, recounted before the judge that thirteen years earlier, she had refused the offer of her former mistress to serve as a wet nurse for her child on the grounds that she did not love her former mistress’s son as much as she loved her own child, and would not be willing to sacrifice her child’s life for that of her mistress’s son.
Although separated by geography and time, these examples pose interesting questions for conventional views of servants and service in late medieval England: the obligatory hierarchy implied between servant and employer; the “life cycle” model that has prevailed of seeing service as one “stop” along the way to maturity and adulthood; and the insulation of servants from the personal matters of those whom they serve. Taking as my time period roughly c. 1300 to 1500, and drawing on a combination of legal and literary sources, I hope to explore the degree to which servants were embedded within the households they served, and how this embedding may disrupt both internal hierarchies among servants and the larger inequalities of social class embodied by the employer/employee relationship.
