While legal authority lay
with the king, his secretaries of state, judges, sheriffs, justices of the
peace and parish constables, authority within the family lay with the head of
each household and the rights of servants were subsumed within those of their
employers. There was a common association
in the minds of society generally between domestic service and theft, illicit
sex, pregnancy and infanticide and conduct books warned female servants about
dishonesty, entering into quarrels and on matters of chastity with men
servants, the master, his sons and gentlemen lodgers.
Eliza Fowler Haywood
Eliza Fowler Haywood (1743) A
present for a servant-maid. Or, the sure means of gaining love and esteem,
London: T. Gardener.
(1771, Revised) A present for a servant-maid:
containing rules for her Moral Conduct both with respect to Herself and her
Superiors: The Whole Art of
Cookery, Pickling, and Preserving, &c, &c. and every other Direction
necessary to be known to render her a Complete, Useful and Valuable Servant, London: G. Pearch and H. Gardener.
The freedom to
move in domestic settings allowed domestic servants to acquire knowledge from
friends, neighbours and other servants of what goods were available and when
and how access to them might be obtained. In response
to an outcry among wealthy householders over a spate of burglaries thought to
have been organised by servants of poor character, the Servants' Characters Act
1792 was passed to forbid staff from supplying false character references. The
act was used only once in a successful prosecution before it was repealed in
2008. The records for Yorkshire are
fairly quiet on the topic of domestic theft and it is
possible that minor offences were dealt with summarily within the household by
some form of ‘moderate correction’ or the servant dismissed without a reference
and effectively punished through subsequent loss of character.
Theft from a master or mistress came within the common law definition of crimes of fraud and dishonesty when victims handed over goods or money
willingly to one of their servants and acquisition did not include the
necessary taking ‘by force of arms’ for theft. However, a statute of 1529 created
an exception to the common law and made it an offence for a servant to
appropriate or ‘embezzle’ goods from his or her master where the value exceeded
40shillings.[1]
Therefore, when Daniel Drummond was found guilty at the York Assizes of theft
from his master of three guineas (63 shillings) he was sentenced to transportation for seven years.[2]
Another employee who admitted to having accepted a stolen half guinea from
Drummond, in return for not reporting him, escaped prosecution for receiving
stolen goods by giving evidence against Drummond, although it is possible that
he was punished informally by the loss of his employment.
A female servant, Ann Willoughby, was charged under
the same statute when she was accused of the theft of a gold coin valued at 36 shillings
from the top of a chest in her master’s house and £6 in coins from inside the
same chest on an earlier occasion.[3]
Her mistress explained that the gold coin had been left out to trap a suspected
thief and that she saw that Willoughby
“made a pretence to seek” for the gold coin and “found” it on the floor.
Willoughby was charged with the theft of the coin but acquitted at her trial. If no evidence were
presented to prove that Willoughby stole other money from inside the chest, any
offence committed by her fell below the statutory 40 shilling threshold and a
direction to acquit would have been inevitable.
In the absence of many similar cases for the county one may
conclude that justice was deemed to be served by some combination of the return
of goods stolen, an arrangement whereby the servant ‘worked off’ the value of
goods taken, some form of corporal punishment by the master, or the dismissal
of the accused servant with loss of good character and no references.
By the eighteenth century, two
magistrates sitting at the petty sessions were empowered inter alia to imprison a servant for up to one year for an assault
on his or her master. In contrast, masters and mistresses were entitled to use
‘moderate’ methods and a ‘reasonable’ instrument in chastising a servant, over
whom they had natural authority. The reasonable use of physical abuse could be justified in terms of upholding
order in a household, so that many incidents of abuse were ignored.
BBC, Blackadder
Nevertheless, justices of
peace were seen to undertake thorough investigations into complaints of excessive
assaults upon servants and this is particularly evident when allegations were
made against adults accused of the physical and sexual abuse of children and
young people. In 1771, husband and wife, John and Hannah Walker
were jointly convicted of a prolonged and vicious assault upon a thirteen year
old Elizabeth Owens who lived and worked in their home as a domestic servant. The indictment for that
assault ran to over six
pages, detailing fifty days of systematic abuse.[4] Nothing is known of the girl’s background
but it is possible that she was one of the poor children of a parish who had been apprenticed into
domestic service, in which case she was vulnerable to both physical and sexual
abuse. John Walker did not plead “not guilty” but submitted
to the court, possibly because he accepted his right to beat his servant as
response to any domestic disorder. The couple each received a small fine for their
actions, the standard punishment for an assault at this time. However, the
impetus for the investigation and prosecution appear to have come from the
parish and justices of the peace who acted on behalf of the community to punish
anti-social behaviour, regardless of the victim’s circumstances.
The murder of a master by
his servant fell within the category of ‘petit treasons’, for which a female
servant would burn at the stake and a male servant hang.[5] While a man’s violence towards his servant was perceived in terms of the
‘natural’ authority a man held as head of his household; reciprocal violence by
a servant was subversive and a threat to social order. Therefore, when Thomas Butler was
unsuccessful in his attempt to poison his master he was convicted of a
misdemeanour and sentenced to a term of two years in gaol, at a time when other
men convicted of manslaughter might expect to be released immediately after
being branded on the hand.[6]
Female
servants were put in a particularly vulnerable position if they became pregnant
by a member of the family they served. In 1774, John Scott was convicted of
murdering a female servant (who already had a three year old child by him) by
giving her a fatal abortifacient.[7] Sir Henry Gould, the
presiding judge, made no recommendation for mercy but added a requirement that
Scott’s dead body be dissected and anatomized after he had been hanged.
However, a private petition for mercy must have been made by a person or people
of influence because by the following assizes his sentence had been commuted to
transportation.
One year
later, John Bolton was accused of strangling his servant, Elizabeth Rainbow.[8] Bolton was a married man
with five children who six years previously had taken in a young boy and girl
(Elizabeth Rainbow) from a local foundling hospital to work and live in the
family home. It is likely that Rainbow was in her teens when she died and the
enquiry into her death revealed that she was pregnant with Bolton’s child at
the time of her death. Bolton was convicted of her murder, sentenced to hang
and his body dissected and anatomized, although he committed suicide in prison
before the sentence could be carried out.
ECCO – Eighteenth-Century
Collections On-line
The
physical appearance of a female servant could play a
significant part in her experience as a victim of a sexual assault. The broadside
account of Bolton’s assault includes the prosecutor’s reference to the girl’s
good looks in connection with the temptations to her master. He stated in his
opening speech that “it was to be her misfortune to be handsome”, as if to
explain Bolton’s behaviour, and it serves to underline the difficult position
of a young girl living in close proximity with those on whom she was wholly
dependent for her support and well-being.
The outcomes of master/servant
relationships were unbalanced when many acts of new-born child murder were alleged to have been undertaken by female, domestic servants living
with or near their employers, yet few women would have had the courage to
accuse a master or his son of an initial rape. The fact that many servant girls
appear to have given birth in secret in their employers’ houses is remarkable
since it required a woman to keep her pregnancy secret. It is the secrecy
surrounding a pregnancy and birth that raises questions as to whether other members
of the household really were ignorant of a pregnancy or whether a ‘blind eye’
was turned unless, or until, the discovery of a baby’s body forced them to
address the matter.
The
1624 statute on concealment reversed the standard burden of proof, so that an
unmarried woman accused of murdering her baby was obliged to prove her
innocence.[9] Indictments for infanticide
were viewed in terms of punishing immorality, although by the 1770’s there was
far greater awareness of the vulnerability of domestic servants, in particular,
and doubts were being expressed on the accuracy of available forensic evidence.
In general, while violence might be
condoned when it was directed to uphold household order, recourse to the judicial process might be sought when a master or mistress was perceived to have abused those powers.
[1] 21 Hen. VIII c.7 (1529): Embezzlement by servants Act.
[2] TNA ASSI 45/20/1; ASSI 41/2, assizes, county of York, March 1735.
[3] TNA ASSI 45/22; TNA ASSI 42/6 gaol delivery, city of York, March 1742.
[4] WRY Rotherham, QS4/37, August 1771.
[5] 25 Edw. III
Stat. 5. c.2 (1351), Treason Act.
[6]
TNA ASSI 41/3, Crown minutes, York, March 1741.
[7]
TNA ASSI 45/31/2; TNA ASSI 42/8; TNA, ASSI 41/6, York County, July 1774.
[8]
Williamson, W. (c.1775) The Trial at Large of John Bolton, Gent., York.
[9]
21 Jac. I, c. 27 (1624): An Act to prevent the destroying and murdering of
bastard children.
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