It's Hard to Find Good Help, Part 1
Whenever we think about the concept of nobility in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or later, it is hard to disentangle the life of the upper class from the role of their servants. In an era before washing machines or laundromats, the wealthy– and even many of the upper bourgeoisie, like bankers and lawyers – did not handle their own laundry. In an era before fast fashion, where every garment had to be made by hand, poor women made their family's garments, but the rich would have their staff to do the mundane work of mending and altering clothes. And of course, no respectable aristocrat was going to spend time cleaning, especially before the vacuum cleaner, which meant that an army of maids would be employed to keep their giant houses from growing gross and dirty.
When we watch TV shows like Downton Abbey or The Gilded Age, the life of these servants is made a focal point of the story. And it is abundantly clear that there is a hierarchy among the staff. But when we're writing the stories of adventurers in our TTRPGs, we too often do the same thing as the nobles: we avoid acknowledging the staff, because the focus is on the money, the prestige, and the affairs of the rich. When there is a focus on servants, they tend to be mostly just generic servants--it is rare that I've seen a published adventure that focuses on the internal hierarchy of a house's staff, and uses that as fodder for secrets and plot threads.
So today, as part of my ongoing series Rethinking Fantasy, where I pull apart the history surrounding a fantasy genre trope so that we can rebuild it and use it in a more interesting way, we're going to talk about servants. In order to keep this post from growing to 4,000 words, I'm going to split this article into two pieces. Today, we're going to be covering the most general jobs and lay out the basic hierarchy; next week, we'll cover some exceptions to these basic divisions, as well as how the servant hierarchies can provide a rich source of information and politicking for your RPG plotlines.
The Jobs
We're going to start at the top of the hierarchy. I'm going to do my best to provide reference to how these positions changed and evolved across our standard fantasy medley of medieval-Renaissance-Early Modern, but as with all history, things sometimes vary significantly by time and by region... so take everything with a grain of salt the further east you go.
Also keep in mind that, historically, these roles were very gendered (with the exception, perhaps, of the cook). That said, in a fantasy world where you have different gender roles established, you don't need to necessarily split up these offices along the same gendered lines if at all. Historically, the "male" jobs tended to be somewhat public-facing while the "female" jobs tended to be inwards-facing, as you'll see in the job descriptions. But if you're toying with gender roles, you might mix and match which of the two "divisions" of the household each position falls under (what would it mean for the cook to be in the "public facing division"?), or decide that everything falls under one division, headed by a more powerful housekeeper or butler.
For the purposes of this article, I'll be including which "division" the position fell under historically by gender, but I think it would be fun to consider how they might get switched up.
The Estate's Manager: the Steward or the Seneschal
The title of Seneschal comes from Old French, which means you'll mostly see this during the early medieval period, before its gets phased out for Steward – a title used up through at least through the Regency era, when the more boring title "estate agent" started to be used.
A Steward is only partially considered a servant. It is a position that a respectable man would fill: someone educated, usually from a good--but not landowning, aristocratic, or gentry--family.
Not all households would have a steward--only when the land associated with the household was too big for a housekeeper or butler to manage. The steward essentially had all the duties that we'd associate with being a homeowner today: they were in charge of ensuring repairs were done, managing the household's finances (tenants who lived on the land would pay their rents in, and the steward would see all the salaries to the servants and wages for construction on the land go out). If an estate and its lands were small, or the noble owning the land was particularly attentive, they might not waste the money on hiring a steward, looking after their own accounts. But when you're a duke and your landholdings stretch across half the kingdom? You likely have a steward overseeing each of the major estates, making sure that each estate has someone living locally to oversee it.
This always set the steward apart somewhat from the rest of the staff. They're not quite a servant, thanks to their duties of oversight and rent collection. They're practically a boss. But neither are they truly part of the ownership class. The land is not theirs, and they're usually still expected to use the servants' entrance rather than the main door, moving through side stairwells so as to not disrupt the actual nobles living there.
Often, a steward would have their own suite of rooms: a bedroom, an office for accounting, etc. This is a position of prestige. Or, they might be located nearby but in their own building, a small cottage – emphasizing their role as distinct from the rest of the staff, but also distinct from the real owner.
The modern parallel here might be the way that people with investable assets might have a financial planner or accountant managing their money for them... except that a steward would work only for one person, not multiple at a time, and they'd usually be tied to a specific estate rather than overseeing every investment that the wealthy owner had made.
The Top Man/Public-Facing: The Butler or the Chamberlain
Like seneschal becoming steward, the title of Chamberlain would give way to the title of Butler, switching over sometime in the late Renaissance (by my best research). So if you're shooting for a more medieval vibe, go with Chamberlain; if you're going for more "early modern," go with Butler.
The Butler was generally the top of the male serving staff. The Butler was essentially in charge of keeping the staff running: they might hire or fire lesser servants, organize food service and ensure the table was properly set for the meal, and announce visitors by receiving calling cards.
In short, the Butler was usually the "face" of the staff when presented to the lord of the house or to the outside well-to-do. This makes the Butler usually the main person that PCs interact with in adventures as "the servant"--they're the most public servant.
So, to answer the line in Clue: when the butler says that his job is "to butle," it means to run the household – which he does, in a way.
The Butler or Chamberlain would typically be referred to as "Mr. Lastname" by the staff, and simply "Lastname" by the owner of the house.
The Top Woman/Private-Facing: The Housekeeper
The top of the other division, historically women, was the housekeeper. This role is far more what you'd expect based on our modern understanding of the name: the housekeeper is responsible for making sure that the house is kept clean and well-stocked, and that generally includes working closely with the kitchen. To fulfill this job, she'll oversee all the female staff: primarily, a small army of maids, which we'll talk about later, but she'll also do cleaning duties herself. To keep everything looking tidy, she also is likely responsible for some mending of linens, tablecloths, and possibly even clothes (depending on the size of the household).
The Housekeeper's role in ensuring that rooms are ready and tidy lets me talk about one of the other frequently-neglected residents of a fancy house or castle: the Guest. In an era before luxury hotels and AirBnb, people of high class would never stay in a public or even semi-public venue. Instead, they'd simply ask a high-class friend to put them up. It is part of why these palaces are so huge! They needed several guest rooms, and failure to accommodate a friend would be scandalous. The family might host a famous musician, another noble, a distant cousin, and a diplomat all at the same time--it enlivened dinner conversation--and lodging would need to be provided for all of them and their most important servants (at least their valet or ladies' maid, who we'll talk about later). That is a lot of extra rooms.
The Housekeeper would be responsible, when news that a guest was coming, for "opening up" rooms. And when those guests departed, those rooms might be "closed"--with drapes covering all of the furniture to prevent wear and exposure. So the job of housekeeper was intricately linked with the presence of guests, from dealing with their rooms to coordinating with the cook to ensure that dinner will be suitable for all the guests.
The Housekeeper also often assumed a lot of other duties if the staff was not large enough for those duties to be spun off. If there was not a separate laundress, the Housekeeper dealt with that on top of her job mending. If there was no steward, the housekeeper--not the Butler--often saw to tallying the household's expenses. In a particularly small house, they might often do the cooking as well!
In short, if the Butler is the public-facing chief servant, the Housekeeper is the private-facing chief servant: they're responsible for running pretty much everything behind the scenes.
Like the Butler, the Housekeeper would typically be referred to as "Mrs. Lastname" by the staff, and simply "Lastname" by the owner of the house.
Common Men/Public-Facing: Footmen
Beneath the Butler or Chamberlain, the vast majority of male servants would be considered "footmen". A footman is a fairly general-purpose type of servant, and is probably the closest thing to what we imagine the duties of a servant being. Footmen carry in food for each meal--and wait while the rich eat, in order to then take away their plates or refill their wine. They stand at the door to open and close them for guests or for the master of the house. They light all the candles of the house every morning, and extinguish them once the master of the house has gone to bed. They might deliver notes on behalf of the house's owner to neighbors. They're a generally all-purpose type of servant.
And while a lot of this work is silent work, like waiting while your employer eats, it is all still very public-facing--which is why the footman works under the direction of the butler.
Other things to note about footmen: they tend to all wear "livery" (matching fancy clothes in the colors of the employer's coat of arms), and they'll usually be addressed by their first name both by the butler, the other servants, and by their employer.
Common Women/Private-Facing: Maids
The parallel "standard" role for women, in the division beneath the Housekeeper, is the housemaid. Housemaids, as their name still means today, is responsible for cleaning. If the staff was large enough, each housemaid would be assigned a particular set of rooms to be responsible for. They'd be responsible for everything in that room: dusting, sweeping, tidying the beds after people arose in the morning, arranging fresh flowers, light fires in the hearths as needed, polish any brass, emptying chamberpots, and other such routine chores.
All this was to be done under the watchful eye of the Housekeeper. So if, for example, while cleaning, a housemaid found a ripped or soiled linen, they'd bring it to the housekeeper for mending or laundering.
Generally speaking, the richer the employer, the more maids they'd employ, and so the smaller each maid's workload would be. In a particularly large household staff, each maid might only be assigned two or three rooms, with the expectation that they would be immaculate. In a smaller household, there might be no individual housemaids, with all cleaning duties handled by the Housekeeper.
Like the footmen are public-facing, it should be evident that all of a maid's work is private-facing. Rarely should your maid be interacting with– or even seen by– a guest. Instead, the maid should enter after the guest has left their rooms, clean and tidy, and be gone before their return.
Maids, like footmen, would be addressed by their first names. However, unlike footmen, they would not be wearing livery. Why bother with such ornamentation, when your guests won't even see them?
Next Week
I've cracked 2,000 words and hopefully laid out the framework that a household staff would have operated under, along with the bare minimum staffing: at least a butler and housekeeper, even if the butler was also your footman and the housekeeper was your housemaid.
Next week, we're going to complicate this whole picture by adding in all the areas of the house that don't quite line up neatly within this framework: the kitchen, personal servants, the stables, the gardens, and the nursery. We'll also go over some more practical tips on how to integrate all these NPCs into your games.