English servants and their employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Economic History Review, 52 (2):
236-256 (1999)Abstract
This article presents a study on English servants and their employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Document T47.8 in the Public Record Office is a list of the employers of man-servants who were liable to taxation on these servants in 1780. It gives the individual employer's name, address, and the number of man- servants he or she employed in that year. The tax had been at the level of 1 guinea per manservant since 1777 and for obvious reasons the list will not exaggerate the number of man-servants. At the same time, the 1777 act was precise in its definition of man-servants, taking care to limit itself to domestic servants: those employed in the stable, gardeners, park-keepers, gamekeepers, huntsmen. The servants of the royal family, of ambassadors and of Oxford and Cambridge colleges were exempt. Being a tax, it was of course an underestimate, but not considerably so. Respect among historians for the tax-collecting powers of the English state has grown in recent yea