Master and Servant in the Medieval Kitchen
The relationship between a medieval master or mistress and their household servants ran on a genuinely familiar mix of hierarchy, hard bargaining, and — more often than popular stereotype allows — real personal warmth, and the surviving correspondence between actual employers and staff captures both sides with disarming honesty.
One book of practical household advice warns bluntly that hired helpers are “commonly tiresome, rough and prone to answer back… and ready to break into insults and reproaches if you do not pay them what they ask when the work is done” — advice on managing awkward staff that would sound entirely unremarkable in any modern management handbook. Genuine domestic flashpoints survive too: Margaret Paston complained in a 1459 letter that the family’s newly hired steward flatly refused to keep the daily household accounts the way the Pastons always had, insisting on his own weekly method instead and seeing no reason to change. Yet warmth ran alongside the friction just as clearly. One Italian merchant, deeply fond of guinea-fowl and convinced of their health benefits, sent six of the birds to a sick servant with the brisk, affectionate instruction: “Look to it that you eat them, for you could eat naught better, or more wholesome, and I will go on purveying them for you.”
The Goodman of Paris captured the expected balance neatly in his advice to his young wife: hire and manage the servants firmly, but “if one of your servants fall ill… take thought for him full lovingly and kindly.” Distance and authority were expected, certainly — but so, evidently, was a genuine sense of mutual obligation running in both directions.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.