The great household was a key institution of late medieval life. Its style of living, practised by some 9,000 households at any one time in England by the 15th century, gave it a cultural dominance and set a pattern that was emulated down to the leading families in the country’s villages ‒ yeoman farmers and the greater peasants ‒ and the parish clergy. At its most extensive, the household was a body of enormous wealth and importance, with a remarkable influence ‒ that its display of magnificence was not always seen as a force for good is apparent from the writings of contemporary moralists. The aristocratic household had many more people than a village, sometimes more than a small town. It was overwhelmingly a male institution until well into the 15th century. For the men of the household, service was an honourable activity: the greatest noblemen would expect to attend the king as his servants, and lesser men would attend lesser lords. Although we know a great deal about the more senior staff of the household – and the ‘household of magnificence’ that went with it – we know very much less about the ‘menial’ staff (mesnee was the Anglo-Norman word for a great household), that part of the household that did the provisioning and the routine daily tasks.
This course will examine the range of interests of great households: their buildings and furnishings, intended to impress, to express lordship across the country; their consumption, both in terms of the fabulous goods, the material culture that filled the houses of the great, to the range of servants and practices of service, the routines of food provision, cooking and dining – and the exotic dishes and spicery that went with them. Travel was engrained in elite household life: in the 13th century, lords and ladies expected to travel around their estates, to use different residences in order to consume resources in equal measure across their holdings – but this pattern was a changing one, with a concentration of activities on favoured residences and in London townhouses in the later Middle Ages. There was a growing distance between the wealth of the Crown and the scale of its households, and those of the nobility during the 14th century. This meant that life at the royal court became more distinctive because of its scale, the investments that might be made in cultural goods and other activities, and royal households in consequence became considerably larger than those of nobles. These households were leaders of fashion, not only in terms of goods, but also in practices of courtesy and manners, religious practice, in aristocratic pastimes like hunting, and the focus a great many other activities and practices, from literature to music.
