Making a splash with her first book, Charmian Mansell’s 2024 study Female Servants in Early Modern England sets out with a clear objective in mind: to explore the experiences of female service workers during the period. In doing so, she asks questions about their identities, their roles, and how they fit into their communities at large. In order to accomplish her goal, Mansell makes use of a sizeable body of primary sources in what she calls a “‘needle in a haystack’ method of research” (297), which almost exclusively originate from the church records of five dioceses — Bath & Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Winchester. These locations were chosen due to a higher volume of surviving records compared to much of England. When speaking on the body of her sources, Mansell writes that “Church court depositions are links of a broken chain” (29); while male deponents’ biographical information can often be reliably found in court records, few, if any, comparable records exist for women. In her research, she pored over nearly 9,000 cases from 1532–1649, involving over 15,000 litigants and 27,000 witnesses. Critically for this book, she draws on the testimonies of over a thousand female servants who were identified, some more than once (14).
As a scholar who identifies with social and economic history, Mansell’s findings deal heavily with these two aspects. Using the aforementioned sources, her chief argument is that the industry of female servitude (and servitude more generally) was neither static nor stable. Instead, it was a fluid and flexible system in which female autonomy was perhaps greater than scholars in the field have given women credit for. While still acknowledging the patriarchal structures of society, she states that “The world in which these women lived was undoubtedly one in which men ruled, just not in the way that we thought” (297). Her arguments, backed by a blending of qualitative and quantitative analyses, are both persuasive and thoughtfully developed. The data takes the forms of tables that record things such as female movement around towns and the distribution of ages among servants. Chapter 5 for instance, features a table detailing the length of residence in parishes, and from this chapter, she is able to discern mobility as it correlates to age amongst servants.
The book, perhaps more than any other that we have read this semester, interacts heavily with the historiography (or sometimes the lack thereof). Her arguments directly challenge long-held notions of family and servitude during the early modern period. For instance, as this is a gender study, the concept of patriarchy features prominently throughout. Mansell notes that female servants are scarcely studied outside the context of their masters’ households. She argues that while women’s history has stretched far and wide in search of female autonomy, the history of service has lagged behind. Just as service itself was flexible, there appears to have been flexibility within the household patriarchal order. She notes that some households indeed had no patriarchal figure; houses headed by a father or husband were but one type of household (10).
Female Servants is organized into three parts and nine chapters. Part I discusses who female servants were and how they were recorded in church records. As she claims, it offers “a more detailed reconstruction of female servant lives for this period than has been attempted before, showing service to be contingent, fluid, and flexible,” (19). Part II focuses on patterns of labor by examining female servants’ mobility, employment conditions, contractual freedom, and the types of work they performed. It shows how mobility shaped their integration and belonging, questions how freely women entered service contracts, and challenges the idea that female service was simply domestic labor. Finally, Part III examines female service spatially, socially, and temporally. It shows how itinerant women built community ties beyond the household, maintained connections across distance and time, and remained shaped by service long after it ended. Overall, it argues that early modern service was not static or purely domestic, but “finely graded, fluid, and often contingent,” (19).
Mansell also comments on the economic influence that female servants had on early modern England. According to the Statute of Artificers of 1563, servants were expected to enter into annual contracts with their masters. However, Mansell demonstrates that this was not the case in many instances. Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the servant Philippa Hooper, who stood as a witness to the affair of her mistress. Despite heavy regulation of service, it would seem that Philippa, and many others like her, were making agreements to serve in short-term daily or weekly contracts. This aligns with Mansell’s broader argument about the greater degree of autonomy female servants experienced. However, it is also important to note that service being flexible did not always equate to total freedom; servants were still legally at the whim of their masters or mistresses. Another way in which the working lives of women are framed by Mansell is through her discussion of mobility. According to Chapter 4, women were the more mobile sex, and of this number of migrant women, over half were servants (128). This analysis aligns with the work women sought in towns and cities. It is in this chapter that perhaps one of her most compelling interventions takes place. While London attracts much of the historiographical attention for migrant laborers (deservedly so), she notes that “other urban centres offered labour opportunities for young people” (130).
Overall, Mansell’s arguments hold up well and offer another example of crafting bottom-up history from primary sources. Rather than portraying women as purely defined by their service, Mansell humanizes female servants, much as Dyer in Peasants or Kaufman in A People’s Reformation did in their respective studies. That said, one shortcoming I identified (unless I missed it) was a general lack of placement of the book within a broader political context. The last seven years covered in this study, for example, encompass the tumultuous period of the English Civil War, yet it receives only one mention in the entire book. This may almost certainly be due to political events not appearing prominently in the trial testimonies; still, I could not help but feel there was an opportunity for Mansell to further her argument by situating female servants within these broader upheavals. This aside, Female Servants is compelling and well written in its detective-like research approach and leaves the door open for further scholarship on both female and male servitude during the period.