I don’t think I’d have lasted 24 hours in the Dee household without tearing my hair out.
Paging through his personal and spiritual diaries I catch glimpses of people who, while colorful, I’d never want to meet: Dee’s cranky alchemical apprentice; two maids who accidentally set fire to their room twice in one year; the manservant he fired for getting drunk and cursing out the rest of the staff. That’s just a sampling and while there’s no full list it seems Dee had at least nine servants and probably more during my 1583-9 time frame.
The Dees weren’t unusual. Almost everyone of middling rank or higher had live-in staff. If you didn’t have servants you’d likely be one because up to a quarter of the population was in service. And even if everyone was nice as pie there was never, ever a break from their company. Servants worked in all parts of the house and some slept on their masters’ bedchamber floors (dedicated servants’ dormitories were rare). Houses were often designed with linked rooms so even if your maid or man had a private bedchamber they probably passed through yours to get there. Decorative elements like wooden screens and bed curtains compensated for this lack of privacy, but only just.
More on the Great Bed of Ware with photos and videos of assembly.
In short it was damn near impossible to be truly alone*, a fact that makes my inner introvert blanch while my writer’s mind reels at the potential mayhem.
Pro: lovely opportunities to endanger my characters! Dee and Kelley were into so many questionable things that any sudden walk-ins could easily create panic and rumors of Dee’s “conjuring” that Jane would struggle to explain away. Hours of amusement!
Con: a massive narrative hurdle. I’ve got to get the servants out of the house for their infamous “crossmatching” incident, which the Dees and Kelleys swore to keep secret on pain of death. Dee’s spiritual diary offers no details beyond a terse “pactu factu” (pact fulfilled) so I have free rein, but how do I empty the house believably? Send everyone to a market fair (if there was one)? Hide in an unused wing (ditto)? Bribe everybody (though they’re poor)?
I’m almost done with the first draft (!) and am still unraveling this snarly plot knot.
*Even more so if you take children and visitors into account.
Selected Sources:
Cooper, Nicholas. Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Dee, John (author), Stephen Skinner (editor), and Meric Casaubon (Preface). Dr John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries (1583-1608): Being a reset and corrected edition of a True & Faithful Relation of what Passed for many Yeers between Dr John Dee…and Some Spirits. Woodbury MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2012.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996.
Now that brought back memories. Not that this fellow introvert grew up in a household full of servants … quite the opposite. But, having been raised in a very small house with several sibs and only ever getting a room of my own when I left home, I do know that a survival essential is learning the skill of giving and getting privacy in close company and it’s very likely I learned a skill that was in far more common practice in older, even more crowded times; the ability to be in a roomful of people and to simultaneously be aware of and yet tune out all their noises/actions that surround me is still very useful. Not sure how to describe how it’s done but I’ll be happy to give it a try if you want to know.
Re emptying the house … any big-draw, great-entertainment-for-the-whole-household-so-give-the-servants-leave-to-attend public executions happening on the necessary date? ;p (yes, I’m dreadful … I freely admit it)
I’d love to hear your experiences 🙂 A friend who served on a sailing ship for a year told me something similar, that everyone ended up following certain unspoken rules and conventions to carve out a bit of privacy for themselves.
Re: getting them out of the house: I’m leaning towards them using an unoccupied part of the castle for atmospheric purposes, but don’t worry – I’m finding ample excuses to make my characters miserable. Indeed, my critique groups almost always advises me to make awkward situations WORSE!
Your friend is right … much of it is unspoken rules about not hearing what you hear, not seeing what you see. An example you’re probably familiar with is in “Dances With Wolves” … you don’t “know” there’s a couple making love a few feet away in the same tipi. 😉 That’s why nobody else had woken up … for them it was none-of-my-business-so-ignore sounds that everybody was so used to that everyone could categorize it as such in their sleep and thus not be woken by it (of course the other side of this is that one also learns alternatives to being noisy to express oneself –grin–). A further corollary to this is that because you didn’t hear or see it, you don’t know about it to talk to other people about either. A gossip in this kind of setting/culture is a much more serious (and bad) thing because they are the untrustworthy privacy breakers (what’s heard/seen in public is acceptable social gossip, what’s heard/seen in crowded private is not)
When you grow up with this as your normal, however, it becomes instinct rather than rule-following … you do it automatically and unconsciously with no effort required. Here we’re entering not-sure-how-to-describe-it territory (this is kind of like explaining to an alien just how you happen to go about breathing when you’re asleep).
A real life example: These days I work in a huge open space at the back of a warehouse, surrounded by the dozen other people who make up my department. There are multiple printers running, people conversing, book carts and delivery dollies rumbling back and forth, the occasional crash of a book pile toppling, front office folk taking visitors on tour with a running commentary, plus near continous conversation from the processing department beside mine (no wall between us) as well as from the public library staff who work on site. All the other cataloguers have headphones on most of the time to block all this out; if they don’t they continually get distracted and can’t concentrate on what they’re supposed to be doing. I wear headphones about eight hours per year. I’m aware of everything going on around me and yet at the same time I’m not hearing or seeing a thing. I couldn’t tell you what anybody was saying to anybody or who was coming and going. Somebody wants to ask or tell me something they have to stand by my desk within my line of sight and wait for me to register that they’re there (another filter in place there … I won’t “see” people walking past through that space but standing right there for a few seconds will come through my filter as person-needing-interaction.
And yet, with all that blocking out/ignoring, I can hear if somebody is giving wrong information or instructions to a client on the phone or a co-worker at the next desk and intervene immediately. It’s all just filters that get programmed into the brain as you grow up in a very-little-physical-privacy environment and it’s always rather a surprise to learn that not everyone can do this … it truly isn’t something I do consciously, it’s just my default autopilot. I grew up in a community of farmers descended from Irish famine immigrants … my dad’s family had lived within the same two-mile radius for five generations … and pretty much everybody had large family in small house so everybody did the privacy thing. It’s not that I was unaware of the concept of families where each kid had their own bedroom and there was a living room, a rec room, a garage, and multiple other be-by-yourself opportunities … it’s just that this was something one read about in books or magazines or saw on TV and so it was a sort of a fiction thing rather than something real.
Need food now, but can do my best to expand on this later if you want
This actually clears things up nicely. The notion that strategic “not-knowing” becomes second nature when exposed to it constantly does make intellectual sense to me. Social structures are wonderfully flexible in some ways and once a norm is established it’s fairly easy to go with the flow once you “know” the rules.
And even when you’re aware of other behaviours in other places, often in some detail, you still have no idea you’re following rules, written or unwritten … it’s something that just is.
Another useful side effect of this upbringing appears to be my ability to live in the vicinity of police and fire stations (used to live two blocks from both a police and a fire station and currently live across the street from a police station) and not be woken by the sirens. Takes a week or two (depending on how frequent the “exposure” is), but after that my brain “knows” those sounds and puts them and the associates engine and other noises behind the ignore filter. Proximity is part of this as well … the sounds have to keep at the correct distance that means they’re on the street. If they come closer, as in on the property, then I will wake up. Had something similar in the house in Lethbridge where the gravel parking pad was right outside my bedroom window … once I knew the sounds of the basement tenants’ vehicle(s), I wouldn’t be woken by them coming home late. A “stranger” car would wake me, so when somebody got dropped off or there was a new neighbour or the existing neighbour got a new vehicle I’d get woken until I learned the new sounds. Ambulances, because they don’t happen regularly, can still wake me up (but that would likely change if I took up living next to hospitals)
Selective ignorance should work for your purposes.
If it aids the plot, many books I’ve read where an upper class or titled person was engaged in questionable/clandestine behavior often had the manservant/maid be in their master’s confidence and either actively help out or passively redirect any suspicion from outsiders away from the master.
Alternatively, you can use Poe’s method and have your hero order his servants to remain in the house at all times while he is away, thus ensuring an empty manse.
Tentatively yours is the angle I’m taking: Dee was just such a good boss that no one wanted to rat him out. Doesn’t cover all eventualities, but at least it starts with the assumption that his staff were on his side.