ABSTRACT
My family is my wife, in good health, and [I am) happy with her; her woman Mercer, a pretty, modest, quiet maid; her chambermaid Bess; her cook-maid Jane; the Iittle girl Susan; and my boy which 1 have had half a year, Tom Edwards, wi-Jich 1 took from the King's chapel - and a pretty and loving quiet family 1 have as any man in England. 3
Pepys and his wife had no children of their own, and in the glow of holiday feeling, having just noted how much his physical and financial health had recently improved, Pepys may have enjoyed depicting his menage of servants as a 'loving quiet family'. But the 'family' was hardly a very stable one: within a few weeks the cookmaid Jane had been fired (though she eventually returned) and the chambermaid Bess had quit, 'she having of all wenches that ever lived with us received the greatest love and kindness and good clothes, besides wages, and gone away with the greatest ingratitude'. 4
In fact there was no confusing servants with true family. Pepys did form a lasting attachment to one of his servants, Will Hewer, but many of the cooks, maids and servant-boys who populate the voluminous pages of his diary rotated in and out of the household at frequent intervals. This was entirely normal. Journeymen, apprentices and servants ca me and went. As long as they wert: in service, the householder might owe them wages, training or supervision in loco parentis, but the obligation was time-bound and limited. Servants were expected to be loyal to their masters. Often masters showed their gratitude to servants by helping to arrange marriages for them or remembering them in their wills. But servants could take nothing for granted.
