ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the diversity of modes of authority within London households and neighbourhoods. It examines ideal forms of patriarchy through the legal, spiritual and prescriptive frameworks utilised and generated by contemporaries, to dissect the roles of masters and mistresses. The chapter deals with a discussion of the parameters of patriarchy in servant-employing households. Servants were as instrumental in the mechanics of the stage as they were in the machinery of the middling or gentry’s household. The script for patriarchal household mastery was a rhetorical resource available to masters throughout the period, a set of ideal devices that exhibited striking continuity across several centuries. Household management required a kind of surveillance that led to a tripartite scale of response to servant behaviour: reward, reform or removal. The manuals directing their instructions to the female managers of households in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were written by men or women who clearly saw that a market awaited them.
