ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that while money wages remained important to domestic servants, the importance of a mixture of earnings in a customary context — a moral economy of service — persisted for the large and important sector of the London labour force. It discusses the construction of wage series alone and attempt to conjecture for real earnings, considering money wages for domestic servants in London between 1670 and 1750 in smaller and larger households. The chapter looks at bed and board, and then the intractable question of perks and vails and offers an analysis of servants’ savings. Cash wages were extremely important to domestic servants throughout the early modern period. The relative parity in female servant wages between a London-wide source in the depositions and the Chelsea setdements lends litde corroboration to E. W. Gilboy findings of an eighteenth-century metropolitan wage area. The data on fortunes certainly points to most servants as consumers rather than life-cycle savers.
