Servants and the pecking order

So writing about servants in a medieval sort of society is hard. I keep wanting to bring what I know about being a paid employee in modern times into it. I'm fairly sure that the life of a servant in a manor or castle was significantly different to my experience.

So research, yeah.

The thing I discovered almost immediately was the that society I was imagining in my SciFi/Fantasy world was more like a renaissance one than a real medieval one. That's actually good news, it frees me from slavishly following medieval practices. The society I've imagined plays out in detail like a movie in my head but its not exactly the same as any historic period on Earth.

The second thing I discovered quickly is that servants were not treated anywhere near as well as I thought they might be. Nowhere near as well as I'd imagined. So again, my world is not like history but I did have to change what I was writing to make the servants life less comfortable.

Finally and terrifyingly, women were treated even worse than I had imagined. In medieval times women had no rights, at all! Wives were not partners in life, they were slaves, often taken by force from enemies or bought for money. I wanted to paint a picture of a society where women don't have anything like the equality I'm used to (as flawed as it is), so that I can draw a contrast with modern society and point out its flaws but medieval society was terrifyingly worse than even my most horrific imaginings. So again my world is different to that, I don't want to portray life for women as bad as it actually was in medieval Europe.

The pecking order, it's human nature to want to know where you stand with those around you. so confrontations to sort out the pecking order are inevitable. In medieval society servants fell into two distinct classes. The sons of people of influence/nobles doing effectively an apprenticeship as a servant. They made contacts and learned important skills until they could establish their own household. The others were women and serfs, in both cases effectively slaves paid almost nothing and expected to act with complete obedience.

So in my world I'm going for something of a hybrid model of the servant/master relationship. Two classes of servants, the noble brats and the commoners. However the commoners are paid a little in addition to room and board and basic clothes supplied. They also have some common law rights. Common law started in England in the later part of the medieval period. So my world is something like late middle ages with a touch of renaissance and a touch of SciFi/fantasy.

Some links to things I found:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_household
http://www.ancientfortresses.org/medieval-castle-life.htm
http://mail.islux.lu/librarylinks/Medieval+3rd+grade/Servants.htm
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gbetcher/373/guilds.htm
http://www.eelkat.com/MedievalServants.html
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40275569?sid=21105789168813&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3737536
http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-life/
...and many others.


A.I.Marin.