SC - women in the kitchen

[Wanda Pease]

>
> mattie wrote:
> >does anyone know if there were ever noblewomen working in the
> kitchen? ...
>
> While I don't know for sure, I doubt that such a thing would have happened
> except in very unusual circumstances. Being noble was all about being too
> important and powerful to have to work for your living. Nobles tended to
> avoid any appearance of being too much like the lower classes.

Just a thought on this.  I suspect that there certainly was a bit of not
wishing to look like the lower classes if you were a newly rich (think
Hyacinth Bucket--er.. Bouquet), but mostly it was probably because a noble
woman had way more important things to do than mess in the hot, dirty, noisy
kitchen.  She would be working at being her husband's hostess and
housekeeper, she might work in the still room making drugs or perfumes, work
on finishing garments for the Lord and herself (all that embroidery that we
drool over, and things like that.

I think of noblewomen as Hotel Managers.  They had a great deal of oversight
work to do, and had to assign specific tasks to experts and let them go to
it.  It isn't that they are too "good" for that sort of work, it's that they
were needed elsewhere for a thousand different things.

<snip>
> There is one case that comes to mind, but I don't have access to full
> information about it at the moment. I've read that when Richard Duke of
> Gloucester (later Richard III) wanted to get married to the
> sister-in-law of
> his elder brother George Duke of Clarence, George hid her away to
> try to get
> out of sharing his wife's inheritance. I don't recall the details, but I
> think that maybe he had her work in a kitchen. She got someone to take a
> message to Richard, and the rest (as they say) is history.
> Anyway, if that's
> how it happened then it would be a case where a noblewoman was
> disguised as
> a commoner and forced to work in a kitchen as part of that disguise.

Anne Neville, Richard's childhood sweetheart and true love.  I've always
wondered why this has never been made into a movie, it's a wonderful love
story.  I suppose we have Thomas More and Shakespeare's character blackening
of Richard to blame.  If you go back and read the real story of their
marriage (not the libel Shakespeare puts into Richard III), it's really
romantic! (sigh....)

Regina Romsey
>

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