English servants and their employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Evidence that English domestic maidservants increased as a proportion of the population during this period is extremely weak. Indeed, with the exception of London, they probably formed a smaller proportion of the population during the nineteenth century than at me end of the seventeenth. Male domestic servants were comparatively few in number and fewer still by the mid-nineteenth century. The potential supply of female servants was always very limited, necessitating a use of casual female labour. The feminization of domestic service, already me case in London by the start of the eighteenth century, was well under way nationally by 1780.