If your main character in your work of medievalist fiction is a noble or a knight, then you will need to spend at least some time thinking about their household.

You might underestimate the importance of the household if you mistakenly reduce it only to those members and servants directly focused on the family’s needs. In reality, particularly for the higher nobility, the household connected to every aspect of life.

A range of useful sources have survived to the present day, although nowhere near as many as historians would wish to see. You can study the surviving account books directly, but I’d recommend instead the readable general overviews generated by medieval historians.

Two books stand out in my collection: C.M. Woolgar’s The Great Household in Late Medieval England (1999) and Margaret Wade Labarge’s A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (1980, reprint (1965)).

One quote from Woolgar clarifies the scale of these household establishments. In the 1300s, according to Woolgar’s research, “the royal household had between 400 and 700 servants, four to seven times the adult population of Cuxham, in Oxfordshire, a typical Midlands village, on the eve of the Black Death” (9).

The medieval household is an interesting social construct. On the one hand, especially for the high nobility, the household is essentially a local government, with a smaller traveling household embedded inside the larger stationary one. On the other hand, the household, in all its colorful glory as its servants wore their livery to show their affiliation, functioned as the living proof of the lord’s or household head’s virtue, generosity, and reputation. Conspicuous consumption was one of its priorities.

A reasonably prosperous merchant or trade worker typically would employ a cook and a few other household servants. But a king, duke, or high-ranking clergy member would require and support a much larger establishment.

Examining the available records for English kings during the medieval period, Woolgar found royal households ranging from 53 to 363 to 700-800 or more, depending on the century and wealth of the king. So for a king in a reasonably prosperous kingdom, you are “building” at the right scale if you envision a household membership of somewhere between 300 and 700. For high nobles, depending on their incoming revenues, they typically would maintain a household of between 100 and 200, with clerical households normally employing a few dozen fewer members.

In several future postings, I plan to explain who these members would be and who would be responsible for which aspect of the household’s functions by summarizing the common structures.