The DEADLY Price of Being the Handsomest Footman in a Regency House | History for Sleep

Regency London in 1815 was the capital of a nation coming out of more than twenty years of war with France: George III was still king in name, but since 1811 his son had governed as Prince Regent, and on 18 June 1815 the Battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars. The 1811 census counted about a million people in the metropolis, and in fashionable Mayfair, around Grosvenor Square and Hanover Square, aristocratic town houses lived on the rents of landed estates and kept large staffs of domestic servants below stairs and in the garrets.This episode of History for Sleep covers the Regency footman and the working world of the great town house. Footmen were hired for height and appearance and matched in pairs, because tall men in livery were a public display of a family's wealth, and their dress of household-coloured coats, crested buttons, knee breeches and silk stockings was owned by the employer, not the servant. Hair powder was part of the uniform and was taxed from 1795 at one guinea a year per person, while a separate tax on male servants, introduced in 1777, made every footman a costly luxury. Daily life ran on tallow candles, chamber pots, coal smoke, the stables of the mews behind the house, and the bells of St George's, Hanover Square, which marked the hours across Mayfair.The law that hung over every servant was the Bloody Code. Under an Act of 1713, stealing goods worth forty shillings or more from a dwelling house was a capital felony, and servants accused of theft from their employers regularly stood trial at the Old Bailey, where many death sentences were commuted to transportation to New South Wales.Within a generation the reforms of the 1820s and 1830s dismantled most of the Bloody Code, and the powdered, liveried footman of the Regency gave way to the plainer domestic service of Victorian Britain.