This demand, coupled with the reported attractions of city life, encouraged migration into the towns. In the cities farmers' children were reputed to make the best servants, while city–bred servants were the least desirable. In the country or the provincial towns, the most usual way of hiring servants was at the 'statute' or 'hiring' fairs, usually held in May and November. Obtaining a satisfactory position was not always easy, and many dangers awaited the unsophisticated. Domestic service was one of the principal openings for poor girls in the eighteenth century, and accordingly this was one of the main objectives of their education. It was being sold at half price – sixpence stg – 'for the good of the public'. This small treatise is so well done and so much approved of by the nobility as well as the gentry and trading part of England that many thousands of them have already been sold Landlords making presents of them to their tenants Parents to their children, Mistresses to their servants and the governors and directors of all charity schools to the girls, obliging mistresses to teach them to read this book, as it will better qualify them for Service of any degree, than any other instructions that can be given them. In 1744 Freeman's Dublin Journal was advertising a treatise entitled A Present for a Serving–maid: or the sure means of gaining love and esteem:
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Mordant's The Complete Steward (2 vols, 1761). Lawrence's Duty of a Steward to his Lord ( 1727) and J. For aspiring servants there were numerous books and pamphlets including E. These career opportunities were endorsed by the speed with which publishers seized on a potential market. For the ambitious, the spectrum of employment offered by a great landlord was wide, with salaries and perquisites varying accordingly.
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Food and board were provided, and there were often additional benefits. To be in service was a way of life and, by eighteenth–century standards, often a desirable one, for a good employer offered a sheltered and structured social environment in which servants orbited round 'the family'. Agricultural and domestic servants made up the greatest single element of employment in the eighteenth century. Throughout the century parliament passed statutes regulating the relationship of masters and servants, aimed at ensuring that servants received the wages due to them and behaved circumspectly towards their employers, for instance 6 Anne, c. Many statutes were passed in order to regulate conditions of employment.