The work of servants changed little throughout the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Gamekeepers and warreners are types of servants more particularly associated with this period, and likely to have been employed at Burghley House. However, they are neither exclusive of this period nor the only types of servants.

A gamekeeper would catch small birds for the table and a warrener would manage the ‘coning-earth’, which was a mound with a ditch and a fence to keep predators away from the rabbits. Rabbits were an essential source of meat in winter. A special dispensation from the monarch was needed to keep both rabbits and deer.

Pigeon flesh and eggs were another relief to the normal winter diet of salted meat and fish. Pigeon feathers were used to stuff pillows and their dung for fertiliser, gunpowder and for softening leather. Dovecotes or culver houses could contain four hundred to six thousand birds. Pigeons were, however, greatly resented by the peasants for eating their crops, but being off limits as food.

Force-feeding and plucking feathers off live geese up to five times in a year were common practise. Methods of increasing poultry productivity were outrageous. One common procedure of the period to encourage a hen to lay, was that she should be doused in water, fed half a glass of gin, swung round until seeming dead and then shut in a pot for two days with only a very small hole for air.