Scullion noun a servant, a menial; a piece of cloth for washing or scrubbing
‘The kitchen looked as though a bomb had gone off in it, but only a scullion was there, a half-witted boy who was washing pots, singing softly to himself.’ (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)
The etymology for this word is unclear, but it is thought it might derive from the French souillon, meaning a dirty person or thing. It was probably most commonly used to mean lower-order servants, although one of the earliest recordings of the word (with its meaning of washing cloth) comes from Laing’s Ancient Poetical Scotland John Rowlis Cursing (1500): ‘With skulӡeoun clowttis and dressing knyvis [knives for preparing food].’
Dictionaries of the Scots Language records a later citation from John Reads’ George Buchanan’s History of Scotland (c. 1634) describing the rag-tag folk following an army: ‘a number of rascalls and scullions following the campe.’ Interestingly, scudlers were also servants who carried out menial kitchen tasks for the army and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, though scudler is thought to come from the French escuelier, meaning keeper of the dishes.
Scullion can also be used to describe a base or mean thing. In Deformed Transformed (1822, an unfinished poetic drama version of the Faust legend), Byron wrote: ‘The forester Hunts not the wretched coney, but the boar…, leaving paltry game to petty burghers, who leave once a year Their wall, to fill their household caldrons with Such scullion prey.’
Scullion is now largely obsolete, though there is a twentieth-century example. Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davis (writing in The World and His Wife and quoted in an article entitled ‘Scullion Cooks’ in the Daily Record of 16 August 1905), noted that ‘Most very rich men whom I know are served with an abominably cooked meal if they ask for very simple dishes - a boiled fowl, a grilled chop, or a fried sole. It is not the business of any of the high priests of the kitchen to attend to such cookery as this, though the rich man probably pays his chef £1000 a year, a scullion cooks his lunch for him.’