Let's say we're looking at the period from 1870-1880, in England. I'm quite aware that if a servant were unsatisfactory, they could be dismissed by an employer, their reputation ruined, and they might have some pretty rough times ahead. That's obviously a major punishment, and any servant would studiously try to avoid that fate, but I'm trying to understand if a master/mistress had any legal authorities over their servants outside of their ability to terminate a contract.
These days, a contract can’t override basic worker protections against abuse and misuse, but I believe the 1870s predate almost all of those. I’ve heard examples of servants being punished physically (pinching, paddling, etc), financially (fines for practically everything), and by other means, most of which would be legally regulated today. Did a servant in this period have any recourse against these sorts of treatments, or were they basically a legally/contractually enforceable version of "while you're in my house, you live by my rules" from which the only escape was to resign?
The flipside of this is to ask what legal responsibilities an employer had to, or for, their servants. I can't imagine most servants had many, if any, legal protections. Am I right to think that while an employer’s good will might yield leniency or protection in times of trouble, this was not due to any kind of legal requirement? Going further, given how much control it seems an employer held over a servant’s life, did employers ever bear any of the punishment when a servant engaged in criminal activity? Was there a social stigma attached even, or was it just dismissed as a case of "a lower class person" acting poorly, which didn’t reflect upon their employer?
I’ve heard examples of servants being punished physically (pinching, paddling, etc), financially (fines for practically everything), and by other means, most of which would be legally regulated today.
Can you be more specific about where you've heard these examples? I ask because I'm familiar with people hearing about examples of boarding school corset-related sadism, and these all stem from unsubstantiated letters to the editors of one or two Victorian magazines (and are now broadly considered nothing more than sexual fantasies), so it seems plausible to me that stories of extreme mistreatment, depending on their sources, might be similar in cause. Employers did not have the legal right to beat servants in the late 19th century, and if cruelly treated servants could go to the courts - the law wasn't totally fair, a master going against the law would generally be fined while a servant whose master accused them of breaking their contract (leaving without notice or not performing their duties) could be fined as well as imprisoned, and the master's word was taken as essentially true when it came to describing a verbal contract, but the servant was still seen as having rights. The trouble would just be in proving the wrongs to the magistrate, as we sometimes still see today. But nobody would say, eh, go ahead, paddle your maid because she woke up too late this morning. Servants were not slaves.
Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 and Master and Servant Law: Chartists, Trade Unions, Radical Lawyers and the Magistracy in England, 1840–1865, by Dr. Christopher Frank, can give you a good idea of the legal relationship between employer and employee just prior to the period you're asking about, which the 1867 act addressed.
Regarding the flipside, most sources are discussing employers and servants in legal battles against each other, but from what I've read it seems that employers would only be legally responsible for what their servants had done if they'd ordered them to do it. The situation you're thinking of seems to be more like that of contracted apprentices in the early 19th century and earlier, where there was a considerably tighter legal relationship between apprentice and master.
You might also be interested in Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times by Lucy Lethbridge, which deals with servants' positions from about the 1890s on.