I've been reading about women in the English aristocracy in the 15th and 16th centuries, and I'm a bit stumped about the function of the Ladies in Waiting and Maids of Honor. I know it was important for them to be attractive and accomplished, but how literal was the term "Queen's servants" - were these high-born women expected to delegate menial tasks (cleaning a piece of clothing that had been stained, repairing a tear, fetching food, etc.) to underlings, or to actually perform them themselves?
Was this the same situation as the "King's servants"? And was this type of arrangement common in other western European courts at the time?
Our major sources for court life and royal households in this era are account registers, household ordinances, chronicles and letters, which--surprise, surprise--tend to gloss over, which is a nice way to say ignore, day-to-day life in the queen's household. Still, either England is exceptionally well-documented or England-focused scholarship is more interested in women than French or German (very true in the latter case), because scholars have been able to see through the avalanche of reports of parties and feasts to the more mundane details.
In York and Tudor England, the queen's household would have consisted of several groups of women (in addition to male servants like her own Lord Chamberlain): ladies-in-waiting (typically married), maids-of-honor (not married), menial servants, and the LIWs' servants. Sometimes the mistress of the nursery would also be considered part of the queen's household, but her duties would have been rather different from the queen's direct retinue.
The function of the LIWs (and MOHs, but I will use LIW to be concise) within the queen's household was inextricably bound to the function of the queen in court life. First, ritual and ceremony was crucial to the construction of kingship, and the queen--and her ladies--were essential to that. An important duty of the LIWs was to know the queen's responsibilities better than she did: to advise on the proper ceremonial for an occasion. You will love this detail, /u/chocolatepot: they spent a lot of time keeping straight what the queen needed to wear on a given occasion! (The attention to the queen's wardrobe in chronicle accounts is there for a reason! It was vital to achieve the proper display).
They did perform some "servant" roles, although generally not of the emptying the chamberpot variety. The mysterious function always describes as "attending the queen at meals" entailed...I don't actually know, that's the most detail I've ever read, but I would imagine it could be cutting meat so the LIWs' sleeves would get dirty instead of the queen's, making sure she had enough to drink, or some such. They helped her get dressed for sure!
You mentioned repairing clothing. I've not seen direct references to that, but certainly needlework and sewing were vital occupations. The sources are interested in the garments and altarcloths they sewed to serve as gifts the queen could bestow on others. So it definitely stands to reason that they would have repaired ripped dresses.
Companionship, of course, was a necessary function. LIWs would be comprised of a mix of the queen's favorite female relatives, the king's favorites, and the result of political maneuvering, but the general picture we have is a group of women who did courtly things together. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn famously gambled at cards with each other. Margaret Beaufort bet money that she could defeat her opponents at chess. Apparently music and dancing were favorite activities within the queen's Privy Chamber as well as at formal court functions! Elizabeth Blount, Henry VIII's mistress as well as a LIW, was renowned for her singing voice.
Second, attending the queen was an inherently political position within the overall court structure. Such a position for his daughter could be a valuable gift the king bestowed on a courtier (with related obligations, of course). Additionally, in the case of the maids-of-honor specifically, the king was generally expected to help secure her a better marriage. That gave the king immense control over the reproduction and inheritance of some of the highest nobility in the kingdom. And of course the queen's ladies contributed greatly to ceremonies and dancing at court--Henry VIII's famous "disguisings" could not have worked without them. They also would have served as mediatrices, ferrying requests from their own kinsmen and favorites to the queen, who could intercede with the king in turn.
Can we extrapolate from the English court outwards? Yes, to some degree. Malcolm Vale argues persuasively for a "francophone court culture" in northwest Europe, roughly England-Paris-Low Countries princel courts. He thinks the use of French in addition to the local vernacular serves as a cultural marker of the underlying economic and political-culture parallels. Vale, however, ignores women almost completely in this study. When we expand our view, however, we see that women were key drivers of creating a European court culture that stretched further than the northwest core (although there are some differences in southern Germany in terms of structure, or at least there seem to be given the fewer sources we have, there are also general parallels). Young women would go abroad to a different court to receive an education. We talk about "marriage alliances" as if the weight is all on the king and queen/lord and lady having children. But the real diplomacy was in the retinue: girls getting married far from home did not travel alone! They, and the relatives and advisors they brought along, were ambassadors of culture as well as politics. So while the particular ceremonies may have differed, or the importance of one ritual over another, there is good reason to start talking about, in the grand scholarly tradition of ambiguity, "western European court culture(s)."
Further reading: You can pick around the edges of some biographies of English queens. Barbara Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550 has a really good chapter on court life that would probably interest you.