Hello!
I hope I can ask this here... I am watching the Tudors (which I know is not entirely historically accurate), and the servants see and hear so much... So I am wondering if there are any good reads during this time period that was written by a servant? Preferably non-fiction.
Thank you!
Not a book and not a servant, but I think you would enjoy the Cecil papers which - luckily for you- have all been digitised! Cecil was Secretary of State during the Elizabethan government (amongst many other things!)
http://cecilpapers.chadwyck.co.uk/marketing.do
You might also enjoy A Visitors Companion to Tudor England by Suzannah Lipscomb which is excellent for further entertaining insight into the era.
Basically, the problem you're going to run into here is that almost all serving people were, if not wholly illiterate, then close enough to it as makes no difference. They weren't writing books. Almost all of the Tudor sources I'm aware of - Thomas More and Margaret Roper's letters, the Cecil papers that /u/yermawsgotbawz mentioned, etc - are going to be from the upper-middle class or higher.