Arlington House - Rear Passage - looking south - 2011

The servants' hall is a common room for

domestic worker A domestic worker is a person who works within a residence and performs a variety of household services for an individual, from providing cleaning and household maintenance, or cooking, laundry and ironing, or care for children and elderly ...

s in a

great house A great house is a large house or mansion with luxurious appointments and great retinues of indoor and outdoor staff. The term is used mainly historically, especially of properties at the turn of the 20th century, i.e., the late Victorian or ...

, typically referring to the servants'

dining room A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually next to the kitchen for convenience in serving, though in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level. Historically the dining room is furnished with ...

. If there is no separate sitting room, the servants' hall doubles as the place servants may spend their leisure hours and serves as both sitting room and dining room.

Background

Meals in the servants' hall were sometimes very formal affairs, depending on the size and formality of the

household A household consists of one or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is im ...

. At dinner in a formal house, the

butler A butler is a person who works in a house serving and is a domestic worker in a large household. In great houses, the household is sometimes divided into departments, with the butler in charge of the dining room, wine cellar, and pantries, pantr ...

and housekeeper presided over the table much as the master and

lady ''Lady'' is a term for a woman who behaves in a polite way. Once used to describe only women of a high social class or status, the female counterpart of lord, now it may refer to any adult woman, as gentleman can be used for men. "Lady" is al ...

of the house did 'above stairs' (i.e., in the rooms occupied by the employer). In Victorian England, the strict rules of precedence were mirrored by the domestic staff in grand or formal homes in the seating arrangements of the Servants' Hall. A senior servant such as the

lady's maid A lady's maid is a female personal attendant who waits on her female employer. The role of a lady's maid is similar to that of a gentleman's valet. Description Traditionally, the lady's maid was not as high-ranking as a lady's companion, who wa ...

took the place of honour but would have to "go lower" (i.e. take a place further down the table) if the employer of a visiting servant outranked the mistress of the house.

References

Domestic work Rooms {{Room-stub

Background

See also

References