Arlington House - Rear Passage - looking south - 2011

The servants' hall is a common room for

domestic worker A domestic worker or domestic servant is a person who works within the scope of a residence. The term "domestic service" applies to the equivalent occupational category. In traditional English contexts, such a person was said to be "in service ...

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 ...

. The term usually refers to the servants'

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

. 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 two 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 pantry. Some al ...

and housekeeper presided over the table much as the master and lady 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 took the

place of honour {{Short pages monitor See also *Curule seat Honor Honour (British English) or honor (American English; see spelling differences) is the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person that is both of social teac ...

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