The Servants' Hall Author:Merlin Waterson The servants' hall: a domestic history of Erdigg, in Great Britain. — From the servants' hall we can witness the complex functioning of an unusual, closely knit - and almost utterly vanished - world: a community composed of housekeepers, kitchenmaids, stableboys, nannies, tutors, woodsmen, and more. To give us back that vantage and open up to us ... more »that world, Merlin Waterson has turned a uniquely vivid set of human records into an engaging picture of 250 years of daily life "below stairs" in a country squire's household.
The Yorkes of Erddig, a modest (fifty-room) estate in Wales, were distinguished for their utter fascination with their staff: they commissioned more portraits of their servants than of their family, and over the generations wrote (and kept) endless letters and diaries and reams of verse to and about the staff. The archives left at the death of the last heir in 1978 are a detailed catalogue of life and work on the estate, from kitchen inventories to accounts of three centuries of building across the luscious grounds. But it is the human faces and memories which give us the richest insights into the community's intricate underpinnings.« less