...and the poor man at his gate

Recently I watched a three-part documentary about the history of domestic service. Many of my ancestresses worked as housemaids or maids-of-all-work. The maids were the first in the household to wake up, and they toiled non-stop until they went to bed long after everybody else had retired. In the larger houses there was a hierarchy of servants, which reflected the class system of the world at large. The established Church was complicit in maintaining and preserving the class system. Did you know that in the Nineteenth Century, prayer books were published specifically for certain classes of servant. The person presenting the documentary read an extract from a prayer book written specially for housemaids, in which the poor maid was told to be satisfied with her lot in life and to submit to it, as it was God's natural order. The book also instructed her to work diligently and without complaint, and to remember her humble station. Any dissent was considered an act against God, therefore was not to be tolerated. Those poor women. It was all stacked against them. They worked so hard and got so little out of life.