Friday 21st September, 8pm
A century ago the world of the British manor house was at its height. For the upper classes living in a manor house meant you were guaranteed a life of luxury, but downstairs hundreds of servants toiled ceaselessly to make the lives of their lords and ladies run as smoothly as possible. It’s this rigid class system that drama series like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey have used as inspiration for their TV dramas.
But what was really going on behind these stately walls a century ago? Secrets Of The Manor House looks beyond the fiction to the truth of what life was like in these ancient British houses. They were communities where two separate worlds existed side by side: the poor worked as domestic servants, while the nation’s wealthiest families enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury, and aristocrats ruled over their servants as they had done for a thousand years.
The one-off talks to present-day British lords and ladies as well as the descendants of those who lived and worked in manor houses across the country. A series of expert historians explain the true picture of how life was lived within the walls of these stately homes that had changed very little for centuries.
