Totally common, especially for female servants. As a working class woman in Victorian/Edwardian/Interwar Britain, it wasn't uncommon to work as a servant in your youth before you got married. On getting married, you would be expected to settle down and become a housewife. If Downton Abbey were real life, both Anna and Daisy would have left their jobs on getting married to Mr Bates and William to become housewives. The men would probably leave employment in service on getting married too. The reason for this is that as a servant you most probably lived with your employer and your employer couldn't be expected to house you (his employee) as well as a spouse and any children that might come out of your relationship. For this reason, fraternisation between unmarried servants was discouraged, as it meant that an employer could lose two perfectly decent servants. There were often exceptions for roles that were slightly removed from the house; for example, chauffeurs and gamekeepers often didn't live with the family but in their own nearby (dependent) properties. If you look in central and west London today, you will see lots of large middle and upper class houses surrounded by little streets of small houses, which would have been where these servants lived.

But then, what about the older servants? What about Mr Carson, Mrs Hughes, and Mrs Patmore? Downton gets one thing right - none of them are shown to have a spouse (before Carson and Hughes marry each other of course). Mrs Hughes even makes it clear that she only becomes a "Mrs" to give herself more status after becoming housekeeper. This is very reflective of real life. Butlers and housekeepers often started life as footmen and housemaids but as they never got married they were not forced out of their professions and then found themselves promoted. In the case of housekeepers, you occasionally see widows or mothers of illegitimate children (who for one reason or another did not marry the father) being employed, but all were unmarried during the time they were servants.

This situation meant there was often a very high turnover of servants (for example, look at a middle class family in censuses in 1851 and 1861 and you'll see they have entirely different servants). The cozy relationship you see developing in Downton between the servants and the Crawleys is entirely unrealistic, if only because it is unlikely they would have employed the same servants for so many years (not to mention the absolutely rigid class system would have meant the Crawleys would have felt very above the servants). Close relationships were perhaps more likely to develop between servants and the family in middle class homes, where the family were only likely to employ one or two housemaids. In my own family, there is some suggestion of this - my grandad was adopted and never knew his birth family. After some digging we found his mother worked as a housemaid for a middle class family, and *suspiciously* (rolls eyes) my grandfather was given the name of the middle class family's son who was a similar age to his mother! As far as we know, my great-grandmother had to leave employment when she got pregnant, but later became a housekeeper (as she remained unmarried).

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