'Your most obedient servant' : from serving the crown to serving the people!

Abstract

Those archivists who work with collections of documents in the English-speaking world could not have missed the common salutation at the end of most correspondence "Your Most Obedient Servant". Variants of this also exist such as "Your humble servant". Such terminology might seem strange in today's world, but at the time it was the polite form to address the other part. I took the inspiration for this theme from this statement, which was common-day practice in public administration. Most of the records constituting the main corpus of our national archives in Malta are the product of those times. However, as the diplomatics of our holdings changed to reflect the changes in society so has our national archive. The study shows how the National Archives of Malta moved from serving the needs of the state to its current practice of focusing on the needs of the people.