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Shades of Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid or whatever it was she was pretending to do in her toy village.
I think it would have been impossible for the aristocracy to have any idea of what life was really like for the peasants. And they couldn't have acted the part very easily, Sir Percy notwithstanding.
In more recent times of course they have had to live with the middle classes. We knew a man who died some years ago now, who was by birth a Polish count, grew up in the 1930s, became a refugee and then a British national, and joined the RAF in the Second World War.
After the war he and his wife came to Australia and he became a very successful businessman. He was very charming, had beautiful manners, but was unmistakeably aristocratic. He liked to have the family crest on his writing paper, and surrounded himself with beautiful books and objects, no doubt to replace all the things lost to his family during and after the war. He had earned the right to have them, as opposed to simply inheriting wealth and property.
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