It wasn’t just a question of doing the work, but often of doing it to the kind of exacting standards that generally occur only to people who don’t have to do the work themselves. At Manderston, a stately home in Scotland, a team of workers had to devote three full days twice a year to dismantling, polishing, and then reassembling a grand staircase. Some of the extra work was as demeaning as it was pointless. The historian Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett notes one household in which the butler and his staff were required to put down spare stair carpet around the dining room table before setting it so
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