English furniture - Robinson

The aim of this book is to be of some assistance to those who collect, or propose to collect, English furniture. The subjects of the plates, therefore, have been chosen mainly for the purpose of affording a good general view of the usual types with which a collector may meet. A false idea of English furniture would be formed if the majority of the objects reproduced were such as are seldom or never found for sale. At the same time, there are included many rare and beautiful pieces to demonstrate the artistic and technical skill of English designers and cabinetmakers. Mere reproductions of engravings from the pattern books of Chippendale and his successors have been avoided. Though very full reference is made to their designs in the text, nothing has been admitted into the plates which is not taken from some existing piece of furniture. The illustrations are arranged at the end of the volume as nearly as possible in the order in which they are required for the elucidation of the text.

The grateful thanks of the author and publishers are due to all those who have so kindly given access to their collections, and allowed reproductions to be made from their treasures. Too numerous to mention here, their names will be found in the List of Illustrations, formed mainly for the purpose of recording them.

In the case of the many photographs of objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the author has to acknowledge the courtesy of the officials in the Store-keeper's Department of the Board of Education.

The writer of a treatise upon English Furniture, who wishes to trace his subject from the very commencement of its history, is attended at once by a serious difficulty. Lack of actual material, owing to the limited durability of woodwork as compared with that of metal and stone, absolutely precludes all certainty as to the shape and adornment of Saxon, Danish, or Norman chairs, beds, and tables. Their non-existence may be regarded either as a blessing or a curse. The collector's loss is the speculative anti-quary's opportunity. The former, from whose point of view this book is written, is not much concerned with what he can never hope to see or obtain. To the latter, then, let us leave the privilege of 'embarking,' as a recent writer on the Saxon period has it, 'on the perilous sea of conjecture surrounding the small solid spots of knowledge which ... we possess.'

A brief study of the manner in which a Saxon house is represented in one of the most useful historical documents will show how difficult it is to draw exact inferences as to its contents. In the Bayeux so-called 'tapestry' Harold's house at Bosham is depicted. We cannot tell from such a picture what it really looked like, because the front is entirely open to display the feasting in progress within. The figures in the house are cut off at the waist by the floor of the upper story.

The only definite conclusion to be drawn as to other things besides dress and architecture, of which the latter is but symbolically recorded, concerns horns and drinking-cups. They are unmistakable, but in this particular picture of a feast, at any rate, there are no tables, chairs, or furniture of any kind. Mr. Baldwin Brown, however (Arts in Early England, i. p. 103), gathers from inventories and records that the equipment of a Saxon lord's house ' gave occasion for art in the figured wall-hanging, and in carved and gilded woodwork in furniture and utensil.' The plentiful remains of beautifully executed Saxon metal-work warrant such a conclusion, and a reference by the same writer to the chronicle of Ramsey Abbey (Rolls Series, 83) brings us a step nearer to our subject. It records that the church, originally built in 974, was soon adorned with a jewelled altar-front of silver, and an organ with pipes of copper. There is, in fact, no doubt that the pre-Norman house, monastery, and church must have been suitably furnished with a skill worthy of that which we can see actually displayed in the remains of metal-work. Many of the examples preserved show a technical skill of the highest order in all except figure-work. Seeing, then, that unfortunately no remains of Saxon furniture have come down to us, and that most representations of it, whether on textile fabrics or in manuscripts, are of so plain a description as to leave us no very definite ideas, the illustrations of this book will be confined to actual existing objects, leaving aside all exemplifications of what may have been.

There is in the British Museum a most precious relic which may give us a clue to realise the probable skill in wood-carving before the Norman period. It is the casket in whale's bone presented by Sir A. W. Franks. The cover represents a man defending his house with a bow drawn, be it noticed, to the waist, and not as our later archers drew it against opponents with swords and shields. The subject on the cover only takes up about one-third of the space. There is a round disc in the centre to which a handle was probably once attached. The front shows one Weland Smith mounting a young prince's skull as a drinking-cup; with Egil his brother; and the adoration of the Magi. A twisted rope pattern runs round the border between straight lines raised upon a field which has been cut away. There is a place for a lock. On the back is represented the taking of Jerusalem, the central shape being an arch with pillars broken or interrupted by horizontal pieces in three stories. On the sides is an episode from the Teutonic legend of Egil the archer, a prototype of William Tell. There are Runic inscriptions in the Northumbrian dialect. It is said that this object is of the eighth century, and was formerly preserved in Auvergne. The missing portions are in the Bargello at Florence. The material, whale's bone, is dullish white in colour, like coarse ivory, and with a decided grain. It is easy to imagine that the Saxon oak chest was carved with a front similar in execution to this, naive and flat, but so well incised and definite as to have a peculiar attractiveness. The doorway of the house on the cover, which is represented in elevation (whereas the house itself is fantastically given in ground plan), is of very similar proportion and general appearance to the round arches and pillars on the chests and chimney-pieces and other furniture of the Elizabethan period. A twisted cable ornament runs up the pillars, suggesting the 'guilloche' which we shall find so common in the period of the Renaissance.

A Saxon or Anglo-Norman state bed, illustrated from a manuscript in Willemin's Monumens Franqais inddits, has thick carved legs of a very similar type to the baluster legs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Needless to say that we do not find the exact acanthus-leaf lower part and the gadrooned upper portion which are so entirely characteristic of Elizabethan and Jacobean beds. It is a matter rather of general shape and feeling than of detail. If manuscript delineations of the Saxon house are to be trusted, and the usual type is of one story and one room we are compelled to believe that its appurtenances must, generally speaking, have been made more for use than for show. The meuble dapparat was not characteristic of the Saxon period. A heavy table, upon which the inhabitants of the house and guests also slept, an occasional four-post bed for the mistress of the house, enclosed in a shed with a separate roof, and benches, some with lions' or other heads at the corners, with backs for the lord and lady of the house, are all that Mr. J. H. Pollen in his Furniture and Woodwork allows to the rank and file. Crosslegged thrones, something like that problematical one of Dagobert in the Muse'e des Souverains at Paris, of which there is a cast in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and folding chairs of various forms more or less from classical types, he allots to great personages. Benches and chests served as beds likewise, the bedding being kept inside ; and considerable use was made of textile fabrics to cover furniture and keep out draughts. If we take it for granted with Mr. Pollen that candles in houses 'were stuck anywhere on beams and ledges/ the practice throws a light upon the amount of comfort and cleanliness which our forefathers enjoyed.

The Norman Conquest may be taken as an epoch of advance in comfort and refinement. Perhaps the one roomed house would cease to be anything but the shelter of the poor, and, as soon as there was space to fill, things must have been made to fill it. The Jews' House at Lincoln, however, one of the few remaining dwelling-houses of Norman architecture in England, and said to be of the early twelfth century, appears to have contained but two rooms. As yet the house would be one of unglazed windows and short of chimneys. The fire in the chief room would be in the centre of the floor. At Penshurst, Kent, in the hall, may still be seen the centrally placed hearth of a house as late as the fourteenth century. The smoke escapes by an opening in the roof. The old 'louvre' of the central fireplace may be noticed on the roof of the hall of Lincoln College, Oxford, but the fire has long been burning up a chimney.

Tables now were placed upon trestles, and cup- boards or armoires (armarid) came into use with decorative iron hinges worked into scrolls and leafage. No such thing as a piece of Norman furniture exists in England. It is, therefore, rather idle to waste space upon the matter, except to deprecate the theory that prior to 1250 furniture owed all its decoration to painting and ironwork. With Norman stone carvings remaining, it seems rather unreasonable to conjecture that there were no carvings in wood. The theory is not, at any rate, supported by a unique example which exists in France. This is an armoire at Aubazine, Correze, illustrated by Mr. Fred Roe in his Ancient Coffers and Cupboards. Dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century, it has ends with round arches and Vandyke patterns of typical Norman character, with slender pillars and capitals. Its wooden decoration, therefore, is considerably more effective than that of such a celebrated relic as the thirteenth century chest at Stoke d'Abernon, which is illustrated in this volume (Plate iv.). It would be rather illogical to imagine that examples made, say, a generation or two before the date of this armoire should have been practically uncarved with ornament.

Small houses lacked chimneys 'in most uplandish towns' as late as the early sixteenth century. See Harrison's Description of England, 1577, 'On the Manner of Building and Furniture of our Houses.'

This armoire, however, is very late Norman. Earlier manuscript illustrations, such as those of the ninth century, afford us still only the toy houses, plain beds, and bird's-eye views of fortified places similar to the ground plan of the Northumbrian casket. A tenth century manuscript shows us a semi-circular table supported on many-folding trestles and covered with a cloth. In the Bayeux needlework William I. sits on a seat apparently without a back. Its front legs end at the top in dogs' heads, and it has dogs' feet. On his seal he is represented as occupying a still plainer throne without back or dogs' heads, but apparently cushioned. The seal of Richard Cceur de Lion shows us that king seated on a low-backed throne, the side wings of which have Gothic ornaments of trefoil and fleur-de-lys, but the representation is too devoid of perspective for us to be able to draw much information from it. With his successor John we are supposed, at last, to emerge from the arid tract of an unrepresented period. There remains at Rockingham Castle a chest known locally as 'King John's money-box,' which is of oak covered with hammered iron plates and hinges. It has a domed top, and is practically a strong box without much ornament. 1

There exist, it should be said, a good many rough chests without decoration, and either of wood or bound with iron, for which a Saxon origin is claimed. Receptacles made apparently out of the hollowed trunk of a tree, and with rounded tops, may indeed be of great age, but there is very little intrinsic evidence to prove it, and their want of artistic merits claims for them only the passing attention due to mere curiosities. It is almost as difficult to date the iron-bound ones unless there are special characteristics to be discerned in the locks and hinges.