CHANGES OF TASTE AND STYLE.

It is interesting to trace the changes that the more common and necessary pieces of furniture have undergone during successive historic ages. The social life of ancient times, even of the middle ages which come so much nearer to us in point of years, differs from that of our own in its whole aspect. Yet though personal habits have so greatly altered the general wants of men remain much the same. Hence such objects as beds, chairs, tables, chests, dressers, wardrobes or cabinets, carriages or litters, have been always used and maintained a certain identity. With a summary of the changes of form and methods of decoration of a few of the principal objects of personal use we shall conclude.

Bedsteads and Couches.

Beds served often in antiquity and in the middle ages, and have served at all times, almost as much for sitting or reclining by day as for sleeping on at night.

To what has been already said on the subject of antique beds little need be added. The Egyptian bed and the pillow or crutch, of wood or more valuable materials, have been described. Examples of the crutch are numerous in the British museum and in the Louvre. "The Egyptians had couches," says Sir G. Wilkinson, "but they do not appear to have reclined upon them more frequently than modern Europeans, in whose houses they are equally common. The ottomans were simple square sofas without backs, raised from the ground nearly to the same level as the chair. The upper part was of leather, or of cotton stuff, richly coloured, like the cushions of the fauteuils, and the box was of wood painted with various devices and ornamented with the figures of captives, who were supposed to be degraded by holding so humiliating a position. And the same idea gave them a place on the footstools of a royal throne."

The bed, ?????, of the Greeks was covered with skins, over the skins with woollen blankets; sometimes a linen cloth or sheet was added. The finest coverlids were from Miletus, Carthage, and Corinth. These varied in the softness of their woollen texture and the delicate disposition of the colours. Later Greek beds had girths of leather or string; a mattress; and a pillow.

The Roman bed had the side by which it was entered open, the other was protected by a shelf. The mattresses were stuffed with herbs, in later times with wool or feathers. Precious counterpanes embroidered with gold were occasionally used. Canopies or frames for curtains, in one form or another, have always been necessary adjuncts to beds. Testers were placed on cradles, with gauze curtains to keep off flies. Beds on wheels were in use for the sick in classical and mediÆval times: as also a low and portable bed, grabatum, with mats for bedding. This is the word used in St. John's gospel, translated "take up thy bed and walk."

Besides beds, couches, and stools, used in antiquity, as in our own times, we find amongst the ancients the habit, unknown since, of reclining on the left elbow at meals. The Romans called the conventional arrangement the triclinium. The accompanying woodcut represents the plan of a triclinium, the guest reclining on the left elbow and the faces of each directed from 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and so on. These numbers and positions indicated a sort of superiority, or a highest, middle, and lowest to every table. A passage from Horace, often quoted, enumerates the guests in this order. Fundanius, who was at the top, giving an account of a dinner to his friends, says: "I sat at the top, Viscus Thurinus next to me; Varius, if my memory serves me, below him; Vibidius along with Servilius Balatro, whom MÆcenas brought as humble companions. Nomentanus was above, and Porcius below the host himself."

The beds of the early middle ages in England had testers with curtains, often of valuable material. These slid on rings on an iron rod. Sometimes the rod, with a frame to sustain it, was on one or on three sides of the bed, and the tester wanting. Sometimes the beds were slung on uprights, as cots are at sea. No great expense was incurred in the framework till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The splendour of state beds, or those of great people, consisted in the curtains, which were occasionally taken down, and hung up in churches on festivals. In the illuminations of manuscripts and in pictures representing scenes in which there is a bed, we find the tester strained by cords to the sides of the room or to the ceiling, as in the accompanying woodcut. The curtains ran round this frame, as in our modern four-posters; but we see them hoisted out of the way during the daytime, not round a post, only raised beyond reach.

The finest examples of bedsteads that can be called mediÆval are French, and only met with in fragments, or more or less complete. This is unfortunately the case also as regards early English bedsteads. We may refer the reader to the "Mobilier FranÇais" of Viollet le Duc, for an idea of the sumptuous carved oak bedstead of the great palaces and hotels of France. It was a frame panelled down to the ground, often containing chests, drawers, presses, or other safe places under the sleeper. The back resembled more or less the reredos of an altar, or the great panelled presses that filled the sides of sacristies. Four posts supported the canopy. A bedstead of the fifteenth century was long preserved at Leicester, and said to have been slept on by Richard the third. The under part of it formed his military chest, and the discovery of the treasure a century afterwards occasioned a barbarous murder. None of the coin found was of a later mint than his reign. It is also said by Pennant that a stump bedstead still in Berkeley castle is the same on which the murder of Edward the second was committed. Fine examples of Tudor bedsteads are preserved there. In the town of Ware in Hertfordshire is, and has long been, an inn under the sign of the Saracen's head, "In this," says Clutterbuck, "there is a bed of enormous proportions, twelve feet square. The head is panelled in the Elizabethan style of arched panels, and a date is painted on it—1460. [This, however, is not authentic.] It is of carved oak. The top is covered by a panelled tester, supported on baluster columns at the feet. The bases of these rest on a cluster of four arches or supports to each column." Nothing is known of the original history of the bedstead. Shakespeare alludes to it in Twelfth Night.

To the Tudor and Jacobean period of heavy oak furniture succeeded the custom of supplying the place of oak-panelled testers and headboards with rich hangings either of tapestry, cut Genoa, or Venice velvets and other costly materials, with ostrich feathers or other ornaments on the angles. The royal beds at Hampton court admirably illustrate this stately fashion, as in the accompanying woodcut. More modern changes it is unnecessary to trace.

Couches for reclining or sitting upon were, in the middle ages, rather benches with cushions on them. The king conversing with a lady in her chamber is from a manuscript of about 1390 (the "Romance of Meliadus") in the British museum. In the seventeenth century we find the same ornaments that were used in chair backs extended to large frames so as to form them into couches, and the same plaited cane panels. In the last century, sofas were sometimes made in the form of several chair backs, with arms at each end, the backs being pierced work or framing made of bars in fancy shapes. This work was in mahogany or satin wood, or was painted after the fashion of vernis-martin work. In all cases such pieces were made to accord with suites of chairs, tables, &c.

Cradles have been made in many shapes. The most approved in antiquity was that of a boat, s??f??, or a shield; in either case they could be rocked. In the fourteenth century the men of Ghent destroyed the house of the earl of Flanders, according to Froissart, and all his furniture including the cradle in which he was nursed, which was of silver. The cradle of Henry the fifth is still preserved. It is in the form of a chest, much like the cradle in the Kensington museum, n^o. 1769; and swings on posts, one at each end, standing on cross-bars to keep them steady: but there is no higher portion, as in the example in the museum, to support a tester. A hundred years later the shape seems to have become heavier.

Chairs.

In the ancient Egyptian paintings at Thebes, and elsewhere, chairs are minutely represented like the throne or arm chair of the Greeks, each containing one person. Occasionally they used stools and low seats raised a little above the ground. Some sat cross-legged on the ground, though this is more rare, or kneeling on one knee. The men and women generally were apart, but in the same room, while conversing they sat, and did not recline. Wilkinson gives a full description of the old Egyptian chairs and stools.

The classical curule chairs were made of ivory; sometimes of solid and entire elephants' teeth, which seems to have been the typical idea of the ivory chair; sometimes the ivory was veneered on a wooden base. The foot or point of the tusk was carved into a head or beak. It is from this curved chair of state that the later chairs were derived, of which the form remained popular in Italy through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The mediÆval name was faldistorium, rendered "faldstool," a stool or seat to support the arms when kneeling, or to act as a chair when sitting.

The earliest type of the architectural thrones or chairs of the middle ages is the ancient chair of St. Peter, at Rome, of which a woodcut has been given in p. 35. A full description and plates of it will be found in the "Vetusta monumenta" of the Society of antiquaries for 1870. Another famous chair, that of St. Mark, is preserved at Venice, in the treasury of St. Mark's. Anciently this chair, like that of St. Peter in Rome, was covered with plates of ivory, carved panels probably fitted into frame pieces of wood as a covering to the stone. As it is now seen, however, the work is of oriental marble. It is a rudely shaped arm chair, with high back sloping upwards in the form of a pediment, truncated and surmounted by a stone, cut into an imperfect circle or oval, and having an arm or volute like the reversed angle-volute of a column projecting from the lower part of each side. The chair of St. Maximian at Ravenna dates from the sixth century; this is described in Mr. Maskell's "Ivories." A magnificent fourteenth century architectural chair of silver is preserved at Barcelona. The supports represent window tracery. One large arch supplies the front support, being cusped, and these cusps are again subdivided. The two sides form each a pair of windows of two lights or divisions, with a circle above, the whole cusped and having trefoil leaves on the cusps. The back is open tracery work, representing three narrow windows, with two lights or openings each. They finish in three lofty gables, crocketed outside and divided into tracery within.

Chairs in England during the mediÆval period were sometimes made of turned wood. Sometimes they were cleverly arranged to fold up, as in our own days: the engraving (p. 122) is from a beautiful manuscript of the fifteenth century. The chair known as that of Glastonbury is a square board on two pairs of cross-trestles, with a square board for a back, held to the seat by sloping arm pieces, shaped out to receive the arms of a sitter. On the edges of the seat and back tenons protrude, long enough to pass through mortices in the leg and arm pieces, which are pegged to keep them firm. Like the sixteenth century curule chairs these can easily be taken to pieces for travelling. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James, high-backed chairs, richly cut and pierced, with wooden, afterwards with cane, seats were used and remained in use simplified and lightened during more than a century. The woodcut (p. 123) represents the fashion of chair common in Italy about the year 1620: and from thence introduced into England.

The use of marquetry was not confined to tables and cabinets. Rich chairs were made in this material (rarely in boule) during the eighteenth century in France, Italy, and Holland, from whence they came to this country. Light and very elegant yellow satin-wood marquetry chairs were also then in fashion. The use of mahogany for chairs, often delicately carved and admirably constructed, was general during the last century in England. The French carved chairs of the time of Louis the sixteenth covered with silk all but the legs and framework, and painted white or gilt, were made to accord with the sofas and carved woodwork of the rooms. This example was followed in England, with certain national differences.

Tables.

The ancient Egyptian tables were round, square, or oblong; the former were generally used during their repasts, and consisted of a circular flat summit, supported, like the monopodium of the Romans, on a single shaft or leg in the centre or by the figure of a man intended to represent a captive. Large tables had usually three or four legs, but some were made with solid sides; and though generally of wood many were of metal or stone; and they varied in size according to the different purposes for which they were intended. Often they were three-legged, the legs in a concave shape.

An antique marble table of GrÆco-Roman work is preserved at Naples, supported by a centaur in full relief at one end, and a sea monster, Scylla it is supposed, involving a shipwrecked mariner in the folds of her tail, with indications of waves, &c., round her body. Other Roman tables of larger dimensions had three, four, or five supports of sphinxes, lions, and the like. We give representations of three kinds of tables from paintings on vases; and another, on three marble legs, found at Pompeii.

In the middle ages, as has been before said, tables were generally folding boards laid on trestles and moveable. The general disposition of the dining table was taken from those of abbeys and convents, and may be seen continued in some of our own colleges to this day. The principal table was on a raised platform or floor at the upper end of the hall, and thence called the "High" table. The guests sat on one side only, as in the traditional representations of the Last Supper, and the place of honour was the centre, the opposite side being left for the service. The principal person sat under a canopy or cloth of estate, either made for the occasion, or under a panelled canopy curving outward and permanent. Occasionally mediÆval tables in England were of stone or marble. Of the former material a table is preserved belonging to the strangers' hall at Winchester; and a wooden one in the chapter-house at Salisbury. The tops of some old English tables are made with two thicknesses, the lower pulling out on either side to rest on supports drawn from the bed. A table of this description is kept at Hill hall, Essex; and the woodcut represents a folding table of the time of Elizabeth, long preserved at Flaxton Hall, in Suffolk. During the last century mahogany tables with delicate pierced galleries round the edge, and similar work to ornament the bed or frame, were made by Chippendale and his contemporaries. Many of them are light and graceful pieces of construction. Others were massively made with goat-footed legs that bulge well beyond the lines of the table top, which in these cases is often a slab of marble. The workmanship is admirable. Mahogany had then supplanted the use of oak for large tables.

Chests, Cabinets, and Sideboards.

The wardrobe, both in the Roman house and the mediÆval castle, was a small room suitably fitted up and provided with receptacles. Chests, coffers, and caskets were also in use, and implied moveability. In later days the renaissance chests were either mounted on stands or gave place to mixed structures; and cabinets of various forms that could be kept permanently in the hall or chamber became the fashion. They were large, important objects, were never moved or carried abroad, descended from father to son, and were the monumental objects, as the panelled superstructure of the fireplace was, of halls and reception rooms. These pieces have various forms. In dining halls or rooms occasionally so used, they were cupboards, dressers, or places with a small receptacle to hold food, and a flat top with perhaps a step or shelf above it to carry plate, candlesticks, &c. When placed in receiving rooms or to hold dresses they were cabinets or wardrobes; for the conveniences of writing they are bureaux, sÉcrÉtaires, or escritoires.

We have early notices of the use of cypress chests, perhaps cabinets as some of them are fitted with drawers, in this country. John of Gaunt in his will, 1397, specifies "a little box of cypress wood;" probably something like the chest engraved from a manuscript of that date: out of which the servant is taking a robe evidently richly embroidered with armorial bearings. In the memoirs of the antiquities of Great Britain, relating to the reformation, we find an account of church plate, money, gold and silver images, &c., delivered to Henry the eighth: "Paid William Grene, the king's coffer-maker, for making of a coffer covered with fustyan of Naples, and being full of drawers and boxes lined with red and grene sarcynet to put in stones of divers sorts, vi. li. xviij. s. ij. d.," by which we may gather something of its costly construction, "and to Cornelys the locke smythe for making all the iron worke, that is to say, the locke, gymours, handels, ryngs to every drawer box, the price xxxvi. s. iv. d."

The marquetry invented or brought to perfection by Boule was displayed in greater magnificence on cabinets of various shapes than on any other pieces of furniture. The same may be said of the marquetry cabinets in wood executed during the eighteenth century in France by Riesener and David, with the help of the metal mounts of GouthiÈre and his contemporaries. In these fine pieces the interior is generally simple and the conceits of the previous century are omitted. Japan cabinets obtained through the Dutch were frequently imported into England. The hinges and mounts were of silver or gilt metal, richly chased. The bureau, escritoire, or office desk, called in Germany Kaunitz after a princely inventor, was a knee-hole table. These tall bureaux were of general, almost universal, use in England during the last century.

Sideboards.

There are several old sideboards in the Kensington museum, described under the names of dressoir or dressoir de salle À manger in the large catalogue. They are small cupboards and would be called cabinets but for the drawers half-way down, and the rows of the shelves on the top; and are of the sixteenth century date. According to Willemin, the old etiquette of France, certainly that of Burgundy, prescribed five steps or shelves to these dressers for use during meals for queens; four for duchesses or princesses; three for their children and for countesses and grandes dames; two for other noble ladies. In the middle ages cupboards or dressers were mere covered boards or shelves against a wall on which plate was set out, and were made of three or four or more stages according to the splendour of the occasion. The cupboard dresser of more modest pretensions was considered as a piece of dining-room furniture. It was ordinarily covered with a piece of embroidery.

Robert Frevyll bequeaths, 1521, to his "son John a stone cobard in the hall." A manuscript inventory of Henry the eighth names, "Item, one large cuppbord carpet of grene cloth of gold with workes lyned with bockeram, conteyning in length three yards, iii. q'ters, and three bredthes." In the herald's account of the feast at Westminster, on the occasion of the marriage of prince Arthur, we find "There was also a stage of dyvers greas and hannes (degrees and enhancings of height) for the cuppbord that the plate shulde stande inn, the which plate for the moost part was clene (pure) goold, and the residue all gilte and non silver, and was in length from the closet doore to the chimney." And when in the next reign Henry entertained Francis at Calais, a cupboard of seven stages was provided and furnished with gold and silver gilt plate.

Before concluding these remarks on dining-room furniture something may be said on painted roundels or wooden platters. Though they have long ceased to be used for their original purpose, several sets still complete remain in country houses and collections of different kinds; and three sets are in the Kensington museum. They are usually twelve in number: and all seem to be of the date of the late Tudor princes. They were kept in boxes turned out of a block, and decorated with painting and gilding. Their size does not differ materially, all the sets varying from 5? to 5? inches. There are, however, smaller sets to be seen which range from 2¾ to 5 inches in diameter. The top surface is in all instances plain and the under surface painted with a border of flowers, generally alternating with knots more or less artistically drawn in vermilion: "posyes" or a couple of verses are generally added. These platters were used in the sixteenth century as dessert plates, the plain side being at the top. Leland speaks of the "confettes" at the end of a dinner, "sugar plate fertes, with other subtilties with ippocrass" (a sweet wine). Earthenware plates though not unknown were still very uncommon in England before the reign of Elizabeth. The dinner was served on plate in royal or very great houses, on pewter and wooden trenchers in more humble and unpretending households. Specimens of the latter may still be seen in our old collegiate establishments. Probably the earliest instance of the use of earthenware may be found in the time of Edward the first, when some dishes and plates of that material were bought from a Spanish ship. Pitchers, jugs and the like had been for centuries commonly made. "Porselyn" is mentioned in 1587: where we read of "five dishes of earth painted, such as are brought from Venice" being presented to the queen on one of her progresses.

Carriages.

The shape and decoration of carriages have changed continually, but these changes have not always been in the direction of convenience and handiness for rapid motion. Our space will not allow us to enter here upon a history of the chariots of ancient nations; Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans. A detailed account of them will be found in the introduction to the large catalogue of furniture at South Kensington. The woodcut represents the Roman "biga," the original of which (in marble) is in the Vatican; and the "pilentum," or covered carriage, from the column of Theodosius.

We know but little of the period succeeding the destruction of Rome and the extinction of classic customs. In the middle ages we find carts, like those now in use for agricultural purposes in France; a long frame with spreading rails balanced on one pair of wheels of large dimensions, drawn by a string of horses. The woodcut of a family carriage is from the well-known Luttrell psalter, an illuminated manuscript of the early fourteenth century. Such vehicles seem to have been clumsy enough and had no springs: nevertheless they were much ornamented with various decorations. They had roofs as a protection from the weather, with silk or leather curtains; and the interior was fitted with cushions. In the "Squire of low degree" the father of the princess of Hungary promises,

The oldest kind of wheel-carriages known in England were called whirlecotes, and one of these belonged to the mother of Richard the second. Whirlecotes were used also at the marriage of Katherine of Arragon. Coaches were probably first introduced from Hungary. They seem to have been square, not differing greatly in outline from the state coaches of which numerous engraved plates can be seen; and were considered as too effeminate a conveyance for men in the days of Elizabeth. The coach of Henry the fourth of France may be studied in the plate by Van Luyken that represents his murder by Ravaillac, 1610. It is four-wheeled, square, with a flat awning on four corner pillars or supports, and curtains. The centre descends into a kind of boot with leather sides. The accompanying woodcut represents the carriage of the English ambassador at Rome in 1688: and we add also an engraving of a state carriage of about fifty years later, still in the possession of Lord Darnley.