CHAPTER XXI. 



SUNDRY ARTICLES. 



THERE still remain certain articles on which it will be 

 convenient to make some brief comments in the present place, 

 these being chiefly household furniture and similar effects. 



The furniture of a house in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies was mean and cheap, even where the buildings were 

 large and handsome. The paved or tiled floor was strewn 

 with rushes, and in royal apartments covered with mats. The 

 tables were generally moveable, and stood on trestles, the 

 guests sitting on forms or stools at meals, though the principal 

 persons may have had chairs. When the meal was finished, it 

 appears that the tables were removed, the trestles put away, and 

 the forms transferred to the wall or arranged round the charcoal 

 fire which burned in the centre of the hall. Sometimes a long 

 low seat was permanently placed at the walls of the common 

 hall, and covered with a kind of cheap cloth called a banker. 

 In 1536 a banker cost 5^. 6d., and in 1548 fifteen yards of stuff 

 at icd. a yard are purchased for making a banker by King's 

 College. 



THE HALL. In 1410 a long table was purchased at Wye for 

 zs. 8d., nine trestles for is. id., and a chair for is. zd. In 1431 

 a high table at Oxford cost is. 8d., a side table is. 6d., two 

 forms is., two pairs of trestles is., and a chair is. 6d. In 1477 

 a 'cypress' chair cost 3^., and a long settle $s. ^d. in London. 

 In 1482 King's College, Cambridge, purchases for 6os. the 

 following : two tables, each fifteen feet long ; two, each four- 

 teen feet long ; four pairs of folding trestles, four forms of 

 eight feet each, four of six feet, and fourteen of four feet each. 

 In 1533 a wainscot chair costs 8s., in 1548 a square wainscot 



VOL. IV. R r 



