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Many items of household furnishings followed a similar route, beginning as a functional object before becoming a costly item of display. In Romeo and Juliet, written in the 1590s, the Capulets’ servants are ordered to ‘give room’, or make space, for the dancing by removing the furniture after the meal: ‘Away with the join-stools, remove the court-cubbert’ (a movable sideboard used to display plate) and ‘turn the tables up’, which was done by lifting the tabletop off its trestle legs, and turning it on its side to store it.*261 It was only from the end of the seventeenth century, as some of the great houses began to allocate a separate room for eating in, that heavy tables that were not routinely moved came into use. Even the rich, who had the income but not necessarily the space, were slow to adopt these pieces; lower down the social scale they were unknown. One-room living – or even two- or three-room living – was not conducive to heavy, single-purpose furniture. Instead small, light tables continued to be moved around the room to serve different purposes: the family ate on a table near the fireplace before pushing it against a wall so they could sit near the fire between meals, or sleep in front of it at night. * Traces of the movable history of tables can still be heard in English idiom: tables continue to be turned, if only metaphorically, laying, setting and clearing tables are equally metaphorical, since in none of these cases is a table actually laid or set out or cleared away any more.
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Householders moved their table around, that is, if they had one, and sat at it if they had anything to sit on. Most people did not. In the Middle Ages chairs were found in courts, and in the homes of the very great, but rarely anywhere else: their purpose was to convey status and power, and rank was indicated by types of seating: those who sat in the one or two chairs available were clearly privileged. In Louis XIV’s reign, the highest-ranking at court sat in chairs with arms, the next level down in chairs without arms, below them, people sat on stools with backs, below them again, on backless stools, and finally there were folding stools. Yet even the stools did not demarcate the lowest level of court society: many at Versailles were not entitled to sit at all, but remained standing at all times in the presence of their betters. Below this level in the seventeenth century, chairs were found only intermittently in daily life, and were by no means routine items of household furniture, whether in Europe or the colonies. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1633, a household valued at £ 100 – very wealthy – possessed two chairs.262 Half the houses in Connecticut before 1670 had no tables, and while 80 per cent had chairs, each household averaged fewer than three, less than half as many as there were residents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, a third of houses in one county of Delaware still had no tables, and 30 per cent had no chairs. Some adult family members sat on benches or chests at meals, their food resting on their laps, while children rarely had chairs, and were usually expected to stand while they ate. In the Netherlands, Jan Steen’s 1665 A Peasant Family at Meal-time shows only the man of the household with a seat at the trestle table (see plate section, no. x).263 If there was enough seating for the adults, children might be allowed to use a chest while they ate off their laps, or, if there was a more than usual amount of furniture, they might sit on chests with their trenchers on stools beside them. 131
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Well through the seventeenth century, chests, or trunks, or boxes, were the primary objects of use, as storage of course, but also as seating, as a flat surface to eat from and, later in the day, as a base for bedding. As the most multi-functional pieces of furniture, they were therefore the most useful. But as is so often the case with multifunctional items, chests, in doing everything, were never ideal for any of the single purposes they served. Even as storage spaces, their primary function, they have drawbacks. If a chest is carefully packed, things can be kept in separate layers within its single space. Even so, each layer has to be lifted out in order to reach items in the layer beneath. There is also no way of keeping disparate items apart, and indeed it appears that not only was there, initially, no separation of different types of stored items, but apparently there was no thought that this might be practical. In Bologna in 1630, a theft of linen and cheese from the same trunk was recorded without surprise.264 While most houses continued to rely on the centuries-old storage–seating combination, a quiet storage revolution was brewing, with the Low Countries once again leading the way. The design of the chest, so simple, began to be modified. Each alteration, at each stage, must have seemed negligible. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, short legs were affixed beneath deeper chests, so that their users no longer had to bend over headfirst in order to reach the bottom. But even this small increase in their height prevented them from being used as seating, so at first these leggy chests were found only in rich households, which could afford both chests and stools or benches. What might have been a drawback, that chests were now confined to a single use, in fact permitted further modifications. That they opened from above had been a constraint on innovation: their height had to be limited, or access to the contents became impossible. In 132
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the sixteenth century, however, the hinges were moved from the top to the front panel. Now the legs could be any height below eye-level, and the new side-opening had the added benefit that the chest’s entire contents could be seen at a glance: no longer did each layer have to be lifted out to reveal the one below. Shelves, which previously had only been affixed to walls, were adapted for use inside the new sideopening chests, to create a more definitive separation of, and support for, the stored items. With that, the chest ceased to be a chest. It had evolved into a cupboard.
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