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CHEST. MIDDLE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Gothic carving. Solid wood ends, forming feet. Made from six boards; with hand-forged nails and large lock, characteristic of Gothic chests.

CHEST. SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Lozenge panels, disc turning, and Gothic brackets (rare).

(By the courtesy of Mr. F. W. Phillips, Hitchin.)

Cottage and farmhouse furniture may be said to be in somewhat parallel case to English earthenware. A quarter of a century ago, or even ten years ago, collectors in general confined their attention mainly to porcelain. The rage was for Worcester, Chelsea, Derby, or Bow. With the exception of Wedgwood and Turner, the Staffordshire potters had not found favour with the fashionable collector. Nowadays Toft dishes, Staffordshire figures by Enoch Wood, vases by Neale and Palmer, and the entire school of lustre ware, have received attention from the specialist, and scientific classification has brought prices within measurable distance of those paid for porcelain.

What earthenware is to porcelain, so cottage and farmhouse furniture are to the elaborate styles made for the use of the richer classes. The French insipidities and rococo ornament of Chelsea and Derby and the oriental echoes of Worcester and of Bow are as little typical of national eighteenth-century sentiment as the ribbon-back chair and the Chinese fretwork of Chippendale or the satinwood elegances of Sheraton.

To Staffordshire and to local potteries scattered all over the country from Sunderland to Bristol, from Lambeth to Nottingham, from Liverpool to Rye, one instinctively turns for real individuality and native tradition. Similarly farmhouse furniture exhibits the work of the local cabinet-maker in various districts, strongly marked by an adherence to traditional forms and intensely insular in its disregard of prevailing fashions. It is as English as the leather black-jack and the home-brewed ale.

Contemporaneous with the great cabinet-makers who drew their inspiration from foreign sources—from Italy, from France, from Holland, and from Spain—small jobbing cabinet-makers in every village and town had their patrons, and when not making wagons or farm implements, produced furniture for everyday use. As may readily be supposed, there is in these results a blind naïveté which characterises a design handed down from generation to generation. This is one of the surprising features of the village cabinet-maker's work—its curious anachronism. The sublime indifference to passing fashions is astonishingly delightful to the student and to the collector.

There is nothing more uncertain than to attempt with exactitude to place a date upon cottage or farmhouse furniture. The bacon-cupboard, the linen-chest, the gate-table, the ladder-back chair and the windsor chair, were made through successive generations down to fifty years ago without departing from the original pattern of the Charles I. or the Queen Anne period. Oak chests are found carved with the Gothic linen-fold pattern. They might be of the sixteenth century except for the fact that dates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are carved upon them. Whole districts have retained similar styles for centuries, and the fondness for clearly defined types is almost as pronounced as that of the Asiatic rug-weaver, who makes the same patterns as his remote ancestors sold to the ancient Greeks.

The village cabinet-maker's work knows no sequence of ages of oak, walnut, mahogany, and satinwood. His wood is from his native trees. His chairs come straight from the hedgerows. His history can be spanned in one long age of oak, intermingled here and there with elm and yew-tree and beech. The early days of primitive work go back to the marked class distinction between gentles and simples, and the end came only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the village craftsman was obliterated by the rapid advance of factory and machine made furniture.

It may at first be assumed by the beginner that cottage and farmhouse furniture is throughout a weak and feeble imitation of finer pieces. But this is not so. The craftsmen who made this class of furniture formed for themselves special types which were never made by the London cabinet-makers. For instance, the Jacobean gate-table, the Lancashire wardrobe, the dresser, and the windsor chair, have styles peculiarly their own. In many of the specimens found it will be seen that the village cabinet-maker displayed very fine workmanship, and there are clever touches and delightful mannerisms which make such pieces of interest to the collector.

In early days of the villeins, furniture was limited to a stool, a table, and perhaps a chest. Nor was the use of much furniture at the farm or in the cottage a feature in Tudor and early Stuart days. Gorgeously carved oak and richly turned walnut filled the mansions of the wealthy, but one does not find its simpler counterpart made for cottages till nearly 1660. The few pieces essential to every dwelling-house may be placed not earlier than the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century—the chest, the table, the form, and the Protestant Bible-box.

Chests with scratched Gothic mouldings, tables of the trestle type as used to-day, forms of the most simple construction, exist, and may be said to belong to the sixteenth century.

Bible-boxes became common during the early seventeenth century, and without change in their style were made till the late eighteenth century. In mid-seventeenth-century days the well-known gate-table was introduced.

Of early pieces we illustrate a few examples, though in connection with farmhouse and cottage, the early days afford a poor field, as the furniture of those days now remaining was mostly made for great families. The two sixteenth-century chests illustrated (p. 29) are interesting as showing the early styles. The upper photograph is of a middle sixteenth-century chest, with Gothic carving and solid wood ends forming feet. This type of chest is made from six boards. The hand-forged nails show the rough joinery, and the large lock is characteristic of such Gothic chests. The lower chest is also of the sixteenth century. It has lozenge panels, and is further ornamented by disc turning. The Gothic brackets at the base are rare, and it is an interesting example.

ELIZABETHAN CHAIR

This is of Scandinavian origin, and was known in England before the Roman Conquest, being shown in mediæval MSS. Such designs survived the Gothic styles.

(By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin.)]

CHEST. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Panels with early scratched mouldings (i.e., not mitred). Mitreing came into general use about 1600.

That the chest remained in somewhat primitive form is shown by the illustration of a seventeenth-century specimen (p. 35). It will be observed that the panels have early scratched mouldings, that is to say they are not mitred. The fashion of mitreing in cabinet-work came into general use about the year 1600, but minor examples of country furniture often possess scratched moulding at a much later date.

On the same page is an Elizabethan chair. This type is of exceptional interest. It has a long and proud history. They are, according to Mr. Percy Macquoid, "of Byzantine origin; their pattern was introduced by the Varangian Guard into Scandinavia, and from there doubtless brought to England by the Normans. They continued to be made until the end of the sixteenth century." These turned chairs are interesting as having spindles, which came into use at a much later period in the spindle-back chair.

With the growth of prosperity and the increased use of domestic comforts, cottage furniture becomes a wider subject. Carved oak bedsteads, simple four-posters, bacon-cupboards, linen-chests became more common. In eighteenth-century days there was quite an outburst of enthusiasm, and the small cabinet-maker gained knowledge of his craft and became ambitious. On the promulgation of Chippendale's designs he made copies in elm and oak and beech for village patrons and essayed to follow Hepplewhite and even Sheraton.

But this wave of success was followed by the competitive inroad made by factory-made cabinet-work, and during these last days the local cabinet-maker adhered closer than ever to the early oak examples of his forefathers. The village craft practically came to an end in the fifties, but it was a glorious end, and it is happy that it did not survive to produce bad work of atrocious design.

The passing of cottage and farmhouse furniture may be said to be like the disappearance of dialect. The modern spirit has entered into village life, the town newspaper has permeated the country-side and disturbed the old-world repose. The lover of English folk-ways and the simplicity of rural life may echo the line of Wordsworth, "The things that I have seen I now can see no more."

In the illustrations of two interiors shown on p. 39 it will be seen how happily placed the furniture becomes when in its old home. The atmosphere of these rural homesteads is at once soothing and restful, and the pieces of furniture had an added dignity. It seems almost sacrilege to tear such relics of bygone days from their ancient resting-place. But the collector is abroad, and few sanctuaries have escaped his assiduous attention. The lower illustration shows the interior of a cottage with its original panelled walls. This cottage actually has Tudor frescoes.

The study of old farmhouse and cottage furniture has not been pursued in this country in so scientific a manner as in Sweden and in Denmark. The conservation of national heirlooms is a matter which must be speedily dealt with before they become scattered. It is a point which cannot be repeated too often. At Skansen, Stockholm, old buildings have, under State supervision, been re-erected, and with their furniture they afford a practical illustration of the particular type of life of the district of their origin. At Lyngby, near Copenhagen, a series of farmhouses similarly illustrate old types of homesteads from various localities in Denmark, and from Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

INTERIOR OF FARMHOUSE PARLOUR.

INTERIOR OF COTTAGE.

With original panelled walls. This cottage has Tudor frescoes.

By such a systematic and permanent record of farm and cottage life and the everyday art of the people it is possible to impart vitality to the study of the subject.

The English method of museum arrangement in dry-as-dust manner, with rows of furniture and cases of china, is a valley of dry bones compared with such a fresh and vigorous handling and method of exposition as is followed in Scandinavia.

If old English furniture is worth the preservation for the benefit of students of craftsmanship or as a relic of bygone customs, there is undoubted room for due consideration of the best means of exhibiting it. A series of representative farmhouses could be re-erected at some convenient spot. There are many parks around London and other great cities which would be benefited by such picturesque buildings.

Before it is too late, and many of these beautiful structures have been destroyed to make room for modern improvements, and village life has become absorbed by the growing towns, it should be possible to step in and preserve some of the most typical examples for the enjoyment of the nation. The real interest shown by the public in out-of-door object-lessons of this nature is indicated by the great crowds at Exhibitions at Earl's Court and the like, which flocked to Tudor houses replete with old furniture, and villages transplanted in lath and plaster to simulate the real thing, which seemingly has been neglected from an educational point of view.

The mountain farms and the homesteads of the men of the dales, fen farms, and stone cottages from the Cotswolds, half-timbered farms from Surrey, from Cheshire, and from Hampshire, dating back to early Stuart days—are not these worthy of preservation? In the Welsh hills, and nestling in the dips of the Grampians and the Cheviots, from Wessex to Northumbria, from the Border country to the extremity of Cornwall, from East Anglia to the Lakes, are treasures upon which the ruthless hand of destruction must shortly fall. Or far afield in Harris and in Skye, or remote Connemara, there are types which should find a permanent abiding place as national records of the homes of the men of the island kingdom.

This should not be an impossible nor unthinkable problem to solve before such are allowed to pass away. The intense value of such a faithful record is worthy of careful consideration by the authorities, either as a national undertaking or under the auspices of one of the learned societies, such as the Society of Antiquaries, or the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and Monuments, interested in the safeguarding of the national heritage bequeathed us by our forefathers.