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Medvl-Chests-art
- 2/2/15
"The Medieval Chest
800-1600" by Master Dafydd ap Gwystl.
NOTE: See also the files:
6-board-chest-art, caskets-boxes-msg, furniture-msg, leather-boxes-bib,
Trestle-Table-art, Viking-Bed-art, wood-finishes-msg.
************************************************************************
NOTICE -
This
article was submitted to me by the author for inclusion in this set of files,
called Stefan's Florilegium.
These
files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org
Copyright
to the contents of this file remains with the author or translator.
While the
author will likely give permission for this work to be reprinted in SCA type
publications, please check with the author first or check for any permissions
granted at the end of this file.
Thank
you,
Mark S.
Harris...AKA:..Stefan li Rous
stefan at
florilegium.org
************************************************************************
The Medieval Chest 800-1600
by Master Dafydd ap Gwystl
The
chest is the most common and fundamental item of medieval furniture. Wealthy nobles would own hundreds upon
hundreds of chests, as shown by wills and death-rolls.[1] Chests in the Middle Ages served
simultaneously as both furniture and luggage. They were the most important furniture of the medieval noble
household.
Chests
are also the most useful items of medieval furniture we can make for use in the
SCA. As the great nobles in the
Middle Ages travelled from manor to manor, we travel from event to event and
must store our SCA goods in the meantime.
This article is a survey of chest construction and decoration techniques
in the hope of inspiring woodworkers to build more medieval chests. It is a condensation of the class I
taught at the University of Atlantia in Spring 1995.
Types of Medieval
Chests
This
article examines the six general styles or classes of medieval chest: box,
standard, Viking chest, six-board chest, hutch, and panel chest. The first two classes (box and
standard) are legless designs; the other four (Viking, six-board, hutch, and
panel chest) are designs with legs.
The
designs of chests were heavily influenced by their intended use. Designs without feet or legs were
easier for travelling, especially by cart or wagon. Designs with legs kept their contents much cleaner and were
less subject to the filth and vermin of medieval floors. Extensive decoration is rare on chests
designed for travelling, as it would easily become damaged and marred. Travelling chests often had hipped or
curved lids to shed water. Chests
intended for static storage purposes usually had flat lids, which would make
them more useful as furniture for seating or other purposes. Travelling chests were often covered in
waxed leather to improve their weather resistance.
As
with many medieval artifacts, chests were often extensively decorated. The decoration of a chest might be a
simple and standardized design, mass-produced by a single workshop. A chest dated to c. 1300 in the
Victoria and Albert Museum is one of a closely related family of chests found
largely in Sussex and Surrey, probably all created by the same guild or
workshop, all decorated nearly identically.[4]
On
the other hand, decoration unique to a particular chest also appears in
surviving examples. The `Fares'
chest (in the Victoria and Albert Museum) shows a number of unique
features. The back of the chest
(where the hinges attach) is much more heavily decorated than the front (where
the lock-plate was). One end of
the chest is heavily carved, the other end is left rough. This chest was clearly designed for use
in a specific place, probably a workshop or guildhall where it would be facing
the customers, one end flush against a wall.[5]
Oak
was the favorite material for medieval chests, as for most other medieval
furniture. Walnut was another
common wood for chests in France, but not in England.[6] Chests were sometimes made of poplar or
pine, and several softwood chests survive from what is now Germany.
The
changes in the types of chests used seems to have been driven by two major
forces: improvements in joinery, and changes in society. Improvements in joinery led the simple
six-board and Viking chest to be replaced by the hutch, and the hutch to be replaced
by the panel chest. Changes in
society led to a change in focus from the mobile, furniture-poor society of the
early Middle Ages, to the more settled society of the Rennaissance. This changed the focus of the chest
from primarily a travelling container to primarily a storage container with a secondary
display function. In keeping with
this new role chests became heavily decorated with intricate carving, and most
lids became flat instead of curved.
In
addition to the six main designs this article will briefly touch on four less
common forms: dugout chests, arks, dovetail-joint chests, and cassoni.
Box
Boxes
are simple flat-lidded travelling chests.
The construction is very simple, with a single board for each side,
bottom, and the lid (six boards total).
The boards are simply butted against each other and nailed
together. Since this is a very
weak joint boxes often used simple iron straps as reinforcements. Because they are intended as travelling
chests, boxes have no legs and are usually undecorated.
Standard
This
is perhaps the most common, and universal, design of chest, and the best
overall travelling chest. Like the
box, the bottom of a standard is simple and legless. The top is smoothly curved, often overlapping the sides,
front, and back. This curved
overlapping top allows the standard to shed rain during travel. Like the box, the standard just has
butted and nailed boards, and therefore it, too, almost always shows heavy use
of metal strapping and reinforcements.
As a travelling chest, it is usually undecorated. Standards were sometimes covered in
leather for weatherproofing.
Viking Chest
The
Viking chest is very similar to the six-board chest. The two end pieces are extended down to form slab legs,
raising the chest off the floor (or ship deck). Instead of the simple overlap design used in the six-board
chest, where the front is nailed to the end-piece, Viking chests have both the
front and end-piece overlapping each other, so nails reinforced the joint in
both directions. Although this is
a better joint than the simple lap of the six-board chest, the resulting joint
is still not very durable, and Viking chests often show the use of metal
reinforcing straps. The floor of
the chest is seated in a dado joint cut in the end boards, as shown in Figure
5.
Viking
chests are usually made to be a good height for seating, and may have been used
as rowing benches in Viking warships.[8]
Many Viking chests were travelling chests, and usually have lids that
are hollowed out of thicker planks so they are curved to shed rain and weather.
The
few surviving Viking chests I have found are undecorated, although sometimes
the iron strapwork is decorated with tinned nails or incised designs. The Vikings carved many items of wood
(ships, churches, sleds, beds, chairs), so it is reasonable that chests were
also decorated with carving, but I have no evidence at this time. Without evidence to the contrary, low
relief or incised carving seem likely to be appropriate decoration for a Viking
chest.
Six-board Chest
This
is perhaps the most common household chest design throughout the period
examined. The construction is
extremely simple: five flat boards make up the bottom, sides, and ends, and
another flat board forms the lid.
The two end boards are extended to raise the chest off the ground on a
pair of slab legs. Six-board
chests might be undecorated, or highly decorated with painting or carving. Some of them are extensively covered
with metal strapping to reinforce their fairly simple and weak joinery, but
others show little or no metalwork.
Six-board
chests involved nailing the sides to the end pieces in a simple lap joint. The chest floor is attached to the end
pieces with a dado joint, exactly as shown for the Viking chest in Figure 5. As with the Viking chest (and perhaps
even more so), the corner joints are quite weak. Because of the weakness of the joinery six-board chests were
often braced with metal straps at the corners, as illustrated in Figure 6.
Six-board
chests are common from the 9th through the sixteenth centuries and later. The longevity of the design is probably
related to its simplicity. More
complex and durable joinery existed from the end of the Viking period, but
these chests would have been much simpler to make, and therefore cheaper, which
explains their survival throughout the period examined and into the seventeenth
century.
This
most common and long-lasting chest design shows a number of decorative
techniques. Few early chests
survive, so decoration techniques before 1200 are merely supposition, but
designs like those discussed above for Viking chests would probably be
appropriate. For later chests,
whatever decoration technique was most common in a given period was likely to
be used upon six-board chests of that period. This was true even when the decoration technique was
inappropriate for the medium; the front of one surviving six-board chest is
wholly covered in low-relief carving typical of the fourteenth century.[9] Undecorated six-board chests seem to be
rare, and limited to early period, but this could be because surviving chests
are much more likely to be those that were richly decorated and carefully
treasured through the ages, rather than utilitarian articles that were used
until broken, then discarded.
Hutch
The
hutch was the first great advance of joinery from the simple nailed six-board
and Viking chests. Instead of the
slab legs of the six-board chest, made by extending the end pieces down to the
floor, the hutch added extensions (stiles)
to lengthen the front and back pieces, and extended the stiles down to the
ground to make four legs. The
end-pieces and front pieces are joined to the stiles with a pegged
tongue-and-groove joint. Sometimes
braces are used in the end pieces for additional strength. The lids are usually flat, but may be
slightly angled. The hutch design
of pegged tongue-and-groove joinery is far more durable than the nailed or
pegged lap joints of the six-board chest.
Although decorative strapping continues to appear on hutches, it is less
prevalent and appears to take the form of a couple of long straps, fewer and
more decorative than on six-board chests.
Hutches
first appeared in the thirteenth century.
They became the dominant form (at least for expensive, fashionable
chests) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the sixteenth century the panel chest, a design that is
lighter than the hutch but just as durable, took over and replaced the hutch,
which quickly disappeared.
Because
of the sturdiness of the hutch design little or no additional reinforcement is
necessary, leaving the whole of the face available for decoration. Many surviving examples of the hutch
are extensively carved. The feet
of the chest are also common subjects for relief carving (arcading) or cutaway
designs. The face of the hutch is
commonly covered with carving appropriate to the period: chip-carved roundels
in the thirteenth century, the relief-carved scenes of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, or the elaborate tracery of the late fifteenth century.
Panel Chest
The
panel chest is a sixteenth century evolution from the hutch. Instead of the hutch design where the
sides and ends are constructed of single boards attached to stiles by pegged
tongue-and-groove joints, the panel chest uses pegged tongue-and-groove to
create a hollow grooved frame that holds a thinner, lighter panel. The stiles often evolve to be corner
posts. Panel chests have flat
lids. The panels are usually
extensively carved, often with linenfold carving. Panel chests quickly become the dominant form in the
sixteenth century, although (like the hutch) they fail to eliminate the much
cheaper and simpler six-board chests.
Decoration
of panel chests is usually focused upon the panels themselves, with the frame
undecorated or merely engraved with linear forms. The elaborate tracery of the later fifteenth century and the
linenfold techniques of the early sixteenth both show up on panel chests.
Dugout
Dugout
chests may be the oldest design of all.
No joinery is required--you just cut a log in two lengthwise, then
hollow out both halves to make a chest.
Chests constructed in this way are very heavy, and take a long time to
make. Even so, a few surviving
examples show that chests were still being made this way in the early Middle
Ages and possibly even into the seventeenth century.[11]
Very
few examples of this type of chest survive, making it hard to generalize about
their decoration (or lack thereof).
Their heavy, legless design seems unsuitable for carving or other
decoration, but this is mere supposition.
Iron straps appear in both the surviving examples shown in Chinnery.[12]
Ark
The
ark is a variation of the hutch style of chest. Although few surviving examples survive, they seem to appear
fairly early (in the thirteenth century).
Unlike any other type of chest described here, the ark was constructed
with riven (split) oak, rather than sawn boards. The design seems to have changed very little in the hundreds
of years it was used (up until the seventeenth century). Arks were constructed with pegged
tenons in through-mortises. Arks
always show an angled lid with raised flanges at the ends, and extended stile
legs similar to those of hutches.
Arks seem to have been usually undecorated.[13] The ark design is quite sturdy, with
its pegged tenons and riven planks.
No metal strap reinforcements are necessary, and none of the surviving
arks show any sign of metalwork. Figure
2. illustrates an ark style chest.
Dovetail Chest
Dovetail
joinery first appears in the fifteenth century as an alternative method of
attaching the ends of a chest to the sides. Numerous examples exist, but this was not as common a
technique as the hutch. Dovetail
chests cannot use the extended-stile design of the hutch, and so dovetail
chests never have legs. Probably
because of its difficulty (and therefore cost), Dovetail joinery never became
the dominant construction technique, and when the panel chest began appearing
in the sixteenth century dovetail-joined chests largely disappear.
The
dovetail-joined chests of the fifteenth century were very well suited to
complex tracery carving over the whole face. Hutches also sometimes exhibit extraordinary carving, but
the differing grain direction at the stiles complicates such carving. Many of the finest examples of
fifteenth century carving are on dovetail-joined chests.
Cassoni
Cassoni
are painted Italian marriage caskets.
They were beautifully painted over the whole surface, often very large,
and had an architectural motif. Considering their size and extensive decoration cassoni were
clearly not constructed for travel.
Numerous examples exist from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The
durability of the joinery in cassoni was much less important than in other
types of chests because they were intended to be stationary furniture with the
main purpose of ostentatious display.
Cassoni were covered with glued-down leather or cloth, primed with
several layers of gesso, and painted over their whole surface. This makes it very hard to determine
the joinery underlying the paint on surviving examples.
Cassoni
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were wholly painted in great detail
and subtlety, similar in style and content to frescoes. In the sixteenth century other
decoration techniques replaced painting.
Some of these techniques were metal embossed sheeting as illustrated in
Figure [15], parquetry and inlay, and fantastic architectural motifs.
Timeline: Chests and
Decoration by Century
Pre 1200
The
six-board and Viking chests dominate.
Carving is probably incised low-relief with the addition of paint, as
shown in Figure 1, and may be infrequent.
Reinforcing ironwork is common and often decorative.
Thirteenth Century
Hutches
appear and become ubiquitous.
Decorative ironwork and reinforcing straps are relatively common, as
illustrated in Figure 3. Carving
techniques used are simple arcading and chip carving. Painting is fairly common, sometimes on chip-carved chests,
sometimes heraldic designs and miniatures.
Fourteenth Century
Hutches
begin to have complex carved scenes on them, replacing the chip-carved roundels
common in the thirteenth century.
Reinforcing straps begin to disappear on chests and decorative ironwork
is uncommon.
Fifteenth Century
Hutches
with relief-carved scenes reach their height (as shown in Figure 10), but they
begin to see competition from complex ornamental tracery and dovetailed boxes
(see Figure 14). Only travelling
and utility chests seem to be without carved ornamentation. Decorative ironwork is rare. This period is the height of the
chest-carver's art, with fantastic decorative ornamentation, whether gothic
tracery or relief-carved scenes from famous stories from literature or
religion.
Sixteenth Century
Panel
chests dominate; various carving techniques are used to decorate the
panels. Linenfold panels and other
relatively simple methods quickly replace the complex tracery of the fifteenth
century.
Notes
1:
Eames, Penelope, Furniture in England,
France and the Netherlands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century,
(London: Furniture History Society, 1977), page 109.
2:
Viking Chest. Reproduction
constructed by the author appropriate for the ninth or tenth century. Photograph 1995 by the author.
3:
Ark. Sixteenth century
reproduction. Bayleaf Hall, Weald
and Downland Open Air Museum, Sussex.
Photograph 1995 by the author.
4:
Tracy, Charles, English Medieval
Furniture and Woodwork, (London: Victoria and Albert Museum), pages 172 to
174. Chinnery, figure 4:1, and
Mercer, figure 27, also show the chest currently in the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
5:
Tracy, page 178.
6:
Eames, page 135.
7:
Hutch. Tower of London. Reproduction of a hutch in the Musee
des Arts Decoratifs, c. 1200-50.
Photograph 1995 by the author.
8:
The Viking, (New York: Crescent
Books, 1975), page 186.
9:
Mercer, Eric, Furniture 700-1700,
(Des Moines and New York: Meredith Press, 1969), figure 91.
10:
Relief-carved Chest Panel. Elm, c.
1400, in the London Museum. A
scene from Chaucer, the Pardoner's Tale.
Photograph 1995 by the author.
11:
Chinnery, Victor, Oak Furniture,
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1979), pages 69-71, mentions
and illustrates both chests, and discusses the later chest at length.
12:
Chinnery, figures 2:35, 2:36, 2:35, and 2:37.
13:
Chinnery, pp356-358; figures 3:359, 3:360. Another example is shown in Tracey, page 176. A 16th century example decorated with
simple incised lines is shown in Wolsey, S. W., and Luff, R. W. P., Furniture in England: The Age of the Joiner,
(New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), figure 2.
14:
Small Dovetail-joined Chest.
French, c. 1500, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph 1995 by the author.
15:
Cassone. Italian, Sixteenth
Century, Victoria and Albert Museum.
Photograph 1991 by Peter Adams and Kitten Reames.
Note:
Some figures referenced in this paper were missing from the copy that I
recieved.
------
Copyright
2008 by David Kuijt. <kuijt at umiacs.umd.edu>. Permission is granted for
republication in SCA-related publications, provided the author is
credited. Addresses change, but a
reasonable attempt should be made to ensure that the author is notified of the
publication and if possible receives a copy.
If this
article is reprinted in a publication, please place a notice in the publication
that you found this article in the Florilegium. I would also appreciate an
email to myself, so that I can track which articles are being reprinted.
Thanks. -Stefan.
<the end>