To understand the development of domestic furniture and its place in the changing social habits, it is necessary to begin by considering furniture of the Middle Ages, because the modern is the outcome and inheritor of the ancient, the old visibly influencing the new. Of medieval furniture there are few examples extant, chiefly because there are limits to the endurance of wood and partly because the amount of furniture was very limited. Chairs, stools, couches, beds, tables, and chests comprised virtually the entire furnishings of the ancients. Until the Renaissance, the development of household comfort was negligible.
Gothic, the style of the age of chivalry and troubadours, began to evolve from the Romanesque around the middle of the twelfth century in the Île-de-France, an old province in the northern France with Paris as its capital. Except in Italy, it reigned unchallenged through the fifteenth century in all European countries, with national variations much stronger and more obvious than in the earlier Romanesque. Its influence is clearly seen in furniture, which, like all the arts of this period, was made subordinate to architecture, the major art form of the Middle Ages.
In medieval times, when the great nobles changed houses they took all their valuable possessions with them. The furniture was so constructed that it could readily be taken apart for transport; it was made to be transportable, or mobile, as the French word mobilier implies.
Traveling chests covered with leather or sometimes with canvas glued down and painted were used to transport clothes, tapestries, fabrics, cushions, coverlets, valuable plate, linens, toilet articles, and furniture. These chests or trunks were provided with locks and handles and as a rule were without feet. Crudely constructed large pieces, such as long dining tables with massive, removable oblong tops supported on trestles that were sometimes of iron that could be folded up; beds, which were little more than boarded boxes surrounded completely by curtains to keep out drafts and to insure privacy, and such built-in pieces as cupboards and benches were left in the castle; they offered no temptation to pillagers, and if stolen their loss would be of no consequence.
Gothic furniture is solid, massive, and severe in character. As a rule, the forms are rectilinear, with emphasis on the vertical. The use of curved lines is limited to the folding chair of X-form, borrowed from the Roman chair of curule form.
Carving was by far the favorite method of decorating the surface of Gothic furniture north of the Alps. It was bold and vigorous, a manner especially proper for work in oak. The ornament employed in the decoration of furniture was borrowed entirely from Gothic architecture and duplicated in wood the work of the masons. Foliage was much favored and the plants, selected from native plant life, included maple leaves, parsley, curled cabbage and cress leaves, and, above all, vine leaves with bunches of grapes. Arcades of fragile tracery, copied from the magnificent tracery windows, enjoyed a great vogue and were freely lavished on the paneled cupboard doors of dressers and the façades of chests. However, by far the favorite decoration for paneled furniture is the linen-fold motif, which lent itself to an infinite number of variations from the simple to the complex.
Extant furniture form medieval times is exceedingly rare. We gain most of our knowledge from illuminated manuscripts, carved reliefs in wood, ivory, or stone, and contemporary accounts and inventories. Medieval rooms depicted with such minute detail in manuscript books of the time give us a good idea of what these rooms were like. Tables and forms, benches, settles, a chair for the master, chests, a cupboard of some nature as food cupboard, perhaps a buffet or dresser for the display of valuable plate and other treasures comprise the furniture in the hall, the chief living room in the house used primarily for dining and entertaining. Colorful fabrics are draped over the furniture and cushions are placed on the seats to provide a little comfort and some feeling of luxury.
The chair in medieval time was regarded as a symbol of authority and its use was restricted to the master of the house and distinguished guests. It is generally accepted that the typical medieval chair was evolved from a chest by the addition of a paneled back and sides. Since chairs were an appanage of state, it is only natural that this massive seat of box-like form was richly carved.
In the medieval house the chest or coffer was of primary importance. No other article of furniture was able to take its place, and it was capable if necessary of supplanting all others. Apart from its use as a case for storing and transporting every kind of personal possession, it also served as a seat, bed, or table and in the kitchen it became the huche or hutch in which the bread was kneaded and, when baked, stored.
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