A Saxon or Anglo-Norman state bed, illustrated from a manuscript in Willemin's Monumens Francais inedits, has thick carved legs of a very similar type to the baluster legs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Needless to say that we do not find the exact acanthus-leaf lower part and the gadrooned upper portion which are so entirely characteristic of Elizabethan and Jacobean beds. It is a matter rather of general shape and feeling than of detail. If manuscript delineations of the Saxon house are to be trusted, - and the usual type is of one story and one room - we are compelled to believe that its appurtenances must, generally speaking, have been made more for use than for show. The meuble dapparat was not characteristic of the Saxon period. A heavy table, upon which the inhabitants of the house and guests also slept, an occasional four-post bed for the mistress of the house, enclosed in a shed with a separate roof, and benches, some with lions' or other heads at the corners, with backs for the lord and lady of the house, are all that Mr. J. H. Pollen in his Furniture and Woodwork allows to the rank and file.

Crosslegged thrones, something like that problematical one of Dagobert in the Musee des Souverains at Paris, of which there is a cast in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and folding chairs of various forms more or less from classical types, he allots to great personages. Benches and chests served as beds likewise, the bedding being kept inside; and considerable use was made of textile fabrics to cover furniture and keep out draughts. If we take it for granted with Mr. Pollen that candles in houses 'were stuck anywhere on beams and ledges,' the practice throws a light upon the amount of comfort and cleanliness which our forefathers enjoyed.

The Norman Conquest may be taken as an epoch of advance in comfort and refinement. Perhaps the one-roomed house would cease to be anything but the shelter of the poor, and, as soon as there was space to fill, things must have been made to fill it. The Jews' House at Lincoln, however, one of the few remaining dwelling-houses of Norman architecture in England, and said to be of the early twelfth century, appears to have contained but two rooms. As yet the house would be one of unglazed windows and short of chimneys. The fire in the chief room would be in the centre of the floor. At Penshurst, Kent, in the hall, may still be seen the centrally placed hearth of a house as late as the fourteenth century. The smoke escapes by an opening in the roof. The old 'louvre' of the central fireplace may be noticed on the roof of the hall of Lincoln College, Oxford, but the fire has long been burning up a chimney.1