The habit of putting almost everything in mourning on the occasion of a death seems to have been very prevalent during the seventeenth century. In the Verney Memoirs (vol. i. p. 293), we find mention, 1640 circa, of a great black bed with hangings at Claydon, which Sir Ralph Verney sympathetically offers to a Mrs. Eure, on the death of her husband, as the only consolation within his means. 'This great black bed,' says the writer, ' with its impressive amplitude of gloom, travels about the family whenever a death occurs, till the very mention of it gives one a feeling of suffocation.' In vol. ii. p. 15, we meet it again, or else another 'that my father borrowed,' says Sir Ralph, 'of my aunt Eure,' and which she caused Sir Ralph to buy for her at her husband's death, when the whole room was hung with black and the furniture covered with it. Forty years later the custom still prevailed, along with the promiscuous distribution of mourning rings to most members of a family. With all this demand for hangings it is not surprising to find amongst the names of rooms at Claydon both ' a little ' and 'great Frippery.'

It is convenient here to mention the great upholstered beds of the succeeding period, but few of which remain. To French fashions must be attributed the abnormal development of hangings which caused woodwork almost entirely to disappear from view. The French had half a dozen names for as many different types of bedstead. To suit the enormously increased height of rooms, the proportions of the bedstead were increased, until some specimens seem to be from sixteen to eighteen feet high, perhaps more. Hampton Court Palace is a place to view these monstrosities.

1 See Appendix, Note III.