Chairs did not come into common use until the sixteenth century, and the early ones existing are purely ecclesiastical. Comparatively plain is that well-known relic the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey. Made about the year 1300, it has suffered, like the celebrated chairs of St. Peter and of Dagobert, from later additions. The lions supporting it are of more recent manufacture. The back rises in a high-pitched gable or pediment of triangular shape. The sides are panelled with arches beneath which are two quatrefoils.

In Shaw's Specimens is to be found a more magnificent example from Evesham, fourteenth or early fifteenth century, with an elaborate single-arched back enriched with many trefoils. On the top of the arched back is a broad outer border of vine and grape carving, which is continued down the concave-edged sides forming the arms of the chair. Shaw illustrates another chair of about 1460 showing the marked architectural characteristics of the Perpendicular style. The top of the back is horizontal, and the back is panelled with three arches filled with thick tracery, chiefly three large quatrefoils to each arch. Spandrels between the arches are filled with oak-leaf carving. The front of the seat is a row of four arches. Above these, and just under the top of the seat, is a row of quatrefoils. The arms or tops of the sides come forward from the back in a concave curve enriched as on the Evesham chair, oak, however, taking the place of vine leaves. This oak-leaf carving runs down almost to the floor, but from the seat to the ground it is diversified by being fronted with a slender octagonal pillar.

Outwardly the sides are divided up with pointed arches. At the level of the seat these are crossed by the transom or horizontal bar of Perpendicular architecture. The spandrel above these arches formed by the rest of the side is filled with figure-carving in relief, and the back is finished with pedestals supporting on one side two lions upright facing each other and holding up a crown, on the other a grotesque beast like an elephant with a castle on its back. The chair was apparently one of a set of stalls made for a church, and does not seem to be still in the Hall of St. Mary, at Coventry, as in the year 1836. Reproductions of Shaw's prints of these chairs may be seen in Mr. Litchfield's History of Furniture, p. 32.

If proof is required of the absolute connection for more than three centuries, 1180-1560, between architecture and the styles of furniture, it can be gathered from the elaborate representations of two thrones of the fifteenth century copied by Willemin in his Monumens Francais inedits from a psalter in the National Library at Paris. These have flying buttresses and crocketed pinnacles in abundance, and, most remarkable, the backs represent not merely pointed arches, but windows also. In the case of one of them, two pointed arches with crockets on the outside mouldings stick up without support above the back rail. We must, however, remember that these are manuscript versions of grandiose imaginations. Simpler and more domestic bedroom chairs are shown in other manuscripts. These, of the fourteenth century, are foreign, but an English example would, perhaps, have been similar in general lines. A miniature in ' Othea,' a poem by Christina di Pisan, represents a boxed-in seat, of which the sides continued upwards form the arms of the chair, and a perfectly upright, very tall back, with four narrow upright panels.1

At Bere Regis Church, Dorset, is a pair of chancel chairs of the Perpendicular period,2 one of which, as less altered than the other, is given in Plate 1. There is linen-fold panelling in the back. The later chair of the Abbot of Glastonbury, now in the bishop's palace at Wells, should be familiar to most readers, as it has been reproduced in countless numbers for chancel and library purposes. It is a seat on two pairs of cross-legs with a round bar between them. The back is short and square, and the arms are pieces of wood, somewhat ogee-shaped; their outside edges concave above and convex where they approach the front of the seat and cross-legs. The date is about 1510, but the legs and seat are restored. The right arm inside has the name 'Johannes Arthurus,' the back 'Monachus Glastonie'; the left arm inside 'Salvet eu Deus, Amen.' On the left arm outside is inscribed 'Da Pacem Dne'; on the right arm outside 'Sit Laus Deo.' The characters are Gothic, and the ornament of the back panel chiefly geometrical.

1 Reproduced in Mr. F. Litchfield's Illustrated History of Furniture. 2 Probably two of a set of stalls. In Browne's Hospital, Stamford, is a curious so-called ' cope' chair.