Settees

The settee or sofa seems to have developed from the love-seat (see following paragraph) and was frequently-found in the houses of the well-to-do from Carolean times onward. They were first made with upholstered backs, seats and arms, and were much like short sofas.

Fig. 4. Jacobean Oak Settee; American, c. 1660. Cromwellian Type. Length, 6 feet 1 inch; height of back, 2 feet 10 inches; height of seat, 1 foot 4 inches; breadth of seat, 17 inches.

By Courtesy of Col. William J. Youngs, Garden City, L. I.

Legs and stretchers were like the legs and stretchers of chairs and the tops were straight, as may be seen by the example shown in Key II, 8. The wood was usually walnut, as they were not common until walnut had superseded oak as the fashionable wood.

Love-seats were but chairs of sufficient breadth of seat to accommodate two occupants side by side and were given the name "courting chairs" or "love-seats" in a spirit of jocularity. They may be regarded as the progenitors of the double chair-backed settee or "sofa" of a later period.

Day-Beds

Day-beds (Key II, 9) were the seventeenth century forerunners of our reclining couches. They were of sufficient length and breadth to permit the occupant to recline at length. The head-piece was frequently adjustable to any desired angle by means of chains or straps and pins.

Day-beds of early Jacobean date fared ill at the hands of Cromwell's soldiers and not many have remained to us. At the Restoration they again became a stock article of furniture. They were both caned and made for cushions. They were about the height of chairs and the legs were either turned, in the humbler types, or highly carved in those of more ornate pattern.

Bedsteads

Like their Elizabethan predecessors, the Jacobean or Stuart bedsteads were objects of fearsome and portentous appearance. Their possessors set great store by them and lavished what seems to us an altogether disproportionate amount of expense and pains in rendering them sufficiently magnifical to suit their notions of state. An examination of the comparatively small number that have come down to us - apparently only the more costly ones have survived - shows them unsanitary as well as cumbrously ornate (Plate I, page 32). The posts supporting the tester often stood clear of the actual bed. Both the underside of the canopy or tester and the bedhead were frequently panelled and elaborately carved as well as the posts and tester cornice. In Jacobean and Cromwellian bedsteads there was a modification in turning and detail of ornamentation as noted in a subsequent section.

For children and servants there were truckle or trundle beds that could readily be pushed out of the way. They were low affairs, scarcely raised from the floor. With the access of all manner of pomp and splendour at the Restoration, amplitude of curtains and heavily upholstered and draped testers with abundance of embroidery found favour among the wealthy.