Early English Oak Benches
By John Fiske and Lisa Freeman
Benches, or forms (the two terms were used interchangeably
in their day), were used for dining at the long "refectory" tables
in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses. Many of the "great rooms"
or "halls" had benches built into the walls; moveable ones were
used on the room side of the tables. On some, the carving and turning copied
that found on the tables, and indeed the benches looked like tables reduced
in size. The earliest forms, from the 13th to the 16th centuries, were supported
on shaped boards at each end, but by the late 16th century and through the
17th, benches with legs became the standard form. Contemporary inventories
also show that forms were also placed at the ends of beds, where they were
used for conversation.
In construction and decoration, benches are like elongated
joint stools. In his 1649 book, Academy
of Armory, Randal Holme describes them in detail: "Some are made
with turned feete, 4 or 6 according to its length, hauing railes or Barres
both aboue for the seat to be fixed upon, and below, to hold the feet firm
and stiddy."
Though they served similar purposes to joint stools,
benches are far less common. In The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture,
Ralph Edwards writes that "seats constructed in this 'fashion of a
form' continued to be made throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.. In the
17th century large oak tables were often provided with a nest of stools,
which were ranged along the stretchers when not in use, and consequently
forms were seldom made." Inventories cited by Chinnery show that forms
were still in use in the 17th century, though they were far less numerous
than stools: "In the Hall.one table bord, one forme, 5 stolles."
(1615): "In the hall.One long table, eight joyne stooles, two joyne
formes." (1686).
Benno Forman, in American Seating Furniture, 1630
- 1730, suggests another reason for their falling out of favor: "[Benches]
were not sufficiently individualized to remain acceptable in the public
room of a New England house. In 1677, for example, a form was used in the
kitchen of William Hollingsworth's house in Salem, while chairs graced his
'best roome'." Forman argues that benches were the lowest status form
of seating, and were typically used by women and children. He refers to
a contemporary engraving showing a mother and children on a bench listening
to their husband-father who is, as befits his patriarchal authority, sitting
in a chair.
Not only were there far fewer joined benches than
joined stools in their period, but their survival rate seems to have been
lower as well. Their lack of utility in later households seems to have led
to them being discarded without much thought. Today, however, they are one
of the very few forms of unmodified antique furniture that can serve as
a coffee table in front of a sofa.