16th Century English Linenfold Panel Chest

by

Master William McNaughton, CL, CVO, CRH-A

 

16th Century Linenfold Panel Chest

 

            This chest was originally conceived as a reproduction of the 16th century linen-fold panel chest found on page 11 of Percy MacQuoid’s History of English Furniture.  During the project I had to make compromises in materials, design, technique, and finish.  When I started this project over five years ago, I wanted to make a three panel chest. 

 

 

Materials

Wood:

This chest is made of North American Red Oak (Quercus rubra).  The materials selection was the first problem to be resolved in the process.  MacQuoid was chiefly concerned with design and decoration in his book, and does not address what kind of wood the example is made of.  To resolve this, we turn to Victor Chinnery’s Oak Furniture, The British Tradition. In it he asserts that “Throughout the Middle Ages and later, the most popular and plentiful of timbers was the native English Oak (p 149).”  This is supported by an informal survey of examples from his work, wherein the vast majority are of oak.[1]  Indeed, oak furniture was so common that Ralph Fastnedge, in English Furniture Styles from 1500 1830, defines the entire span of time from the late 15th century through the end of the Commonwealth period as the “Period of Oak (p 17).  In fact, the opening statement of A Short History of English Furniture, by Trenchard Cox is “From the earlist times until well into the 17th century the wood mainly used for furniture in England was oak (p 1).  Further, direct observations of the furniture collections in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Annex of the Met, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of London, and other smaller collections support these assertions.  Odds are good that the example was oak.

 

In the initial stages of the project it was immediately clear that the expense of obtaining English oak (Quercus robur) would call for a substitute material. Red oak was selected because the grain pattern is visually similar to English oak in finished furniture but far less costly than imported Quercus robur.   This decision was reinforced after the front panels had been carved when Lord James D’Lyon offered an oak tree from his estate which had been struck by lightning.

 

            The wood for the entire framework was hand-riven from the tree provided by Lord James.  Despite the initial mass of the log I had to start with, the wasteful nature of the riving process caused me to run out of tree.  Therefore, the wood for the panels was purchased from a commercial vendor of hardwoods.  This is true for the lid as well.  [2] 

 

 

Glue:

While mortise-and-tenon joinery can be executed without glue, some type of chemical fastener is almost always used.  Chinnery notes that in the London Aldermen’s arbitration of 1632, joiners were specifically authorized the use of “glew” in the construction of their wares (Chinnery, pp 42, 43).  Glue from hides and, oddly, cheese, are also described in detail in Theophilis’ On Diverse Arts (p 26).  Of course, most authorities believe that Theophilis was writing in Germany sometime between 1100 and 1200 AD.    This is somewhat far afield.  But it is the best mention I have run across thus far as regards the gluing process.  In any case, the technique for hide glue calls for a glue pot, fire to heat the glue, and is known to be smelly, messy, and most important of all, time consuming.  A combination of modern poly and yellow glues was substituted to save time, mess, and fire hazard.

 

Fasteners:

All joints in this project were completed with hand-cut red oak pegs.  No nails, screws, or metal pins were used at any point.  This is in line with the illustration of the original (MacQuoid P 11) and observable in examples of frame-and-panel construction throughout the furniture collections in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Annex of the Met, The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London.

 

Hinges:

The hinges and the nails that attach them are commercial, purchased from a company that supplies builders of period furniture.  The style of the hinges is most common in the colonial era in North America, but is not entirely out of line with English examples in Chinnery (pp 414, 422, 376.)[3]

 

Finish:

            Due to limitations of both time and money I applied a commercial boiled linseed oil to the chest instead of making my own.  Please see the section on finishing techniques for further details.

 

Design:

The entire design for this piece was drawn directly from the 16th century linen-fold panel chest found on MacQuoid’s (page 11). This photograph is typical of most documentary photos of the era just prior to World War I.  The shot is straight on from the front and has nothing else in the frame to give a sense of scale.  It is in black and white and provide no information about the back, sides, top, or bottom of the piece.  Further, there is no information available as to the thickness of the panels or the side pieces.  To fill this information gap I examined similar pieces at the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloister’s Annex to the Met.   

A number of design compromises developed during the course of the project.  The piece had initially been planned as a piece of SCA furniture, intended as a garb and bedding box.  When the entire frame had been riven and planed to thickness and length, it was discovered to weigh in excess of fifty pounds, exclusive of the lid and panels.  Assembled, the entire chest would have weighed over 120 pounds, empty.  To alleviate this, all of the framing members were re-cut, reducing them in width by 25%.  In addition, the lid was reduced from an initial thickness of roughly 2” to ½”.  In spite of these radical changes in the design, the chest still weight in excess of 60 pounds empty, and remains unsuitable for SCA use.  An additional compromise in design was made by omitting the faux trim from the framework of the front panels.  This was due to a combination of timing and tools.  Once the chest is assembled, the artisan usually uses a scratch or beading stock to cut the trim into the framework.  Neither tool was available at the time of assembly.  Further, it was necessary to seal the piece shortly after assembly due to frequent changes in humidity.  To cut the trim after that point would have necessitated refinishing the piece, and the color and texture would have been very difficult to recover.  In all other design aspects I believe that this piece is an adequate representation of they type.

Techniques

            The tree I began with was approximately 20’ tall and 2’ in diameter.  THL Charles D’ Jocelyn, and THL James D’Lyon assisted me in felling it.  I estimate that it weight approximately 2,800 pounds.  We used traditional felling techniques found in Old Ways of Working Wood, by Bealer.  We did substitute a chainsaw for the axe.  We guided the fall with ropes after first estimating the path of the fall.  The earth shook when it hit the ground. It wasn’t until after the twigs stopped falling that we realized how unbelievably dangerous the process had been. 

 

            Once the tree was on the ground I used an axe, sledgehammer, and a series of iron and wooden wedges to split the tree trunk into quarters in the traditional manner.  It took me approximately 15 hours spread over 3 days.

 

Once the trunk was riven into quarters I used a combination of both the chainsaw and a medieval two-man crosscut saw to cut the quarters into lengths light enough for me to load them in my van. 

 

 

The tree had stood dead for approximately one year after the lightning strike that slew it, but on quartering, was seen to still be bleeding sap.  I stored the billets in a covered shed for several months while I finished up carving the wooden panels.

 

            Using wedge, sledge, froe, and mallet I split the billets into rough boards.  I then used a scrub plane to square the boards off.  On three of the framing members I continued to use the scrub plane to remove stock and reduce the boards to within 1/8” of their finished size.

 

Because of time constraints, I used a power planer to run the rest of the pieces to within 1/8” of their finished size.  I then used a smoothing plane to finish the boards.  All of the mortise and tenon joints were marked with a mortising gauge, marking gauge, marking awl, and marking knives.  They were then cut using an antique crosscut saw, and finished with chisel and mallet. The occasional pencil mark only appears when I was absorbed in the work and forgot.

 

            I carved the three front panels “the hard way,” using hand chisels and gouges.  After I had completed the project, I discovered techniques for cutting linenfold using round bottom planes that would have save me a lot of hours.  Round bottom planes were found with the carpenter’s tools on board the Mary Rose.  Given that they were available and speed up the process, it is most likely that this technique would have been used by a period joiner.

 

            I cut red oak pegs in place of nails and used a medieval technique called “draw bore” mortise-and-tenon joinery to assemble the framework (Chinnery 109) to insure a tight joint.  At no point did sandpaper touch this piece.  All smoothing was done with planes, sharp chisels, and scrapers.  While there are all manner of documents relating to the creation of and regulation of guilds, and inventories galore, the annals of the woodworkers of medieval England are noticeably short of shop manuals and “how-to” books. I have had to infer most of my techniques from the types of tools available to the Tudor joiner.  The carpenter’s cabin aboard the wreck of the Mary Rose happily provides us with the bodies of many tools of the era.  In these tools are recognizable chisels, dado planes, rebate planes, mallets, scribes, and the like.  Because these tools are very, very similar to those available to work workers in the 1880’s and turn of the 20th century, I have assumed that many techniques are just as similar.

 

            In the middle ages the decorative moulding around the base would have been cut with a moulding plane.  As I do not own a moulding plane, I used a classical ogee bit on a modern router.

Finish

Finishing techniques are the hardest part of woodworking to document.  In working directly with artifacts, you can never be absolutely sure that the finish next to the wood is original, or the result of some Victorian enthusiast armed with vitriol, a scraper, and a passion to “restore” gothic furniture.  That withstanding, to date, I have found no examples of linen fold panels in chests, cupboards, hutches, or walls with  any visible finish. Chinnery does provide us with one example of a painted panel (p 417), but it is armorial rather than linenfold.  In The Annunciation, a painting by Roger van der Weyden, we see a settle and a bedside table, both unpainted (The History of Furniture, Eric Mercer, p 73).  An additional example of unpainted frame-and-panel construction is in the Werl Altarpiece by the Master of Flemalle.  Of course, this is a Flemish piece and 1430.  Again, I go rather far afield.  Combining these and other paintings with my own observations of artifacts in museums, I am comfortable asserting that frame-and-panel construction was generally not painted.  Theophilis provides us with a recipe for “varnish” made from linseed oil (p 28), but he is writing for artists needing to seal panels both before and after painting, not furniture builders.  And, of course, he is still German, not English.

 

And so we turn to the fiber arts.  In Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlocked Janet Arnold provides us with an extensive list of linen garments worn by the Queen (pp 224, 365, 206).  Further, the Tudor Inventories from Appelby England, 1530-1601 by Alan Roberts gives us an additional list of flaxen garments worn by the middle and merchant classes.  I posit that if they had familiarity with flax plants in Tudor England, it is not out of bounds to assume that linseed oil would have been available to Tudor joiners.  It is with this rationalization that I applied a boiled linseed oil to the chest.   I used a commercial boiled linseed oil to save time and cut costs.

 

Bibliography

 

Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd. Leeds: W.S. Maney & Son Ltd., 1988.

 

Chinnery, Victor. Oak Furniture, The British Tradition -, Antique Collectors' Club, 1979, ISBN: 1851490132

 

MacQuoid, Percy, A History of the English Furniture in Four Volumes. Volume 1 the Age of Oak, Dover Publications New York, 1972

 

Mercer, Eric. Furniture, 700-1700 (A social history of the decorative. arts).

Meridith Press, New York, NY, 1969

 

Morely, John.  The History of Furniture, Little, Brown, & Co. 1999

 

Roberts, Alan. The Tudor Inventories from Appleby, 1530-1601.

 

Theophilus’ On Diverse Arts, ed. J.G. Hawthorne and C.S. Smith (c. A.D. 1100) (NY:Dover) 1963, 1979.

 

Unsigned - A Flemish Smock Plainest of the Plain An Experiment in Plain Sewing - http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/ms154/ICEDragon03/smock.document.html

 

Appendix A

The Inside Is Supposed to Be Butt Ugly

I have spent extensive time looking inside of a variety of chests, boxes, cupboards, and sideboards from the Middle Ages, and they are, without exception, roughly finished.  Tool marks abound.

 

 

This is the inside of a gothic coffer (1550) on display at Huntington Antiques (Stow On Wold, England).  Note the visible marks from adze, panel-raising plane, and chisel.

 

Here we have the underside of an inlaid refectory table on display at Huntington Antiques.  The marks of the pit saw are clearly visible on the stretcher, and you can see adze marks on the cross beam (left).  (16th Century England)

 

 

In this example from a 16th Century Spanish cupboard wsa can see uneven joints, mis-matched surfaces, and adze marks.  The gap is due to shrinkage over 400 years.


[1] It is worthy of note that a substantial component of the antiques and historical woodworking community hold that oak is disproportionately represented in surviving pieces due to its hardness.  Even if true, this merely makes our example all the more likely to have been of oak.

[2] It was the practice during the Tudor era for urban joiners to purchase boards from sawyers, rather than prepare them directly “from the log.” Chinnery pp 142 - 145

[3] I did learn enough blacksmithing to make strap hinges for this project.  After producing three of the ugliest pairs of strap hinges in the Known Worlde, I surrendered and bought some.  I just could not bring myself to nail those nasty hinges to this chest.