Of Gothic tables, for want of examples, it is difficult to speak. Shaw represents one from a manuscript, No. 264 in the Bodleian at Oxford. This is a light and extremely elegant little piece of furniture of the type of those fragile nests of tables, made to fit inside each other, of the mahogany period. The slab is on two thin uprights, the square space between which is filled with the most graceful architectural tracery. The main ornament is circular, and contains pairs of pointed arches with their heads converging at the centre. The uprights are attached at the bottom to cross pieces which form the bearing on the floor. It is reasonable to suppose that the majority of tables were upon the board and trestle 1 principle until the 'joined' tables, of which we have plenty of seventeenth century examples, came into vogue. Quite small trestle tables are represented in miniatures, such as one of Anne of Brittany at St. Petersburg. Here the table is a flat slab on two X-shaped supports, but a nice little table with solid standards, and an ogival arch between as a bearer for the top slab, is shown in that same miniature (from the poem by Christina di Pisan) which I have before quoted. This is a foreign one which English specimens may have resembled.

Mr. J. H. Pollen (Furniture and Woodwork at the South Kensington Museum) gives an exceptional instance from a manuscript of the early fifteenth century with a single broad foot shaped like the base of a chalice.1

1 In St. Mary's Church, Cleobury Mortimer, is a heavy slab upon two pairs of Gothic-moulded legs slanting like trestles.

No beds earlier than those of the Tudor period appear to have survived. In general shape they were probably similar to those we have of the early sixteenth century. There does, however, exist a cradle which is said to be that of Henry v. Two, in fact, lay claim to the distinction. One is in the possession of Mr. W. J. Braikenridge, Clevedon. It is an oblong box without a head-cover, swinging between two uprights each surmounted by an eagle. It came originally from Courtfield, near Monmouth, where Henry was put out to nurse. It appears from an illustration to have been recarved in the seventeenth century with the semi-circle or fan pattern. The other, which those who have seen it assert is not of the period, is a cradle upon rockers like those of later date. The writer of an article in The Queen newspaper upon Monmouth Castle and Troy House, at the former of which places it originally was, combats the assertion that rocker cradles were unknown in Henry v.'s time, and says that they appear in contemporary illustrations.

This statement is partially borne out, or at least strengthened, by the fact that in a miniature representing the birth of a child from the Histoire de la belle Helaine, in the National Library at Paris, there is a young child sleeping in a miniature four-post bed upon rockers. The date of this is the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.

1 See Appendix, Note II.