But to consider some of the furniture of this period in detail. Until the sixteenth century was well advanced the word "table" in our language meant an index or pocket book (tablets), or a list, not an article of furniture. The table was, as we have noticed in the time of Elizabeth, composed of boards generally hinged in the middle for convenience of storage, and supported on trestles which were sometimes ornamented by carved work. The word trestle, by the way, is said to be derived from the "threstule," i.e., three-footed supports, and these three-legged stools and benches formed in those days the seats for everyone except the master of the house. Chairs were, as we have seen, scarce articles; sometimes there was only one, a throne-like seat for an honoured guest or for the master or mistress of the house, and doubtless our present phrase of "taking the chair" is a survival of the high place a chair then held amongst the household gods of a gentleman's mansion. Shakespeare possibly had the boards and trestles in his mind when, about 1596, he wrote in "Romeo and Juliet"—
"Come, musicians, play!
A hall! a hall! give room and foot it, girls
More light, ye knaves, and turn the tables up"
And as the scene in "King Henry the Fourth" is placed some years earlier than that of "Romeo and Juliet," it is probable that "table" had then its earlier meaning, for the Archbishop of York is made to say:—
". . . . The King is weary
Of dainty and such picking grievances;
And, therefore, will he wipe his tables clean,
And keep no tell-tale to his memory."
Mr. Maskell, in his handbook on "Ivories," tells us that the word "table" was also used, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to denote the religious carvings and paintings in churches; and he quotes Chaucer to show that the word was also used to describe the game of draughts.