This was intended as a precaution against fires, the frequent occurrence of which in former years had been mainly due to the absence of chimneys.
William Harrison, in 1577, referring to things in England that had been "marvellously changed within the memory of old people," includes among these "the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas in their young days there were not above two or three, if so many, in most uplandish towns of the realm (the religious houses and manor places of their lords always excepted), but each one made his fire against a reredos[1] in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat."
In another chapter Harrison says: "Now have we many chimneys; and yet our tenderlings complain of rheums, catarrhs, and poses. Then had we none but reredosses; and our heads did never ache. For as the smoke in those days was supposed to be a sufficient hardening for the timber of the house, so it was reported a far better medicine to keep the goodman and his family from the quack or pose, wherewith, as then, very few were acquainted."
THE HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE.
Of the furniture in these old houses we get an idea from inventories of the period that have come down to us. We have, for instance, such a list of the household equipment of Richard Arden, Shakespeare's maternal grandfather, who was a wealthy farmer; and another of such property belonging to Henry Field, tanner, a neighbor of John Shakespeare, who was his chief executor.
From these and similar inventories we find that the only furniture in the hall, or main room of the house—often occupying the whole of the ground floor—and the parlor, or sitting-room, when there was one, consisted of two or three chairs, a few joint-stools—that is, stools made of wood jointed or fitted together, as distinguished from those more rudely made—a table of the plainest construction, and possibly one or more "painted cloths" hung on the walls.
These painted cloths were cheap substitutes for the tapestries with which great mansions were adorned, and they were often found in the cottages of the poor. The paintings were generally crude representations of Biblical stories, together with maxims or mottoes, which were sometimes on scrolls or "labels" proceeding from the mouths of the characters.
Shakespeare refers to these cloths several times; for instance, in As You Like It (iii. 2. 291), where Jaques says to Orlando: "You are full of pretty answers; have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths' wives and conned them out of rings?"—referring to the mottoes, or "posies," as they were called, often inscribed in finger-rings. Orlando replies: "Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have studied your questions." Falstaff (1 Henry IV. iv. 2. 28) says that his recruits are "ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth."
In an anonymous play, No Whipping nor Tripping, printed in 1601, we find this passage:—