tish Museum by its generous
curator.

[Illustration: Cover of a Casket Carved in Whalebone. (_Northumbrian, 8th
Century. British Museum._)]

Of the furniture of our own country previous to the eleventh or twelfth
centuries we know but little. The habits of the Anglo-Saxons were rude and
simple, and they advanced but slowly in civilisation until after the
Norman invasion. To convey, however, to our minds some idea of the
interior of a Saxon thane's castle, we may avail ourselves of Sir Walter
Scott's antiquarian research, and borrow his description of the chief
apartment in Rotherwood, the hospitable hall of Cedric the Saxon. Though
the time treated of in "Ivanhoe" is quite at the end of the twelfth
century, yet we have in Cedric a type of man who would have gloried in
retaining the customs of his ancestors, who detested and despised the
new-fashioned manners of his conquerors, and who came of a race that had
probably done very little in the way of "refurnishing" for some
generations. If, therefore, we have the reader's pardon for relying upon
the _mise en scene_ of a novel for an authority, we shall imagine the
more easily what kind of furniture our Anglo-Saxon forefathers indulged
in.

[Illustration: Saxon House of 9th or 10th Century. (_From the Harleian
MSS. in the British Museum._)]

"In a hall, the height of which was greatly disproportioned to its extreme
length and width, a long oaken table--formed of planks rough hewn from the
forest, and which had scarcely received any polish--stood ready prepared
for the evening meal.... On the sides of the apartment hung implements of
war and of the chase, and there were at each corner folding doors which
gave access to the other parts of the extensive building.

"The other appointments of the mansion partook of the rude simplicity of
the Saxon period, which Cedric piqued himself upon maintaining. The floor
was composed of earth mixed with lime, trodden into a hard substance, such
as is often employed in flooring our modern barns. For about one quarter
of the length of the apartment, the floor was raised by a step, and this
space, which was called the dais, was occupied only by the principal
members of the family and visitors of distinction. For this purpose a
table richly covered with scarlet cloth was placed transversely across the
platform, from the middle of which ran the longer and lower board, at
which the domestics and inferior persons fed, down towards the bottom