Placed in the Architecture section because no point in having buildings that you cannot sit in if necessary. So.

In a recent prog about historical finds, a thimble was dug up - a very big thimble - but it turned out to be the tip of a chair leg - and ancient at that. I do believe a Roman villa was envisaged all about it as is the wont of imaginative archaeologists sometimes. However, getting bums off the ground must have bee a major development in making life better in ancient times and info on that would be of interest to me. Ancient Greeks even managed a dress circle (or semi circle) for their theatres, the rank and file also had benches Thrones from more ancient times have been found in tombs - and elegant at that. What of the lesser folk?. Res Hist input sought here.

(Kindly keep cattle off the track.)

Crass site etiquette to continue ones unanswered post but the topic of chairs has always fascinated.... I have interesting replicas in my own home including a large Barcelona chair that fills a space and a half where it is, not suitable for anywhere else and despite family remark not going anywhere either.

The use of thrones and design always catches my eye and I once broke up when I saw a pic of a cyclist Bradley someone sitting in a huge one after big ride. He who is in charge of it all gets the biggest chair. So not of interest to other posters here, thought  would round it up and think of a thread that might.... I use the Alph-ess sofa in our home; huge and soft-lumpy comfortable beyond words.... as chosen by grandsons as suitable for me -. and it is.

Not a throne, but my typing chair needs replacing.  The mechanism for making it go higher or lower is broken.  I'm making do with a cushion on the chair temporarily but without a properly functioning typing chair the old back can ache (well mine can).  I might do some sleuthing on the internet to try and find out how long dedicated "typing" chairs have been in existence.

When the TV show Versailles was broadcast I looked at a couple of history blogs to glean information as to what was correct in the show and what amounted to flights of fancy.  One blogger said she was driven mad by the fact that most of the chairs used by the nobles in the series were armchairs whereas at that time only the king would have used an armchair.  I watched the first two seasons of the show but not season 3 because it seemed to move further from true history with each season.

One blog I looked at was Partylike1660.  I won't link because we are all adults and if anyone wishes to look it up they can use their search engine of choice.

It should also not be forgotten that mobile transport developed greatly for getting people about on chairs.. carriages, cars, trains and planes. Horse too have been use in carrying people about - really useful sort of chairs, horses. And you have not matriculated into the higher designer ranks unless you come up with a designer chair.

Who invented stools - jointed stools, that is, not just a bit of tree trunk?


I know being given a stool  - un tabouret? - at the court of Louis IV meant you really had arrived - but was it just for favoured, high-ranking ladies? The rules for who was allowed to sit on such a stool, and in whose presence, were very complex.

Temps,

Re to be given a tabouret, in Danish political lingo this has come to mean becoming a Government Minister, and so has 'someone who clings to his taburet' [Danish spelling - now without the non-silet 't' at the end].

The concept of the most important person present having the best, or perhaps only chair, is of course reflected in the term 'chairperson' for the one who 'chairs' a meeting.

One of the symbols of office of Roman magistrates holding imperium (ie. dictators, magistri equitum, consuls, praetors, aediles and magistrates - who all held different degrees of government or military authority) was their sella curulis, which was a folding chair. This was deliberately foldable and portable, unlike a potentate's throne, as it was used by military tribunes attached to the army often on the move, and by the city magistrates, who I believe often heard cases in public outside in the Forum. (Here, I'm thinking of Cicero's famous defence of the accused paricide, Sextus Roscius, which according to Tiron - Cicero's slave/secretary, later his biographer - was conducted publicly and in the open air, next to the Rostrum in the Forum). Accordingly wherever these officials set up their curule chair they were effectively in office and the court was legally in session. 

The Roman curule chair was traditionally made of, or veneered with, ivory, with curved legs forming a wide X, no back and low arm-rests. Although often luxuriously decorated this chair was meant to be uncomfortable to sit on for long periods of time, the double symbolism being that the official was expected to carry out his public function in an efficient and timely manner and that his office, being an office of the republic, was temporary, not perennial.

This is a medieval Spanish curule chair - a Roman magistrate's chair would typically have been more lavishly decorated but this one clearly shows the folding X-shape, no back and very low arm-rests.



Its status in early Rome as a symbol of political or military power carried over to other civilizations as a symbol of royal power and justice, although with European kings it was no longer portable, folding, backless nor deliberately uncomfortable. Here's James I standing next to a very well-padded, later development of the classic curule chair:

Then there is "to be at stool" (to be on the loo), or even "straining at stool" - an old-fashioned term for constipation. Stool in this sense is rarely heard these days, but "stool" remains a bona fide medical term for human excrement - doctors still use the word in this sense all the time. Stool meaning -er- poo is derived from the Old English "stoi" meaning "a seat for one person": it has the same old German root as the modern German word for "seat" - "Stuhl".


The "close-stool", of course, was a chamber pot discreetly hidden in a chair. Henry VIII's "Groom of the Stole" (stool) was the unfortunate chap in charge of the proceedings on and around this important seat of government!

Temps's mention of stools in the court of Louis XIV makes me think of some of the names for covered (furniture) stools - such as tuffets and pouffes and ottomans.  Are tuffets and pouffes the same item of furniture?  I tend to think of an ottoman as being a longer version of a covered stool and one where sometimes items could be stored in the base (if they were hollow).  A quick search on the internet showed that these types of furniture are still being manufactured.  I had thought perhaps they had fallen out of use.

Priscilla mentioned riding on horseback.  Does anyone know when ladies made the change from riding side-saddle to riding astride?  If that matter has been addressed on an earlier thread perhaps someone could point me in the direction of that thread.

I notice Henry's close-stool has what appears to be a keyhole at the front. Why would one ever feel the need to lock it up to secure its contents?

I suppose to Henry it was just a case of yet more little shits to be locked up.

Charles Hill, the radio doctor, defined a pathologist as "a man who sits on one stool to examine others". This is out of date in at least two ways - the bland assumption that the practitioner would be male, and the use of "stool" in this sense. Within the path lab in  my time we always referred to "feac" pots, samples, tests etc.

Chair etiquette during all the Egyptian dynasties right up to the post-ptolemaic seems to have been particularly strict, at least for the upper classes. A woman of importance including even a queen, based on depictions spanning a thousand years, could apparently sit on any old thing - from a rock to a sumptuous gilded throne mounted on wheels and drawn by slaves, and in each case her status was not in question. The one thing she couldn't sit on - weirdly - was a fold-up stool. Only men indeed sat on them, and for long periods it appears that only the pharaoh himself got to perch his bum on the high-fashion version of this "humble" piece of furniture.

Why and how this tradition started is open to speculation, but certainly by Tutankhamun's time the humble little fold-up had become something of an item. In fact it wasn't even foldable any longer, if the ones found in his tomb were standard for men of such status. Three spectacularly preserved versions of these kingly cathedra were found by Howard Carter, two actual chairs and one beautiful model (it is assumed to be a model and equally conjectured to have been a foot-stool, though it so closely resembles similar royal stools depicted in many wall paintings that most favour the former theory).



The ebony top, carved to resemble material, is meant to denote leopard skin (with the colours curiously reversed). Leopards were already extinct in Upper Egypt by Tut's time and the motif is therefore more usually associated with Nubian tribute. The legs (which mimic collapsible stool design but are carved from a single piece of wood) however denote ducks, and it is this combination which suggests that it was locally made - the avian legs being a long-standing Egyptian motif for lots of things, while the stylised leopard motif had become fashionably associated with aristocracy. Only a local, it is reckoned, would have thought the two should aesthetically combine in this manner, a Nubian would have made the thing all leopard. I love the ebony tail, just to complete the "illusion".

An ivory stool found in the same chamber is full size - and though not pretending to be foldable as with the model above, it conforms to the dimensions of these strange little seats whose use was reserved solely for male pharaohs.



Funnily enough, though it conforms to the required dimensions the above stool is the one that is most often misidentified as a foot-stool by amateurs writing books about the "boy king".

Going back to collapsible stuff Tut was buried with this marvellous hybrid - an actual foldable item which made it man-only, but this time of proportions much more befitting a royal arse of the Middle Kingdom. Probably by Tut's time some slight irritation had set in among male royals that they had to sit on picnic chairs to prove their status whereas their womenfolk could go the full chippendale, and so they'd pushed the foldable thing up a notch or two to see how high they could get.



The above stool, of all those found in the tomb, was the only one to show signs of having been much used, and may even have been Tut's throne of choice.

I found a YouTube video which features almost all the chairs and stools Carter found - it's worth a look even if some of the info is a bit dubious.

It's odd how one's reading throws up details which are relevant to  a current thread on dear Res His - synchronicity or just random chance? In my quiet moments this week (of which there have been few), I have been ploughing my way through Diane Purkiss' excellent rich layer cake of a book, The English Civil War: A People's History. In her Chapter Four, The Bishops' War, the Three Kingdoms and Montrose, Purkiss mentions something I have never heard of before: the Stool of Repentance. Gosh -  it sounds a bad business:


To understand the Scots, one must understand the way the Kirk fostered a certain idea of collective identity, generating a powerful sense of sin, and then alleviating it with penitence. The Stool of Repentance was a wooden seat, often a kind of step-stool with different levels for different sins. It stood immediately in front of the pulpit, elevated to where everyone could see it. Those deemed immoral by the Church courts had to sit on it while a sermon was preached. The connection between the trembling example of sin before the eyes of the congregation and the words of the preacher was what made this punishment different from most English methods, in whiche the sinner was generally displayed by the church door rather than inside the building. In Scotland, words and spectacle were welded together into a single great theatrical event (my emphasis).


To emphasise the drama of it all, the sinner then made - from the Stool - an attention-grabbing "speech of repentance": note it was vitally important to be very dramatic indeed, preferably with much hysterical weeping and beating of - er - breasts. The relating of the exact details of the sins committed was encouraged. If the congregation was convinced, there was a joyous welcoming back into the fold of the fallen one, with kisses and hugs and more tears. Unfortunately, some young, female "sinners" embraced the drama of it all with rather too much gusto, and  proceeded to describe the often rather unfortunately salacious detail of their transgressions so vividly that they had, notwithstanding their remorse, to be shut up and removed from the Stool.

Seems everyone enjoyed the proceedings hugely. I wonder if the prostitutes of Edinburgh (were there any left in Scotland in the 17th century?) did as good a business after the Lord's Supper at St Giles', as did the 16th and 17th whores of Paris after Sunday Mass at Notre Dame?





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In this week's "In Our Time" (BBC R4 yesterday) it was stated that Burns had to occupy such a stool because he had impregnated at least two women, and, at the time, was marrie to neither.

Another coincidence! I didn't hear the programme this week, but will check it out on iPlayer.

Going back a few posts, I suppose the keyhole is to enable the posh plush stool to be emptied (though I expect everyone knew that).  I'd heard of the repentance stool though never seen a picture of it - maybe I will join Temps in seeking out that programme on the iplayer.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Temps's mention of stools in the court of Louis XIV makes me think of some of the names for covered (furniture) stools - such as tuffets and pouffes and ottomans.  Are tuffets and pouffes the same item of furniture?  I tend to think of an ottoman as being a longer version of a covered stool and one where sometimes items could be stored in the base (if they were hollow).

Yes - an ottoman is a soft-furnished bench or stool, the seat of which can be lifted to store items within. A tuffet normally has no storage capacity. It can come with or without legs and has an inner frame. A pouffe has no legs and no frame. Another name for a pouffe is a hassock. In Newfoundland it’s known as a humpty.
 
In mediaeval times large hassocks were widely used as furniture. Depending upon the wealth of the owner, the fabric used could range from coarse bulrush matting to goat-hair sackcloth to fine worsted. The filling material also varied (again according to wealth) from straw to horsehair to wool. To own a wool-filled worsted hassock or woolsack was a sign of high status.

When the proposed Australian federal capital at Canberra was being built in the 1920s there was call for ‘a woolsack to be provided as a seat for the highest legal official of the Commonwealth’. That official was presumed to be the Chief Justice. There were 2 problems with this proposal, however. Firstly, the Chief Justice of Australia was not the highest legal official at that time because the Australian constitution still deferred to the Privy Council in Westminster (or more specifically, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) as its ultimate arbiter in legal matters. Secondly, in 1927 (when the Australian parliament relocated from Melbourne to Canberra), the High Court of Australia was itinerant, and rotated its seat around the various Australian states. It would not take up permanent residence in Canberra until 1980. Even then, deference to the Privy Council would remain a feature of the Australian constitution until it was repealed in 1986. By the 1980s, however, sheep-rearing in Australia was not as central to the economy or identity of the country as it might have been 60 years earlier, and so no woolsack was created for the Chief Justice at that time.

Across the Tasman Sea is New Zealand, also a famously sheep-rearing country, which did not repeal Privy Council deference until 2004 when the Supreme Court was established in Wellington that year. However, a woolsack did not feature among that new building's furnishings either.

On the other hand, Canada, which is associated more with fishing and forestry rather than sheep-rearing, did indeed create a woolsack for its Cour suprême when it was established in Ottawa in 1875. This was despite it still deferring to the Privy Council. La Cour suprême has had 3 homes in the intervening 148 years. Firstly it sat in committee rooms of the Bloc de l'Ouest of Canada’s parliament buildings until 1882 when it moved into its own building. In 1946 it then took up residence in the current Supreme Court Building.



(The justices of Canada squeezed onto the woolsack in la Chambre du Sénat in Ottawa during an opening of a session of the Canadian parliament in 1938. In the throne is the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir better known as the novelist John Buchan.)

From 1882 until 1949, a woolsack was used for seating the justices of la Cour suprême (the Chief Justice and five other justices) during the opening of parliament. Having been designed for 6 people, the woolsack became something of a tight squeeze when a seventh justice was created in 1927. In 1949, two further justices were created bringing the total to 9. The woolsack simply could not accommodate this number. 1949 would be a significant year for Canada both legislatively and constitutionally. One of the reasons for the increase in the number of justices was that that year saw Newfoundland & Labrador join the Canadian Confederation. 1949 would also see the repeal of deference to the Privy Council. It would be the last time that the woolsack was used during the opening of parliament. For the opening of the 1953 parliament, the woolsack was stored away and the nine justices were seated on nine individual chairs.



(Canada’s judicial woolsack on display in 2022)

A woolsack also featured in Ireland’s parliament. It was the seat of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland when chairing the Irish House of Lords which sat in Dublin between 1297 and 1800. The Parliament Building now houses the Bank of Ireland although the former House of Lords chamber with its woolsack can still be viewed there. Sheep-rearing had been central to the Irish economy as anyone who knows anything about Irish stew will tell you. A proper Irish stew is made with lamb or mutton rather than beef. There is a theory that the Irish woolsack actually predated the English variant, and that the latter was merely an affected appropriation. The evidence for this, however, is sketchy.



(The woolsack in the former Irish House of Lords chamber in Dublin)

That theory aside, the grandfather of woolsacks is to be found in the House of Lords at Westminster. In fact, there are 3 of them. There is the Lord Speaker’s woolsack and a few yards in front of that is the Judges’ woolsack (which actually comprises 2 woolsacks pushed together). The Lord Speaker’s woolsack (which until 2006 was known as the Lord Chancellor’s woolsack) is believed to date from at least the 14th century. In 1938 the new Lord Chancellor, Viscount Maugham, decided that the worn woolsack needed re-upholstered. When opened up by the upholsterers, however, it was discovered that, rather than wool, it had been stuffed with horsehair at some unknown date in the past. The hair was removed and the new sack filled with fresh wool from Wales, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, Scotland, Canada, England and Newfoundland.

That was really interesting, Viz.  At school (in the 1970s) I learned all about the symbolism of the Chancellor's woolsack but not its actual history. So thanks for your explanation.

Nevertheless, seeing as the Lord Chancellor's woolsack had been in use for many centuries before being re-upholstered in 1938, I would think that the stuffing had likely become much compressed, miss-shapen, hard and lumpy under his lordship's posterior. Indeed I image it then somewhat resembled a bean bag - that piece of domestic furniture of the oh-so-trendy 1970s.

Priscilla wrote:

And you have not matriculated into the higher designer ranks unless you come up with a designer chair.

The beanbag chair, or Sacco ("Sacco" is Italian for a bag or sack), was first introduced by the Italian designers Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro in 1968 and went on to win awards for its modern design. Here's an original Sacco and in orange too (urgh!) but such a typically 1970s colour.



The whole point of the bean-bag chair, beyond looking like a flaccid elephant's scrotum, was that it was "anatomic" in that the shape of the seat was set by the user. A similar concept was introduced in the 1990s by the Dutch designers Edwin Niekel and Taco Regtien for the Leolux company with their "Adam's Temptation" pouf; a spherical leather-covered ball that compresses and moulds to your shape when you sit on it, but then 're-inflates' back into a ball when you stand up.

   

I actually have a Leolux ball, along with an original Eames chair, another design "classic" introduced in 1956 by Christian Baggett and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller company, both of which I inherited from a relation who was an an award-winning modernist architect during the 1970s and 80s, and was keen on all things "design".



I use neither of them as I find them both rather impractical - like so much other "design" stuff.

Not designer per se but I remember there being criticism of some of the chairs in the TV series Versailles.  There were seemingly some chairs with arms for characters other than the King which the critics averred just was not the case in those days.

One particular chair that has featured quite prominently over the last year is St. Edward's, or King Edward's chair, the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey.



It was commissioned in 1296 by King Edward I to contain the coronation stone of Scotland - the Stone of Destiny or Stone of Scone - which had been captured from the Scots, while the chair itself was named after Saint Edward the Confessor.  The high-backed, Gothic-style armchair was carved from oak at some point between the summer of 1297 and March 1300 by the carpenter Walter of Durham (making it the oldest dated piece of English furniture made by a known artist) and was originally covered in gilding and coloured glass, much of which has now been lost. Although it was not originally intended to be a coronation chair, it began to be associated with coronations of English monarchs at some point in the 14th century, and the first coronation where it was definitely used was that of Henry IV in 1399. Monarchs used to sit on the Stone of Scone itself until the chair was raised and a wooden platform was added in the 17th century, to hold the Stone of Destiny marginally more comfortably under the chair's seat.

   

For such a venerable and important relic the chair has not been treated kindly. In the 18th century tourists could sit on the chair for a small payment to one of the vergers, early tourists and generations of abbey choirboys have carved their initials and other graffiti into the chair, and the corner posts have been badly damaged by souvenir hunters. Nails have often been driven into the wood to attach fabric for coronations, and in preparation for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee the chair was covered with a coating of brown paint. What I didn't realise until the TV coverage of Charles III's coronation is that it is a chair and not a throne. For the enthronement (and the homage which follows it) the monarch is seated, not in the Coronation Chair, but specifically in a separate Coronation Throne, which is located on a raised dais so that the monarch sits at a higher level than everyone else - the word throne is from the Latin thronus, from Ancient Greek θρόνος (thrónos) meaning an elevated or exalted position - and hence also why the monarch is said to ascend to the throne.

Another ancient chair - or rather a throne as it too is on a raised platform approached by a flight of steps - is the Archbishop's official seat, the cathedra, in Canterbury Cathedral. Known as the Chair of St. Augustine after the first Archbishop of Canterbury, it is made of Purbeck marble and was built sometime between the 6th and 12th centuries, and if one goes with the earlier date may incorporate stones that once formed the seat on which the kings of Kent sat for their coronation.



For a another "seat of royal majesty" of similar age to both St Augustine's Chair and the Scottish Stone of Scone, there's also the Kingston Coronation Stone, an ancient sarsen stone block on which seven Anglo-Saxon kings are believed to have been crowned. It is currently located next to the Guildhall in Kingston upon Thames. Æthelstan was certainly consecrated king at Kingston in 925, as was Eadred in 946 and Æthelred the Unready in 979, and there's some evidence that Edward the Elder, Edmund I, Eadwig and Edward the Martyr were also consecrated in the town. Oral history from at least the middle ages asserted that these kings were crowned on a large stone located in the ancient church of St Mary. This church collapsed in 1730 but from the ruins a large irregular stone block was recovered and has since been regarded as the "Coronation Stone" of the Saxon Kings of the English. It was used for a time in the late 18th century to the early 19th century as a mounting block, but in 1850 it was placed in the market place on a plinth around which the names of the seven kings believed to have been crowned on it were inscribed. It stands there to this day, open to the elements and vulnerable to any passing vandals, protected only by an ornamental wrought iron fence.

I was unaware that King Edward’s Chair was not the Coronation Throne and neither had I picked up on that during the coverage. An interesting point. I was, however, aware of how poorly cared-for it has been over the centuries. I remember when I first saw it in Westminster Abbey when I was about 11 or 12 and being shocked even at that age to see it covered in graffiti and riddled with woodworm etc.  

Also (and to my shame) I had no idea of the antiquity of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s throne or even that it’s called the Chair of St Augustine, let alone its possible association with the Kentish kings. It’s another example, as is so often the case, of locals knowing less than tourists and visitors etc.  

By coincidence, many years ago I spent New Year’s Eve with friends in a pub not far from the Guildhall in Kingston. I had no idea of the importance of the block of stone in the corner of the square or even remember noticing it. At that time, we would have been not so much passing vandals as passing inebriates in search of a night bus.

Vizzer wrote:

... as is so often the case, of locals knowing less than tourists and visitors etc. 

Indeed ... I had been living in Kingston upon Thames for some years before I first noticed the unpreposessing lump of stone behind iron railings tucked away in a corner of the market place, and so rather belatedly learned about the Saxon Coronation Stone from the accompanying information board.

That Westminster, rather than Kingston or Winchester, became the place where the subsequent kings of England were crowned, rather comes down to the Norman conquest, no? The Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, like most of his predecessors had been crowned at Winchester which was then the political capital of England, and in particular his coronation was in Winchester's magnificent cathedral (the then building, begun by Alfred the Great, had been mostly completed by 900 and was then the largest cathedral in England). But when Edward fell ill while in London and shortly thereafter died, the Witan (the country's/sovereign's governing council) convened at Westminster - where the Abbey was a suitably big building complex to accommodate everyone and also where Edward the Confessor had just been buried - to decide on who should succeed to the English throne. Harald Godwinson's claim was accepted and he was then almost immediately crowned as King Harald II of England: the ceremony most likely being performed in the Abbey church, but the exact location is not entirely certain.

However just two months after William of Normandy had defeated King Harold in battle at Hastings, William had himself crowned at Westminster Abbey (on Christmas Day 1066). On this occasion the place was clearly chosen as expediently available because Willian hadn't yet even fully gained control of areas west of London (including Kingston) and certainly not of the Wessex heartland around the city of Winchester. The building also provided a suitable air of continuity, being where William's immediate predecessor had been crowned, although note that Harald Godwinson, Harald II, was likely both the last, and first, Saxon King ever crowned at Westminster. All the evidence and documentation relating to pre-Norman coronations indicates that they were traditionally crowned in Winchester Cathedral, or before that, at Kingston upon Thames.

Another ancient stone throne is the so-called Duke's Chair (Herzogstuhl in German, or Vojvodski Stol in Slovene), which is a medieval stone seat dating from the ninth century, located near Maria Saal, north of Klagenfurt in the South Austrian state of Carinthia. Constructed mainly out of Roman gravestones taken from the ruins of the nearby ancient town of Virunum, this was the throne used for the investitures of the medieval Dukes of Carinthia and of the Counts of Gorizia. It is actually two seats back-to-back, the higher one facing East was reserved for the Dukes, while the Counts used the lower one facing West. Again the seat is deliberately high up to put the the newly enthoned Duke - even when seated - well above everyone else and so that the various lesser lords had to mount the first step and then kneel at the ducal feet to render their homage.