Antique Joint Stools
Joint stool
Signs of authenticity
1. Grain of wood coarser than saw-cut timber, showing slight figure and rippling.
2. Thick timber for seats, curving slightly on the grain from shrinkage and age.
3. Stretchers, legs and feet worn with constant use.
4. Dowelling from tops of legs standing slightly proud of seat due to shrinkage and movement of timber.
5. Pegs on stretcher joints and frieze joints should not stand proud. Green timber was used and knocked in as it shrank.
6. Good width of overhang to seat.
7. Build-up of patination on underside of overhang which should feel almost polished with years of wear.
8. Legs and frieze tapering outward slightly on longer side of stool – neatly flush on short end for pushing together to make a bench.
9. Feet showing signs of ‘frayed’ end-grain damaged by damp and use and unevenly worn.
Likely restoration and repair
10. Legs replaced, usually below the square section, and concealed by turning.
11. Grain of wood ridged, artificially aged with wire brush, not worn. smooth.
12. Grain running across width, not down length.
13. False dowelling in new seats where tops have been replaced. Regular shapes of dowels and holes drilled with mechanical drills.
14. Legs of wrong period baluster and turning – possibly replaced with old staircase balusters, quite old, but quite wrong.
15. Seat timber not thick enough. Genuine joint stools have seats at least an inch thick, tapering slightly where timber has been split, not sawn.
16. Pristine, glowing oak with good patination but not a sign of chip or crack is suspect: no genuine joint stool is likely to have survived so long without some damage or splitting.
Historical background
Seat furniture was very limited in range until the end of the sixteenth century. Built-in benches along walls and in window embrasures, and benches or formes which ran the length of trestle tables, were the most common.
Church stools were made by carpenters, who also made panelling and rood screens, choir stalls and pews. They were slab-ended with rough V-shapes cut to make rudimentary legs, and often the seats which slotted into the tops, contained a deep box with a hinged lid.
The joint stool or joined stool was made by the joiner, and its construction was the basis for
all chair design until the eighteenth century.
The legs were turned by hand in simple baluster and ring: the seats were tenoned to the tops of the legs, and a frieze was joined to the underframe with mortiseand-tenon joints. They had squared stretchers, set low, almost at ground level.
Joint stools are sometimes known as `coffin stools’ and in varying heights and shapes they were made almost continuously until the end of the eighteenth
century. There was a renewed fashion for these useful little stools during the Victorian Jacobethan revival, when they were made by the thousand.
Construction and materials
The joint stool was made of oak, quarter split and showing some figure in the grain on the seat. The legs were square-sectioned at the top and bottom, the tops forming the sides of the frieze and directly supporting the seat. The legs were slightly splayed for stability, from the top, so that the frieze slopes outwards very slightly, on the two longest sides of the seat only.
The grain of the wood always ran the length of the seat, and was usually finished with a simple edge moulding, and the timber was very thick. The dowelling which secured the seat ran the entire thickness, so that four irregular pegs and holes can be seen on the surface of the seat.
Detail
The frieze might have some simple arcaded or geometrical carving, and the legs were turned in simple baluster or reel-and-bobbin between the stout square sections into which the stretchers were fixed with mortise-and-tenon joints.
Variations
Before c.1500, no one other than people of importance had furniture of any kind, and at this time, virtually all furniture of any consequence was made of oak. It is probable that there were some stools made with elm tops, possibly some in yew wood and some in fruitwood, but a difference in material cannot constitute a dividing line between ‘country furniture’ and the rest. The joint stool itself became an essential part of country furniture at a later date, when there were chairs of all kinds for those who could afford them.
Variations, right: seventeenth-century oak joint stool, with chip-carved decoration on the frieze, turned legs and block feet.
Reproductions
Victorian
The greatest number of reproduction joint stools were probably made during the Victorian Jacobethan revival, using the same construction methods, but making them of machine-cut timber with machine-drilled holes for dowels. On Victorian copies there are almost certainly lining-up marks on the tops of the legs indicating where the frieze should slot in, and above and below the stretchers. There are often
patches of paler wood, mistaken for age, due to years of handling, wood which was originally stained. Victorian copies were made with saw-cut, relatively unseasoned timber of
commercial thickness, with shallow machine-cut carving, sometimes also around the edge of the seat but almost certainly on the frieze.
Left: sixteenth century, oak box-stool. Above: oak, with decorated frieze, cylindrical turned legs and block feet.
Price bands
Seventeenth-century oak, £1,000-1,500.
Seventeenth-century yew wood, £1,250-1,750.
Restored original, £430-600.
Victorian reproduction, £125–150.
Tags: Chair, choir stalls, furniture, Jacobethan, Legs, oak, restoration, rood screens, stool, stools, stretcher, trestle tables, wood