PLATE CXXI.

HOME-STOYE AND FENDEE,

BY STD ART AND SMITH OF SHEFFIELD.

In this and the succeeding Plate we present to our readers a Stove and Fender, exhibited by Messrs. Stuartand Smith of Sheffield; a firm whose exertions in the promotion of good taste and excellence of manufacturein works of this description have obtained for them a celebrity as highly merited as it was justly acknowledged,in the award to them of a Council Medal by the Jurors of the Great Exhibition.

In connexion with this object we propose, first, to offer a few remarks on the antiquity of grates andchimneys in this country; and, secondly, to furnish some practical information on the Sheffield trade, thehistory of which we have already sketched in our article on Plate XCIX.

Grates and fenders of the form now in common use were not introduced till the beginning of the lastcentury, when the extensive destruction of the native forests, which had for centuries before supplied woodand charcoal for fuel, had rendered all classes in some degree dependent upon the mineral treasures in whichour island is so rich. Some writers suppose that coal was worked by the Britons and the Romans, as itwas in some parts of England by the Saxons ; but the first distinct record of its use is met with in the year1239, when Henry III. granted a license to the town of Newcastle for digging sea-coal, as it was longafterwards termed. In the latter part of the same century the coal-trade of Newcastle had become famous;but so general and popular was the use of wood, that, in the year 1306, the burning of coal in London wasprohibited, from its supposed tendency to corrupt the atmosphere and prejudice the health. In the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries the coal-trade was the subject of many enactments and fiscal regulations. In the palaceof Henry VIII . only the apartments of the king, the queen, and the Lady Mary, were supplied with that fuel;and its price in London , in the time of Elizabeth, was 85 . per chaldron, necessarily rendering it a rare andcostly luxury. It was not till the reign of Charles I. that coal can be said to have been generally used.

Chafing-dishes and braziers, consuming wood or charcoal, were used from the earliest periods in English dwellings, as indeed they were occasionally by the Greeks and Romans; but stoves with concealed fires,although common in other parts of Europe (see Plates LV. and CVI.), have, till of late years, been rare inthis country. Mr. T. Hudson Turner* observes, that the Saxons introduced a class of buildings rarely containingmore than one room, in the centre of which the fire was kindled on the floor, the smoke escaping by anopening in the roof above, and this continued to be the common mode of warming apartments for many centuriesafterwards. It is true that chimneys, or perpendicular flues in the walls of buildings of the twelfth century,still remain, and they are still more frequently met with in succeeding centuries ; but that they formed exceptionsto the general rule is obvious from the remarks of Leland on the chimneys in Bolton Castle, whereby, heobserves, “ the smoke of the hearth in the halle was wonder strangelye conveyed.”

In the Bayeux Tapestry there are representations of cooking over open fires in a courtyard; but theNorman castles at Rochester, Tunbridge, Newcastle , and Conisborough; the remains of Fountains Abbey;

* “ Domestic Architecture of England in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.”

8vo. 1851. Introduction, p. iv.