The hutch was indeed one of the most important articles of furniture in the mediæval chamber. All portable objects of intrinsic value or utility were kept in boxes, because they were thus ready for moving and taking away in case of danger, and because in travelling people carried much of their movables of this description about with them. Hence the uses of the hutch or chest were very numerous and diversified. It was usual to keep clothes of every description in a chest, and illustrations of this practice are met with not uncommonly in the illuminated manuscripts. One of them is given in our cut No. 187, taken from an illumination in a manuscript of the fourteenth century, given by Willemin. Jewels, plate, personal ornaments of all kinds, and all descriptions of “treasure,” were similarly locked up in chests. In our cut No. 188, taken also from a manuscript in the British Museum (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii., of the beginning of the fourteenth century), a man appears in the act of depositing in a chest fibulæ or brooches, rings, buttons, and other objects, and a large vessel probably of silver. Our cut No. 189, from a manuscript in the National Library in Paris (No. 6956), represents a miser examining the money in his hutch, which is here detached from a bed; but in some other illuminations, a hutch of much the same form appears attached to the bed foot. In Anglo-Saxon the coffer was called a _loc_, whence our word _locker_ is derived; or a _cyste_, our _chest_; or an _arc_: from the Anglo-Normans we derive the words _hutch_ (_huche_) and _coffer_ (_coffre_). The Anglo-Saxons, as we have shown in a former chapter (p. 79), like our forefathers of a later period, kept their treasures in lockers or hutches. In the “Legend of St. Juliana,” an Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book, it is remarked in proof of the richness of a chieftain:-- _þeah þe feoh-gestreon_ _Although he riches_ _under hord-locan,_ _in his treasure-lockers,_ _hyrsta únrím,_ _jewels innumerable,_ _æhte ofer eorþan._ _possessed upon earth._ --Exeter Book, p. 245. [Illustration: _No. 188. The Treasure Chest._] Among the Anglo-Saxons the lady of the household had the charge of the coffers. In one of the laws of Cnut relating to robberies, it is declared that “if any man bring a stolen thing home to his cot, and he be detected, it is just that the owner have what he went for; and unless it has been brought under his wife’s key-lockers (_cæg-locan_), let her be clear; for it is her duty to keep the keys of them, namely, her storehouse (_hord-ern_), and her chest (_cyste_), and her box (_tege_).” (Cnut’s Laws, No. 180.) [Illustration: _No. 189. A Miser and his Hoard._] [Illustration: _No. 190. Joseph buying up the Corn._]