The furniture of the hall appears to have been very simple, for it consisted chiefly of benches. These had carpets and cushions; the former are often mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon wills. The Anglo-Saxon poems speak of the hall as being “adorned with treasures,” from which we are perhaps justified in believing that it was customary to display there in some manner or other the richer and more ornamental of the household vessels. Perhaps one end of the hall was raised higher than the rest for the lord of the household, like the _dais_ of later times, as Anglo-Saxon writers speak of the _heah-setl_, or high seat. The table can hardly be considered as furniture, in the ordinary sense of the word: it was literally, according to its Anglo-Saxon name _bord_, a board that was brought out for the occasion, and placed upon tressels, and taken away as soon as the meal was ended. Among the inedited Latin _ænigmata_, or riddles, of the Anglo-Saxon writer Tahtwin, who flourished at the beginning of the eighth century, is one on a _table_, which is curious enough to be given here, from the manuscript in the British Museum (MS. Reg. 12, C. xxiii.). The table, speaking in its own person, says that it is in the habit of feeding people with all sorts of viands; that while so doing it is a quadruped, and is adorned with handsome clothing; that afterwards it is robbed of all it possesses, and when it has been thus robbed it loses its legs:-- DE MENSA. _Multiferis omnes dapibus saturare solesco,_ _Quadrupedem hinc felix ditem me sanxerit ætas,_ _Esse tamen pulchris fatim dum vestibus orner,_ _Certatim me prædones spoliare solescunt,_ _Raptis nudata exuviis mox membra relinquunt._ In the illuminated manuscripts, wherever dinner scenes are represented, the table is always covered with what is evidently intended for a handsome table-cloth, the _myse-hrægel_ or _bord-clath_. The grand preparation for dinner was _laying the board_; and it is from this original character of the table that we derive our ordinary expression of receiving any one “to _board_ and lodging.”