Showing transition to Queen Anne type. Cabriole feet, bevelled panels, and fluted sides.] [Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY TABLE. _C._ 1670. With finely turned legs and stretcher and scalloped underwork. (_By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin._)] =The Changing Habits of the People.=--The shifting phases of the restless seventeenth century make it exceedingly difficult, in spite of experts, to decide definitely as to the exact date of furniture. The country being in such an unsettled state obviously influenced the manufacture of domestic furniture. Its natural evolution was broken and the restraint of the Jacobean forms was in the main due to the conditions prevailing in regard to their manufacture. The long list of battles given in the chronological table at the commencement of this chapter is advisedly recorded to show the intense upheaval which was caused by the civil wars which raged from north to south, from east to west, and convulsed any artistic impulses which may have been in process of materialisation. It is obvious the class of Table of the William and Mary period, in date about 1670, illustrated (p. 73), with finely turned legs and stretcher and scalloped underwork, belongs to a period far more advanced in comfort than the days when such a table as that illustrated p. 63 was the ordinary type. By the end of the century the growth of sea power and the astonishing development of trade brought corresponding domestic luxuries. The two children's stools illustrated (p. 77) must have come from a country squire's or wealthy provincial merchant's house. Their upholstered seats emulate the grandeur of finer types. The rare form of oak bedstead illustrated on the same page is a survival of the early type. In date this is about 1700; not too often are such examples found, for enterprising restorers and makers have seized these old Jacobean bedsteads and converted them into so-called Jacobean "sideboards," wherein nothing is old except the wood. It requires some little imagination to conjure up what the daily meals were in the days of the early Stuarts. There was the leather jack, the horn mug, and the long table in the hall where the farmer and his servants ate together. An old black-letter song, entitled "When this old cap was new," in date 1666, in the Roxburgh "Songs and Ballads," has two verses which paint a lively picture:-- "Black-jacks to every man Were fill'd with wine and beer; No pewter pot nor can In those days did appear; Good cheer in a nobleman's house Was counted a seemly show; We wanted not brawn nor souse When this old cap was new. We took not such delight In cups of silver fine; None under the degree of knight In plate drank beer or wine; Now each mechanical man Hath a cupboard of plate for show, Which was a rare thing then When this old cap was new."