For the designs of furniture of the tenth to the fourteenth centuries we are in a great measure dependent upon old illuminated manuscripts and missals of these remote times. There are some illustrations of the seats of State used by sovereigns on the occasions of grand banquets, or of some ecclesiastical function, to be found in the valuable collections of old documents in the British Museum and the National Libraries of Paris and Brussels. It is evident from these authorities that the designs of State furniture in France and other countries dominated by the Carlovingian monarchs were of Byzantine character, that pseudo-classic style which was the prototype of furniture of about a thousand years later, when the Cæsarism of Napoleon I., during the early years of the nineteenth century, produced so many designs which we now recognise as "Empire." No history of mediæval woodwork would be complete without noticing the Scandinavian furniture and ornamental wood carving of the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. There are in the South Kensington Museum plaster casts of some three or four carved doorways of Norwegian workmanship, of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, in which scrolls are entwined with contorted monsters, or, to quote Mr. Lovett's description, "dragons of hideous aspect and serpents of more than usually tortuous proclivities." The woodcut of a carved lintel conveys a fair idea of this work, and also of the old juniper wood tankards of a much later time. There are also at Kensington other casts of curious Scandinavian woodwork of more Byzantine treatment, the originals of which are in the Museums of Stockholm and Copenhagen, where the collection of antique woodwork of native production is very large and interesting, and proves how wood carving, as an industrial Art, has flourished in Scandinavia from the early Viking times. One can still see in the old churches of Borgund and Hitterdal much of the carved woodwork of the seventh and eighth centuries; and lintels and porches full of national character are to be found in Thelemarken. [Illustration: A CARVED NORWEGIAN DOORWAY. PERIOD: X. TO XI. CENTURY.] Under the heading of "Scandinavian" may be included the very early Russian school of ornamental woodwork. Before the accession of the Romanoff dynasty in the sixteenth century, the Ruric race of kings came originally from Finland, then a province of Sweden; and so far as one can see from old illuminated manuscripts, there was a similarity of design to those of the early Norwegian and Swedish carved lintels which have been noticed above. [Illustration: CARVED WOOD CHAIR, SCANDINAVIAN WORK. PERIOD: 12th and 13th Century.]