All kinds of words are used to describe all kinds of cupboards. To start with it was called a “cup borde”, so obviously in its origins it was simply aboard or plank on which you kept the plate or pewter. The “Court” cupboard, as seen below, is shown in Tudor paintings with a carpet or piece of tapestry draped over the top shelf with a display of pewter and delftware dishes. The drinking cups and mugs were usually kept on the lower shelf. Some say they are so called from the French court for short, but many of these cupboards are large affairs, and there is just as much reason to believe that they are named after the manorial court held in the lord’s hall.

Some so-called Court cupboards have one or more lockers in which the more valuable possessions could be put away safely. But where there are carved patterns in the doors of the lockers, these pieces are said to be Livery cupboards. The word is used here in the sense of giving food, provisions and clothing to retainers, and in fact it was here that were kept the daily supplies of bread, wine and (when they were lucky) meat: hence the need for ventilation holes. The term Buffet, which is often used, refers to the same kind of piece, but something rather different is meant by a Press. This is much more like the piece which has enclosed cupboards, often with drawers in them, the upper half usually being recessed and forming a narrow shelf. This was mostly kept in the bedroom where it was used for storing linen and the household’s best clothes, only to be brought out on high days and holidays. Cupboards of this sort are still to be found in Welsh country houses: it is known as a deuddarn when it is two-tiered as described above, and a tridarn when it has three tiers.

Antique Collector MagazineSo far I have been describing only the genuine work of the seventeenth century and earlier, and while pieces of this era do come up for sale from time to time—and make not nearly as much money as you would think in view of their age—most of what you see in the shops and salerooms today are nineteenth-century reproductions.

The chest of drawers seems to have evolved from the cupboard which had given itself one large drawer at the foot—rather like a type of modern wardrobe. The drawers increased from one to two and from two to three, and so on, eventually swallowing up the cupboard space above. Sometimes it worked the other way round: there are chests of the Restoration period whereby a three-drawer chest is mounted upon an open frame. Either way, when the drawers had occupied the whole of the piece in its original size, there was the tallboy (in America “highboy”) or “chest-on-chest“.

In spite of their age the early chests do not make nearly as much as one might expect. Neither do the rather later type where the chest is raised off the ground on a stand, supported by baluster legs—until you run into the “cabriole” period of Queen Anne days. Tallboys are inconvenient, perhaps being five or six feet off the ground, but remember that in those days you had in the bedroom a handy set of steps, primarily used for climbing into your four-poster, but no doubt useful also for poking around in those top drawers. Under French influence the chest of drawers became a commode—by which one does not mean a night commode. This latter was a Victorian term and the word was notboard with two drawers used in the eighteenth centuryin that sense.

A commode was a very elaborate and richly decorated version of the chest of drawers, usually with a serpentine front and bombe (i.e. bulging) sides. Sometimes the drawer fronts were hidden by doors, and early in the nineteenth century the commode turned itself into a cupboard or a kind of sideboard, with frieze drawers and perhaps open grillework doors over pleated silk.

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