[Illustration: Dining Hall in the Charterhouse. Shewing Oak Screen and front of Minstrels' Gallery, dated 1571. Period: Elizabethan.]
[Illustration: Screen in the Hall of Gray's Inn. With Table and Desks referred to.]
There are in London other excellent examples of Elizabethan oak carving. Amongst those easily accessible and valuable for reference are the Hall of Gray's Inn, built in 1560, the second year of the Queen's reign, and Middle Temple Hall, built in 1570-2. An illustration of the carved screen supporting the Minstrels' Gallery in the older Hall is given by permission of Mr. William R. Douthwaite, librarian of the "Inn," for whose work, "Gray's Inn, its History and Associations," it was specially prepared. The interlaced strap work generally found in Elizabethan carving, encircles the shafts of the columns as a decoration. The table in the centre has also some low relief carving on the drawer front which forms its frieze, but the straight and severe style of leg leads us to place its date at some fifty years later than the Hall. The desk on the left, and the table on the right, are probably later still. It may be mentioned here, too, that the long table which stands at the opposite end of the Hall, on the daïs, said to have been presented by Queen Elizabeth, is not of the design with which the furniture of her reign is associated by experts; the heavy cabriole legs, with bent knees, corresponding with the legs of the chairs (also on the daïs), are of unmistakable Dutch origin, and, so far as the writer's observations and investigations have gone, were introduced into England about the time of William III.
The same remarks apply to a table in Middle Temple Hall, also said to have been there during Elizabeth's time. Mr. Douthwaite alludes to the rumour of the Queen's gift in his book, and endeavoured to substantiate it from records at his command, but in vain. The authorities at Middle Temple are also, so far as we have been able to ascertain, without any documentary evidence to prove the claim of their table to any greater age than the end of the seventeenth century.
The carved oak screen of Middle Temple Hall is magnificent, and no one should miss seeing it. Terminal figures, fluted columns, panels broken up into smaller divisions, and carved enrichments of various devices, are all combined in a harmonious design, rich without being overcrowded, and its effect is enhanced by the rich color given to it by age, by the excellent proportions of the Hall, by the plain panelling of the three other sides, and above all by the grand oak roof, which is certainly one of the finest of its kind in England. Some of the tables and forms are of much later date, but an interest attaches even to this furniture from the fact of its having been made from oak grown close to the Hall; and as one of the tables has a slab composed of an oak plank nearly thirty inches wide, we can imagine what fine old trees once grew and flourished close to the now busy Fleet Street, and the bustling Strand. There are frames, too, in Middle Temple made from the oaken timbers which once formed the piles in the Thames, on which rested "the Temple Stairs."