ly so soon as the reign of Edward
IV. It is unnecessary to add, that neither libraries of books nor
pictures could have found a place among furniture. Silver plate was very
rare, and hardly used for the table. A few inventories of furniture that
still remain exhibit a miserable deficiency.[680] And this was
incomparably greater in private gentlemen's houses than among citizens,
and especially foreign merchants. We have an inventory of the goods
belonging to Contarini, a rich Venetian trader, at his house in St.
Botolph's Lane, A.D. 1481. There appear to have been no less than ten
beds, and glass windows are especially noticed as moveable furniture. No
mention however is made of chairs or looking-glasses.[681] If we compare
this account, however trifling in our estimation, with a similar
inventory of furniture in Skipton Castle, the great honour of the earls
of Cumberland, and among the most splendid mansions of the north, not at
the same period, for I have not found any inventory of a nobleman's
furniture so ancient, but in 1572, after almost a century of continual
improvement, we shall be astonished at the inferior provision of the
baronial residence. There were not more than seven or eight beds in this
great castle; nor had any of the chambers either chairs, glasses, or
carpets.[682] It is in this sense, probably, that we must understand
AEneas Sylvius, if he meant any thing more than to express a traveller's
discontent, when he declares that the kings of Scotland would rejoice to
be as well lodged as the second class of citizens at Nuremberg.[683] Few
burghers of that town had mansions, I presume, equal to the palaces of
Dumferlin or Stirling, but it is not unlikely that they were better
furnished.

[Sidenote: Farm-houses and cottages.]

In the construction of farm-houses and cottages, especially the latter,
there have probably been fewer changes; and those it would be more
difficult to follow. No building of this class can be supposed to exist
of the antiquity to which the present work is confined; and I do not
know that we have any document as to the inferior architecture of
England, so valuable as one which M. de Paulmy has quoted for that of
France, though perhaps more strictly applicable to Italy, an illuminated
manuscript of the fourteenth century, being a translation of
Crescentio's work on agriculture, illustrating the customs, and, among
other things, the habitations of the agricultural class. According to