As an addition to Oxbow’s magnificent and accessibly priced catalogue of archaeology and ancient history titles, this volume is unusual in offering multiple perspectives and data on an item of private property: a controversial antique bed owned by of one of the contributors, Ian Coulson. The title asserts an identification and the collection of essays chosen to justify the claim is edited by Dr Peter Lindfield, FSA, with chapters on paint analysis, dendrochronology, DNA and conservation. Lindfield also reinterprets others’ research on the bed’s iconography, accounts for the trade in revivalism and composes a provenance with Coulson. Dr Elizabeth Norton’s foreword regards it as ‘leaving no stone unturned in their quest for the truth’ toward ‘a formidable case’, the book promoted as ‘definitive’ and ‘a work of immeasurable value’.
An attempt to measure the truth and value of this book is provided in this short review. The object in question was catalogued in a 2010 Chester auction as a ‘Victorian carved oak four poster bed’ and purchased by Coulson, who was ‘shocked and excited’ (p 10) to receive an incomplete oak frame with Gothic diaper columns, the substantially repaired timber showing worm-riddled rails. Its richly carved pierced headboard panels feature Adam and Eve types amid fruit and beasts, flanked by panels with separated royal arms, as repeated on the footboard, while the posts’ lion finials clutch shields with five-petalled roses as heraldic signifiers of Henry vii and Elizabeth of York. Could Coulson’s purchase be the medieval regal bed that its heraldry suggests, or a later revival or even a fake using early salvages?
Dispute has seen rebuttals by Adam Bowett, through the Furniture History Society, on the basis that the known Victorian faker George Shaw (1810–76), of Uppermill, West Yorkshire, not only made versions of this bed, but (as Coulson discovered) the truncated front crest of this example with royal arms remains over a door in his house. This book claims the bed was one of Shaw’s ancient models. The worthy papers on methodical analyses establish its composition of coeval yet undatable timbers (Andy Moir), establish that the DNA of that timber is European oak and not American as previously claimed (Dr Hilke Schroeder and Lasse Schindler) and that its sparse paint fragments are typically medieval (Helen Hughes). Lindfield vaguely asserts that unpublished post-medieval carbon-14 results reflect ‘contamination and interference’ (p 8).
There are numerous editorial gaffes, such as ‘Thomas Moor’, and unconvincing attributions for related joinery salvage as ineffectual pillow-boards (p 24) and an oversized replacement front crest (plates 6 and 9). However, the book’s major problem lies in Lindfield and Coulson’s attempt to construct a provenance between Westminster Palace in 1486 and George Shaw’s orbit. Their scenario, virtually identical to Stephanie Brooke’s account in Kenyon College’s online Peregrinations (vol 8 (3), 2022), postulates that this dynastic royal marriage bed was gifted by Elizabeth i to Sir Nicholas Mosley to furnish his Hough End Hall near Manchester (c 1596–1600). Mosley died in 1613, and his original will of 1612 is missing. Both Brooke and Lindfield/Coulson herald an item listed among Mosley’s possessions in a tertiary source: ‘the best bedstocke, the Queen’s gift’, as published by a Mrs Williamson in her Sketches of Fallowfield (1888), which she explicitly based on a transcription of Mosley’s will by the Cambridge academic Rev John Booker in his Ancient Chapels of Didsbury [etc] (1857) (p 43). This specific bed is never described, as these authors admit (p 51), but Lindfield still asserts that on the strength of this sole reference ‘we can be sure that it [Nicholas Mosley’s reception of the bed in question from Elizabeth i] was not some invented family legend that spuriously materialised’ (p 43).
The manifold problems in this Mosley scenario are resolved by reviewing that crucial source. A straightforward comparison shows that Williamson inserted ‘the Queen’s gift’ (note the modern apostrophised English), which is absent in Booker’s 1857 transcript, an academically superior secondary source that is unreferenced here. Williamson’s amateurish edit reflects her own uncritical acceptance of Oswald Mosley’s book Family Memoirs of 1849, being the earliest recorded claim of Queen Elizabeth giving Nicholas Mosley a generically ‘handsomely-carved oak bedstead, together with some other articles of furniture’ for Hough End. And therein Oswald explains he had recently been ‘fortunate enough to have obtained many pieces’ of it. Heralding such ancestral ‘discoveries’ was George Shaw’s modus operandi.
In 1892 Oswald Mosley’s house at Rolleston, Staffordshire, was photographed replete with George Shaw’s c 1840s fakeries, including a bench carved with Shaw’s typical motifs and ‘N 1596 M’ that Lindfield and Coulson believe to be another gift from Elizabeth i (pp 46–7, fig 3.20). Also shown are beds in Shaw’s Elizabethan style (fig 3.22). Readers must draw their own conclusions on what Oswald Mosley understood he had acquired. However, no evidence suggests he or Elizabeth i ever encountered this bed, albeit an object wholly uncharacteristic of Shaw’s other work that deserves more prudent and thorough analysis.
