Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair, with plain stay rail attached to button finials of straight backpoles, 3 ladders, missing rushing bars, front stretcher with turnery commonly found in Lincolnshire, turned front legs morticed into the seat frame, with double side and rear stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair, with plain stay rail attached to button finials of straight backpoles, 3 ladders, missing rushing bars, front stretcher with turnery commonly found in Lincolnshire, turned front legs morticed into the seat frame, with double side and rear stretchers WS 34

This an excellent example of a simple well made rush seated ladder back chair made out of ash (with rerushed seat). Vernacular furniture at its very best, probably made by the Ashton/Green families of the Spilsby, Alford, Louth area. This unloved chair appeared at a local auction house and was lotted with other house clearance bits which I got for a pittance - it should have been acquired by the local museum which is only a few streets away from where it was sold. The town where I bought it: Louth.

© William Sergeant 2012

A pair of Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chairs: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened stay rail fixed onto prominent button turnings; 3 plain domed ladders; straight turned front legs, morticed into the seat frame, missing rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

A pair of Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chairs WS 100

A few months after I originally found WS 86 I was lucky enough to chance upon these two near identical chairs at the Newark Antiques fair in April 2013; they too are similar to figure NE 214 at p. 159 of Dr B D Bernard Cotton's The English Regional Chair (1990), chair which he attributes to South Lincolnshire. They are both in excellent condition and came a house clearance on the Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire border.  Well-worn front stretchers mean they have been well-used: they have been re-rushed some time ago but without their original rushing  bars being re-attached.

© William Sergeant 2013 and 2020

Lincolnshire child's rush-seated armchair, straight backpoles w tapered feet, 3 ladders domed with downward shape, turned front legs morticed into rounded arm turnings, Lincolnshire front stretcher, single stretcher x 4,

Lincolnshire rush-seated child's armchair WS 77

I am grateful to Brian Gray for letting me take this picture of his very rare Lincolnshire child's rush-seated armchair. 

© William Sergeant 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened stay rail fixed onto prominent button turnings; 3 plain domed ladders; straight turned front legs, morticed into the seat frame, missing rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chair WS 86

Many thanks to Brian Gray for drawing my attention to this chair at a south Lincolnshire auction in 2013; I was away overseas and he kindly bought this one for me in my absence. These bar topped chairs are not common, in fact it's only the third one I have ever seen*. It's also the most simple of all the Lincolnshire rush-seated chairs: those front legs are as plain as can be with no pad feet or off-centre turning involved. In Dr B D Bernard Cotton's The English Regional Chair (1990) there is one very similar on page 159, figure NE 214. One of my neighbours brought a similar one at a south Lincolnshire  auction several years ago and images appear below: WS 5, 6 and WS 7:

Lincolnshire bar top rush-seated chair WS 5

Lincolnshire bar top rush-seated chair - detail of bar top stay rail and button turning WS 6

Lincolnshire bar top rush-seated chair - detail of front leg turning morticed into seat WS 7

*by January 2013

© William Sergeant 2020

Lincolnshire child's originally rush-seated chair with 3 domed ladders front legs and underarm turned in one, turned arms, straight back poles with flattened finials

Lincolnshire child's originally rush-seated chair with 3 domed ladders front legs and underarm turned in one, turned arms, straight back poles with flattened finials

I have no doubt that this tiny child's chair came from the same workshop as that in WS 42. Just compare those front legs and the cross stretcher, there are even some scribe marks just beneath the front leg turnings which is typical of some  Lincolnshire workshops. However it has had a brutal past. It was once rush-seated but someone has taken away the rushing along with the rushing bars and replaced the seat with ply wood. The dealer still wanted a ridiculous price for it which I was not prepared to meet but at least I have recorded it here.  The chances are that I will probably never find another one like this.

P.S. I found out later that a dealer from Holland bought it, so it looks like it has gone overseas ...

P.P.S. UPDATE: By some strange quirk of fate this chair was offered for auction a few months later in Leominster! I wasn't going to miss it this time and I secured it for a very reasonable amount and was so pleased to add it to my collection. See WS 120 for comparison to other chairs.

© William Sergeant 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated cherrywood ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened curved stay rail with button finials; 3 pierced ladders with both upward & downward shapings; cabriole front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 47 Lincolnshire ladder back chair made of cherry wood

I haven't actually seen this chair but this picture was kindly sent to me by John Boram. It's a bit special: made out of cherry wood and with some fancy pierced ladders with a bar top. Beautifully crafted vernacular furniture.

© William Sergeant 2019

The Elusive Turnpin Chair - A Lincolnshire rush-seated chair by any other name would smell as sweet

William Sergeant  long ago remarked to me that no one could confidently identify a ‘pin’ chair, also known as a ‘turn-pin’ chair. These chairs and their makers are something of a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century mystery. An idle search in the British Newspaper Archive during some Windsor chair research turned up Nicholas Allen of Boston, chair and spinning- wheel maker, who placed two advertisements for pin chair-makers in the Stamford Mercury on 6 August 1790 and 10 June 1803. Could the archive shed further light on pin or turn-pin chairs and their makers?  The resulting research was published in the Journal of the Regional Furniture Society.

The most important and illuminating advertisement read:

26 June 1812 Stamford Mercury: High-street, Boston. Matthew Bacon for William White deceased. To Chair-makers, Cabinet-makers, Wheelwrights, &c. To be SOLD by AUCTION By MATTHEW BACON, On Friday the 3d day of July 1812, on the premises of the late WILLIAM WHITE, Chair-maker, HIGH-STREET, BOSTON; ALL the STOCK in TRADE; consisting of upwards of 400 ash poles, 2,250 feet of ash, elm, and wainscot, 50 camp poles, 60 bed sides and ends, a quantity of pin chairs, a large quantity of stuff ready turned, a quantity of mats and rushes, 2 benches, blocks, turning-frame, tools &c. &c. N.B. The wood being all dry, is well worth the attention of the public. Credit will be given for all bargains above forty shillings, on approved security, to January the 20th, 1813.

That, together with the rest of my research, may be found here.

© Julian Parker 2019

Three Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back chairs compared:

WS 196: L-R WS 11, WS 195 and WS 59 side by side

Firstly, an apology for the slightly unsophisticated picture but it will serve to illustrate the point that I want to make.

The middle one is of a pair which appears at No 195; the RHS of the three is by far the most common Lincolnshire rush seated chair that I see: they have the appearance of being made in the first half of the 19th century; there is a pair on this site at No 59, many of which have a provenance back to the south of the county and I am certain that they were made by the Spikins families in Boston and Spalding. The LHS appears at No 11.  I have a provenance from the previous owner that goes back nearly a century and is associated with the Sleaford area. I just wonder if it was made in that town by the family of Hugh and Ann Mason. I know of only one other and that is in a village near to Spilsby.

It is immediately obvious that the front stretcher of each is identical and the pattern of the other stretchers is the same. The front legs are similar but have notable differences to make them distinct from each other. The middle one has only three back supports and the whole is strengthened by a top rail. These are the explicit design features that suggest a local pattern. What is not visible from the above picture are the implicit construction marks. All of them are exactly the same in having shallow incised rings to the back legs to aid in the drilling of the holes and all the back supports are morticed into the back legs and secured with thin metal pins. I have no doubt that the makers of these chairs were all apprenticed to workshops in the county of Lincolnshire and there they learned the same techniques for manufacturing this pattern of a chair while placing their own individual subtle design features.

© William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated bar top ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened stay rail fixed onto prominent button turnings; 3 plain domed ladders; straight turned front legs with tulip-shaped feet, morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 195 Bar top rush-seated ladder back side chair

My thanks must go to James Drake, a fellow chair collector, who was kind enough to inform me about some rush-seated chairs that were being offered for sale at Gildings auctioneers in June 2018 at Market Harborough. I was able to look at an image online and decided that they were worth bidding for - there were four chairs in the lot, a pair of bar top as above, one the same as No 59 on this site and a Lancashire wavy back chair. There was only one bid, which was mine, so I managed to secure them for the princely sum of £10 plus commission.

In all my years of collecting these Lincolnshire rush-seated chairs, I have never come across these bar topped examples, indeed there is only a single image of this type in all the published literature that I am aware of, but I am in no doubt that they were produced in the county.  This chair is compared with two others at No 196.

© William Sergeant 2019

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Ladder back side chair with bar top, from Leicester house clearance, same front stretcher as No. 2, No. 3 & No. 7, with the same implicit constructional markings. Probably from South Lincolnshire.