Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair with 4 ladders, domed with downward shaping, straight backpoles with button finials and tapered feet, turned front legs morticed into the seat frame, with pad feet, rushing bars, front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double rear and side stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair with 4 ladders, domed with downward shaping, straight backpoles with button finials and tapered feet, turned front legs morticed into the seat frame, with pad feet, rushing bars, front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double rear and side stretchers WS 20

This chair shows all the hallmarks of a simple rush seated ladder back chair made in Northeast Lincolnshire, in good usable condition and probably 150 years old. Very few people know anything about these chairs and I recently (2012!) found this one on eBay and paid less than £4 for it. As with all these rush seated chairs it is made entirely out of ash.

© William Sergeant 2012 and 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; square cornered cabriole 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 ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; square cornered cabriole front legs morticed into the seat frame, missing rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers WS25

This is the very first rush seated Lincolnshire chair that I acquired; I found it hidden away in the back room of a second-hand shop in Greenwich. It was under other things and filthy but I recognised those distinctive front legs with cabriole shape and the turning on top. That was many years ago now and I am so pleased that I bought it. I think this is at least 200 years old; it has been made with a lack of sophistication and naivety that would indicate an early crude country chair - but what charm and presence!

© William Sergeant 2012

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, missing rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, missing rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers WS 23

Compare this Lincolnshire rush-seated side chair with WS 22 and WS21 below; there are so many things in common that these are undoubtedly made by the Ashton/Green families in North Lincolnshire. These do appear with much more regularity on the market and I have lost count the number of times they are described as Lancashire chairs. No, no, no, as a former Lincolnshire-born Prime Minister might have said. Look and learn! 

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back rocking chair: straight back uprights with flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs morticed into the seat frame, rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers WS 21

They are elegant well made vernacular furniture, skilfully made after many years of honing the design, cheap and light weight but brilliant survivors. They would have been on the market of their day as a cheaper alternative to Windsor chairs and many thousands of cottages in the East Midlands would have had these beautiful chairs to sit on.

© William Sergeant 2012 and 2020

Peter Tree discovering a front leg made from birch on a Lincolnshire rush-seated side chair

WS 60

The pair of chairs which appear in WS 59 had some wood in the front legs that I didn't recognise - one of the hall marks of a Lincolnshire rush seated chair is that they are invariably made out of ash. So the only thing to do was to pay a visit to my good friend Peter Tree: after some discussion in which we ruled out most woods we could think of Peter found his eyeglass and on closer inspection of the grain he established that the wood in question was in fact birch. It's not at all common in vernacular chairmaking to use birch in the UK but chairs that were imported from Scandinavian countries often were.

In July 2014 I was able to get Adam Bowett to look closely at this chair and he confirmed that it was in fact birch wood in the front legs.

© William Sergeant 2012

Update: further research has revealed that a number of Caistor chairs have birch components, including birch seats.  Since birch does not grow to seat-size dimensions in the UK we did a little more hunting and discovered that there were importations of American birch, which grows to a greater diameter, during the 19th century and quite possibly before that. Instances of birch cargos coming into the port of Hull have been found in advertisements in UK newspapers.

© William Sergeant and Julian Parker 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair with 4 domed ladders, straight back poles with tapered feet, with Lincolnshire front stretcher, double rear and side stretchers, rushing bars, turned front legs with vase feet morticed into the seat frame

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair WS 186

About five years ago I was sent some photographs of two rush seated ladder back chairs that were in a house near to Spilsby. One of them was identical to the chairs in WS 59 and it is of the type that I come across quite regularly. I have been able to trace these sorts of chair to southeast Lincolnshire and I am confident that they were made by the Spikins family of chair makers in Boston and Spalding. The other chair - pictured above - had straight front legs and a front stretcher with the same pattern as the rocking chair in WS 120. Again, I believe that these sorts of chairs come from the southeast Lincolnshire: indeed the rocking chair came out of a junk shop in Bourne.  So the fact these two chairs appeared in Spilsby, an area of the county where I would only expect to find the cabriole front legged chairs like WS 157, got me wondering if I had got my origins of these chairs wrong.

It was after my talk in Spilsby in the spring of 2017 that these two chairs were brought along to my chair surgery open day. I was able to photograph them both and to inquire into their provenance. Their tale was intriguing.

Throughout the nineteenth century there was a successful banking business in Lincolnshire called the Garfit, Claypon & Co Bank that had at one time ten branches throughout the county. In 1891 it merged with another company which was later absorbed into Lloyds. It was at that time when Bartholomew Claypon Garfit - a partner in the business - sold his large house near Boston to buy a large hunting estate near to Spilsby, bringing all his furniture with him. In subsequent years this estate was broken up and part of the furniture found its way into the ownership of a descendant close to Spilsby. It was that family that had brought along these two chairs for me to see.

So my belief that these types of chairs were made in the Boston area was once again re-inforced by the finding out the provenance of them in Spilsby which definitely showed that their history could be linking to the Boston area over 100 years ago.

© William Sergeant 2017 and 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back child's chair compared to ladder back rocking chair and ladder back side chair

WS 120: L-R WS 108 child's rush-seated chair, WS 42 rush-seated rocking chair of small proportions, and WS 59 RH full-size ladder back with pad feet

The child's chair is already featured in WS 108 but is compared here to two other chairs; it has replacement rushing bars but is the most delightful example of Lincolnshire regional furniture. The rocking chair with the missing lower ladder is also pictured elsewhere at WS 42. The full-sized rush-seated side chair on the right, from WS 59 is the most common design that I come across. While there are obvious design features that unite these three chairs,  there is also the fact that all have iron pins driven through from the back to secure the ladders into the back upright. Besides that all have faint scratch rings on the back legs to aid in their construction. All this leads to me to have no doubt that they all came from the same workshop.

© William Sergeant 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back armchair: 5 ladders with lower indented shape, straight back poles with flattened finials, front legs with graceful pad feet with upper turning joining the arms, Lincolnshire front stretcher turning, double side and rear stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back armchair WS 22

A Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back similar, but not identical, to one that appears at figure NE189 on page 154 in Dr B D Cotton's The English Regional Chair (1990).  The front legs and turnings are very similar but the arms of NE189 are straight, whereas those in this chair curve and terminate in a flattened rounded saucer shape. This chair is taller and consequently has room for an extra ladder.

© William Sergeant and Julian Parker 2012 and 2020

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs of birch with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 60 Peter Tree, chair maker, discovers birch front legs

The pair of chairs which appear in this post had some wood in the front legs that I didn't recognise - one of the hall marks of a Lincolnshire rush seated chair is that they are invariably made out of ash. So the only thing to do was to pay a visit to my good friend Peter Tree: after some discussion in which we ruled out most woods we could think of, Peter found his eyeglass and on closer inspection of the grain he established that the wood in question was in fact birch! It's not at all common in vernacular chairmaking to use birch in the UK but chairs that were imported from Scandinavian countries often were. In July 2014 I was able to get Adam Bowett to look closely at this chair and he confirmed that it was in fact birch wood in the front legs.

© William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 54 Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair

There is a similarity in construction marks to WS 87, WS 70, WS 52 and WS 37.

©William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned tapered front legs lower ring morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery not from Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 52 Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair

I bought this one at the auction house in Market Harborough: take a good look and you will see that the front stretcher doesn't look right. There was other rush seated chairs at the same auction consigned from the same vendor with the same front stretcher but not from Lincolnshire. I think this chair had its original stretcher broken and one was robbed off the other chairs. There is a similarity in construction marks to WS 87, WS 70, WS 54 and WS 37.

©William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back rocking side chair, straight back uprights with tapering feet flattened top finials; 4 ladders (1 missing) with lower indented shaping; turned front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 42 Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back rocking chair

WS 43 detail of front stretcher of Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back rocking chair

Of surprisingly small proportions but not a child's chair, in excellent condition except that it's missing the lowest ladder (there should be 4 not 3 as shown) with original rushing and seat edge trims. The front stretcher is like no other I have seen but a cracking little bit of rural Lincolnshire furniture none the less.  The front stretcher turning may also be seen on WS 70.

©William Sergeant 2019

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 5 ladders with lower indented shaping; square cornered cabriole front legs morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers possibly by Ashton/Green

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 5 ladders with lower indented shaping; square cornered cabriole front legs morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers: an Ashton chair WS 24 

This type of chair is known as an "Ashton Chair" after the family that are supposed to have made them in the Spilsby/Louth area of Lincolnshire and it is from these, with their distinctive features, that nearly all interest in Lincolnshire chairs stems. This particular design does not turn up very often and they are usually keenly contested as they are as Lincolnshire as the Imp and Stuffed Chine are. (Some of you may need to put stuffed chine into Google to understand that last remark. Or watch the video below).

The Imp, Lincoln Cathedral

Stuffed chine © Meridian Meats, Louth

© William Sergeant 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

A pair of Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chairs: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; turned front legs with pad feet morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chairs WS 59

Pictured above is one of a pair of rush seated chairs that I purchased at the Newark Antique Fair during August 2012. I have no doubt that they were made in Lincolnshire; they have all the features that I would expect: straight back legs, mainly made of ash wood, a flat seat with the rushing bars let into the side of the legs and the distinctive turned front stretcher that is used by so many Lincolnshire makers. There is no name stamp but this model is the most common of all the rush seated chairs that I find associated with the county. It even has the pieces of wood (called slips) to protect the rushing where it folds over the rushing bars. It has the appearance of being made during the mid Victorian period. It is not uncommon to find them in the south of the county and this leaves me in no doubt that they were produced by the Spikins family in Boston and Spalding.

Pair of Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chairs WS 59b

These common rush-seated chairs are compared with two others at No 196.

Lincolnshire rush-seated ladder back side chair: straight back uprights with tapered feet & flattened top finials; 4 ladders with lower indented shaping; square cornered cabriole front legs morticed into the seat frame, with rushing bars; front stretcher with turnery often found in Lincolnshire, double side & rear stretchers

WS 157 possibly from Spilsby

Original and untouched. I am indebted to Richard from Saxilby for helping me to acquire a pair of completely original Lincolnshire rush-bottomed chairs. He knew that I collected these chairs and when on his travels he saw these in a window of a Horncastle antique shop he turned around and inquired about them. He was told that they had come out of a house in Spilsby and were the left-overs from a group of a carver and six side chairs. He purchased them and then passed them on to me for my collection. Unfortunately I have been able to establish the veracity of the story of their previous ownership but I am still working on it. Finding a provenance for vernacular furniture is so important; proving they came from Spilsby would be a real bonus.

© William Sergeant 2015.

6

Lincolnshire rush seated ladder back chair, this time with five ladders and cabriole front leg. This type of chair is associated with the towns of Louth,Alford and Spilsby.

7

Rush seated, ladder back side chair with provenance going back over 100 years to the Boston area. The most common Lincs rush chair, probably made by the Spikins family of Boston and Spalding.

8

Ladder back armchair with re-rushed seat. No provenance but similar patterned chairs attributed to Lincolnshire, mid 1700’s

9

Rush seated ladder back chair with the same provenance, and from the same house, as chair No 7.

10

1980s faithful copy of original Lincs rush seated, ladder back armchair, by Rob Ley, who lived in Spilsby at that time. This chair is downstairs at Alford, not in the main exhibition room.