Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/283

 a?2d Sentiments. 263 Another, having extorted feme money from a prieft. Immediately puts it in the hutch — Les dcnlers a mis en la huche. The hutch was indeed one of the moft important articles of furniture in the mediaeval chamber. All portable objetts of intrinlic value or utility were kept in boxes, becaufe they were thus ready for moving and taking away in cafe of danger, and becaufe in travelling people carried much of their movables of this delcription about with them. Hence the ufes of the hutch or cheft were very numerous and diverlified. It was ufual to keep clothes of every defcription in a cheft, and illuftrations of this pra6tice are met with not uncommonly in the illuminated manufcripts. One of them is given in our cut No. 187, taken from an illumination in a manufcript of the fourteenth century, given by Willemin. Jewels, plate, perlbnal ornaments of all kinds, and all defcriptions of " treafure," were limi- larly locked uj) in chetls. In our cut No. 188, taken alio from a manufcript in the BritilTi Mufeum (MS. Reg. 2 B, vii., of the beginning of the fourteenth cen- tury), a man appears in the aft of depofit- ing in a cheft hbulae or brooches, rings, buttons, and other objefts, and a large veftel probably of filver. Oar cut No. 189, from a manufcript in the National Library in Paris (No. 6956), reprefents a mifer examining the money in his hutch, which is here detached from a bed ; but in fome other illuminations, a hutch of much the fame form appears attached to the bed foot. In Anglo-Saxon the coffer was called a he, whence our word locker is derived; or a cxjjie, our cheft; or an arc: from the Anglo-Normans we derive the words hutch {huche) and col)-r (cnjjre). The Anglo-Saxons, as we have ftiown in a former chapter (p. 79), like our forefathers of a later period, kept their treafures in lockers or hutches. In the " Legend of St. Juliana," an Anglo-Saxon poem