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TABLES 
be used, when properly mounted upon trestles, as 
a table for meals. After the repast the table was 
cleared away by first removing the board and then 
its supports. 
This simple method of constructing the dining- 
table with board and trestles is referred to in the 
early part of the eighth century by the Anglo-Saxon 
writer Tahtwin, in a verse quoted by Wright in 
"The Homes of Other Days "(p. 33). 
In process of time this important piece of furni- 
ture received another name. It was no longer called 
a board exclusively, but sometimes a table. How 
early this began we shall doubtless be told in due 
time by Doctor Murray in his great historical Dic- 
tionary now in course of publication. It is certain, 
however, that this new name for the board had be- 
come sufficiently current in the fourteenth century 
to be used to a considerable extent in " Piers the 
Ploughman," and by Chaucer, and in the beginning 
of the fifteenth century it was employed by Lydgate 
in his minor poems published by the Percy Society 
oftener, indeed, than the old word board. 
During the next two centuries the English din- 
ing-table went under one or the other of these two 
names. But we find in the literature of this period, 
as well as in the inventories of household furniture, 
a progressive tendency to use the word table more 
and the word board less, until at length the latter