TABLES  early card and side
It is perhaps ironic that the design of early games tables can be traced back to sacred and ecclesiastical pieces. Furniture from one period borrows from another in ways which can be surprising. Card playing and gaming once occupied a place which has since been replaced by other forms of gambling [...]

Gate-leg table
Coinciding more or less with the Commonwealth period, an increasing number of households began to furnish their houses with relatively sophisticated furniture by comparison with the rather basic pieces of earlier periods. One of the most typical was the gate-leg table, made for the houses of yeomen farmers, manor houses and wealthier households whose [...]