‘Pierced and Perforated Carving, as Fine as the Best Cathedral Screen Work’: Antiquarianism and Faking Tudor Furniture in the 1840s

Abstract

Collecting ancient furniture — or furniture thought to be ancient — for display in ‘romantic interiors’ proliferated in 18th-century Britain; such pieces became so popular that by the 1840s it was easy to purchase generic examples across the country. This essay explores the output of George Shaw (1810–76), a particularly industrious early Victorian antiquary, who, besides working as an architect, restorer and supplier of Gothic-style interiors, also peddled fake ancestral furniture made for specific victims. He claimed his modern forgeries were from the time of Henry VII or Henry VIII, and this essay demonstrates how they were indebted to his long-term antiquarian research into medieval architecture, heraldry and woodwork. Some of Shaw’s forgeries, particularly those for the 4th duke of Northumberland, have been considered at length recently; however, this essay demonstrates that our understanding of his corpus is far from complete given the recent emergence of his until now forgotten work for the Mosleys of Rolleston Hall in Staffordshire. It also shows how the family’s important collection of ancient furniture, some of it gifted by Elizabeth I, had a direct influence upon his work, and that we should consider him to be a more significant figure in the history of Victorian furniture and forgery than we currently understand him to be.

Keywords:

• antiquarian
• forgery
• furniture
• Gothic
• relics
• Tudor
• Victorian

George Shaw (1810–76), the son of a mill owner from the rural village of Uppermill on the outskirts of Greater Manchester, is a compelling if comparatively unknown character in the history of early Victorian architecture and design. His work has, however, gained some attention recently, in particular the wealth of faked furniture that he produced for aristocrats in the 1840s, including for Algernon Percy (1792–1865), 4th duke of Northumberland.¹ Lacking an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his account in British and Irish Furniture Makers Online offers only a partial overview of his work, and whilst his Northumberland forgeries have been examined repeatedly, they are not reconciled fully with his antiquarian practice that emerged whilst he was a teenager.² This essay addresses this omission by situating Shaw’s fakery within the broader context of his antiquarian practice. Shaw was well connected in the antiquarian network around Manchester, and a wealth of manuscript correspondence and diaries reveal first-hand the formative influence this antiquarian network had upon him. But these sources also demonstrate how he became corrupted and applied his knowledge of Gothic architecture and Tudor woodwork, including the Thomas Stanley bed in the collection of James Dearden (1792–1826) of Rochdale Manor, to the production of bespoke, faked ‘antique’ furniture.³ Surviving correspondence also records how he preyed upon collectors who wished to acquire ancient ‘Gothic’- and Elizabethan-style furniture for their historicizing ‘romantic’ country piles.⁴

These forgeries, which appear to have occupied Shaw for less than a decade, are only part of his much broader and otherwise honourable career specializing in the revived Gothic style: Shaw erected new churches, including St Anne’s, Carlecotes, Penistone (1856–57) (Fig. 1); fitted-out medieval churches, such as St Chad’s in Rochdale (1847); and also constructed new buildings, including Friezland Vicarage, Saddleworth (1850).⁵ These structures and their interiors are indebted to Shaw’s Gothic style as exhibited by his forged ancestral furniture, and, as such, they need to be read together. Our knowledge of Shaw’s forgeries is, however, incomplete, as the recent discovery of his previously unknown yet highly significant work for the Mosleys at Rolleston Hall in Staffordshire demonstrates. This collection of furniture demonstrates that Shaw was a more significant figure in the early Victorian antiques trade and forgery than is currently assumed, and that his work, especially in the 1840s, was highly repetitive and differentiated primarily through heraldic ornament.

Fig. 1. George Shaw, the interior of St Anne’s facing the altar, Carlecotes, Penistone, 1856–57

© Peter N. Lindfield

tapping into a market for the past

Shaw’s production of faked Tudor furniture tapped into the pre-existing fashion for Gothic furniture. Modern Gothic, or ‘Gothick’, designs appeared in leading Georgian furniture- and cabinet-makers’ pattern-books, including Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754, 1755, 1762), but these designs only vaguely resemble the material, form, style and appearance of medieval furniture. Some, including Horace Walpole (1717–97), Thomas Barrett (1744–1803) and William Beckford (1760–1844), wanted to display ancient, or supposedly ancient, furniture at their houses (Strawberry Hill, Twickenham; Lee, Kent; Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire) and they collected turned ebony chairs, stools and tables, amongst other pieces, to create an air of the antique.⁶ Walpole even sought help from antiquaries to locate and acquire suitable specimens: in 1765 he wrote to the Cambridgeshire clergyman and antiquary Rev’d William Cole (1714–82), asking,

when you go into Cheshire and upon your ramble, may I trouble you with a commission, but about which you must promise me not to go a step out of your way. Mr Bateman had a cloister at Old Windsor furnished with ancient wooden chairs, most of them triangular, but all versions of patterns, and carved or turned in the most uncouth and whimsical forms […] I have long envied and coveted them. They may have such in poor cottages in so neighbouring a county as Cheshire. I should not grudge any expense for purchasing or carriage; and should be glad even for a couple such for my cloister here. When you are copying inscriptions in a churchyard in any village, think of me, and step into the first cottage you see.⁷

Cole failed to locate examples for Walpole, but Shaw, much like his contemporary architect–designer–antiquary A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52), had more success the following century: Shaw amassed old furniture and fragments, and he used these and other examples in the collections of his friends and contacts as inspiration for his forgeries.

The widespread popularity of ancient furniture increased dramatically in the 19th century, signalled by Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary (1816). Such pieces were sold through a network of antique and curiosity dealers operating in London as well as in Liverpool, Leeds, Southampton and Hertford in the 1820s, and also in Northampton, Gloucester, Birmingham, Portsmouth and Manchester in the 1830s.⁸ The range of tradable commodities in circulation had increased during the first few decades of the 19th century as antiques were liberated from historic settings during the Napoleonic Wars, and their transport to Britain became easier following Waterloo.⁹ Particularly notable dealers included John Webb (1799–1880), the most famous purveyor of ‘antique’ furniture in London, and Samuel (1805–78) and Henry Pratt who traded in armour and furniture, and who supplied staging materials for the Eglinton Tournament (1839).¹⁰ Forty per cent of the premises on Wardour Street in London dealt in antiques and curiosities in the 1830s and 1840s, and it was the capital’s centre for the trade in such commodities at this time.¹¹ The ‘antique’ furniture available on Wardour Street was often not what it appeared to be; Charles Lock Eastlake (1836–1906), for example, warned people about such furniture in his Hints on Household Taste (1868):

I would especially caution my readers against the contemptible specimens of that would be Gothic joinery which is manufactured in the backstreets of Soho. No doubt good examples of mediaeval furniture and cabinetwork are occasionally to be met in the curiosity shops of Wardour Street; but as a rule the ‘Glastonbury’ chairs and ‘antique’ bookcases which are sold in that venerable thoroughfare will prove on examination to be nothing but gross libels on the style of art which they are supposed to represent.¹²

These pieces of questionable ‘antique’ furniture nevertheless fulfilled market demand.

Such was the popularity of antique furniture that the January 1842 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine included an essay on ‘Ancient Domestic Furniture’. This explained that ‘our attention has been directed to this subject by the recent occurrence of two sales by auction in which several very remarkable articles of domestic furniture have been exhibited to public view’ at Pryor’s Bank, Fulham, and East Retford (Fig. 2).¹³ The popularity of such furniture is signalled by the ornate chimneypiece on the cover of Horatio Rodd’s 1842 Catalogue of Portraits, Pictures, Drawings, Carvings in Oak, Ivory, & Boxwood, Antique Furniture & Plate,¹⁴ and The Gentleman’s Magazine observed that,

Fig. 2. Chimney Pieces at the Pryor’s Bank, Fulham, Plate IV from The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1842

Public Domain

the prevalence, at the present period, of a taste for Antique Furniture is most decidedly manifested, not only by the examples which every one may happen to know of either ancient mansions, or modern houses in the ‘Elizabethan’ style, filled with collections of this description, but by the multitude of warehouses which now display their attractive stores, not merely in Wardour Street, but in almost every quarter of the metropolis.¹⁵

Cobbled-together furniture, known as ‘Frankenstein’ or ‘cut-and-shut’, was clearly a response to the nature of materials available at the time as well as customer demand for antique furnishings:

Of course these numerous dealers must be maintained by a certain number of customers, and there is no doubt that many of them have reaped a lucrative harvest. The stock of old furniture remaining in the obscure and poorer habitations of this country was soon exhausted; large importations have in consequence been made from the continent […and] great quantities of detached and fragmentary portions, and of architectural carvings, have been collected, and worked up into the forms now required by modern convenience, but which were perhaps unknown at the time when the materials thus employed were originally designed.¹⁶

Shaw’s faked ancestral furniture produced in the 1840s therefore aligned with contemporary fashions for the antique and romantically furnished homes; the exact nature of his forgeries, including their antiquarian sources and the methodology governing their form and ornament is, however, different. Crucially, Shaw never presented himself as an antiques dealer, but rather an independent agent acting as the go-between connecting aristocrats with ancestral ‘relics’ held by other parties wishing to remain anonymous; he therefore avoided being tainted with the negative reputation ascribed to dealers at the time.¹⁷ Of course, Shaw was not only a dealer, but a dealer at the head of a cottage industry in Uppermill churning out pseudo-ancient furniture alongside church and domestic woodwork.

a burgeoning interest in the antique: gothic architecture and heraldry

The design of Shaw’s pseudo-Tudor furniture was guided by his life-long interest in Gothic material.¹⁸ The earliest record of this is found in his diary for 6 January 1829, where, aged 18, Shaw noted ‘drawing Melrose Abbey with pencils in his [Francis Raines’s] Scrap Book’.¹⁹ Francis Raines (1805–78), the new curate of Saddleworth church, proved crucial to Shaw’s burgeoning antiquarianism: he encouraged Shaw and he also connected him to other antiquaries and collectors. Shaw’s diaries demonstrate not only his interest in medieval architecture, but also a robust understanding of the language necessary to describe such buildings:

The view, consist of the grand eastern window of the choir, with some smaller windows &c — seen in the background. The architecture, is of chaste Gothic, with lancit [sic] shaped windows, filled with the most superb tracery; particularly the large one; over which there are two statues, seemingly of a king and queen, which with numerous canopied niches which were once filled with statues of Saints it is supposed, as there is one still left remaining, and several pieces of broken ones, are to be seen in the various niches.²⁰

As rigorous as his interest in Melrose Abbey appears to be, Shaw, like many other antiquaries of his day, was also drawn to the site for its literary significance courtesy of Scott’s influential description of the ruined abbey in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). Indeed, Shaw transcribed lines from Scott’s poem in his diary; like Scott in Kenilworth (1821), Shaw explored buildings’ associated histories and he felt compelled to inspect, document and preserve built heritage and their histories in drawing and prose.²¹

Until early 1829, Shaw followed this standard type of antiquarian enquiry.²² Raines, however, broadened out Shaw’s approach through the creative medium of model-making:

Mr Raines has frequently mentioned a plan of constructing models of gothic Architecture with Bristol board. Mr Bourke a friend of Mr R’s has formed a splendid Cathedral in this way. It is about a yard long, and half a yard broad, and the great tower is half a yard in height. And though so small every thing is minutely formed; the delicate tracery of the windows, the airy pinnacles, the projecting buttresses, the battlements, the niches for statues &c; in short every ornament peculiar to this style of Architecture […] is there carved with the utmost niceness and skill.²³

Shaw began reproducing extant Gothic architecture in miniature using this method: ‘this evening I thought I would attempt something’, he wrote, so ‘I have accordingly cut the doors of the Galilee Ely Cathedral which is a fine piece of Architecture’.²⁴ He did not limit himself to strict mimesis but embraced the technique’s imaginative possibilities to produce capricci, creating ‘a gorgeous building in the church style although I never saw anything of the kind’.²⁵ This and his other models were based upon knowledge of Gothic architecture, but they did not copy specific buildings. Aged eighteen, Shaw’s understanding of medieval architecture is beyond doubt, and he even articulated the differences between what he considered to be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Gothic architecture. Writing about Holy Trinity church in Huddersfield, built by Thomas Taylor (1777/78–1826) of Leeds between 1816 and 1819, he thought

it looks far better at distance than it does near. The outline is good, and the general plan rather tastefully contrived, but [there is] not one single atom of carving, which is so naturally expected, especially when the founder is rich, and in abundant circumstances.²⁶

The failings applied to ‘all the windows, doors, pinnacles &c. [because they] are as plain and destitute of ornament, as it was possible to make them. The steeple appears to me, to be the worst part of the building, it is square and heavy and not consistant [sic] with the rest of the church’.²⁷ His knowledge of medieval architecture, and the opportunities offered by Bristol board, allowed Shaw a cheap and quick way to build what he considered to be ‘good’ Gothic buildings. Although these models are now lost, Shaw’s accounts of them demonstrate the power of his historically grounded imagination and their informed character can be gauged by the title page to his Antiquarian Scraps, where the calligraphy and border recall the spirit — if not the fine detail — of medieval manuscripts (Fig. 3).²⁸

Fig. 3. George Shaw, title page of Antiquarian Scraps, c. 1833. M175/2/3

Courtesy of Oldham Local Studies and Archives

Shaw’s fascination with Gothic followed the contemporary antiquarian trend for exploring medieval subjects, and was firmly aligned with fashionable taste and picturesque aesthetics.²⁹ He was not only interested in Gothic because it was popular: it had greater significance to him, particularly because of his interest in domestic history. This can be seen especially in his response to the fire that devastated parts of York Minster on 1 February 1829:

I have heard to day [sic] at Huddersfield that the choir of York Cathedral has been burned down and that the organ, a great quantity of old carved work, and part of the splendid window; are entirely destroyed. […] What a truly national loss it would have been; if this superb pile of building, which is the pride of the surrounding country; had fallen a prey to the flames. What a magnificent ancient relic would have been lost to the eye of the antiquarian; what a splendid building to the mind of the architect; and what a beautiful example of the taste and industry of our ancestors will would thus have been lost to the patriot, to the lover of his country, and to the aspiring artists of the present time.³⁰

To Shaw, Gothic was a national, historic style to be cherished. This is remarkably similar to other antiquaries who prized Gothic rather than classical architecture, including John Carter (1748–1817), who argued in 1799 that ‘the admiration that has been conjured up in support of (the Roman and Grecian) styles has necessarily turned the genius of Englishmen from their national architecture to toil in an inglorious and servile pursuit to imitate a foreign manner’.³¹ Shaw therefore fits neatly within a recognized antiquarian mindset from the later Georgian period that was directed towards understanding and preserving domestic Gothic material. His interest in Gothic extended beyond external architecture and ornament to internal decoration as well, and he wrote that,

I would have churches to be built in the most splendid manner possible; and to have the interior in the same degree of costliness as the building. I would have pews as superbly lined as the funds of their owners, would permit; with escutcheons emblazoned over them; doors carved in fretwork; rich stained glass windows.³²

The interior furnishings of St Chad’s in Rochdale, produced by Shaw in the 1840s and characterized by ostentatious carved decoration, clearly illustrate his admiration of rich Gothic ornament applied across woodwork and interiors generally (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. George Shaw, heraldic panelling on the Trinity Chapel screen, St Chad’s, Rochdale, 1843

© Peter N. Lindfield

Heraldry also particularly appealed to Shaw, and his first mention of the subject in his diary comes on 14 March 1829, where the evening had been spent with Raines and ‘conversation lay principally upon heraldry’.³³ Indeed, heraldry was an important part of historical enquiry within his antiquarian circle, with Raines being ‘much chagrined at the thoughts of his brother having entered a nasty black rook, in the books of the Heralds College’.³⁴ Shaw was especially eager to understand the arms of his armigerous ancestors, and he eagerly awaited delivery of an ‘old pane of glass from a window in Shaw Hall, which has the crest or bulls [sic] head with a coronet round its neck, stained upon it’ as a record of his family’s armigerous qualifications and identity.³⁵ Despite the glass’s poor state of preservation, it remained an important family relic:

it is very much scratched and defaced, and has not much appearance of beauty: but through its being a crest of the Radcliffes, and its great antiquity, I value it more than its real intrinsic value, and than what I should have done if it was not relating to our family.³⁶

Heraldry consumed a fair amount of Shaw’s early antiquarian training, and on 25 July 1829 he drew ‘and coloured my Grandfathers [sic] arms, in my Reference Book […]. They consist of a plain white shield, with two Black bends engrailed, with a red line across them. The crest is a bulls [sic] head, with an Earls coronet about its neck’.³⁷ Although his description of the arms is not expressed entirely in the pared-back and formulaic language of heraldry (blazon), the terminology he used to describe the arms reveals either a sound knowledge of the subject, or that he had access to a source that did. Shaw clearly wished to master heraldry, and in late July 1829 he wrote, ‘I have had some thoughts of studying Heraldry a little so as to be able to understand, the terms for various colours and marks with [which] they have’.³⁸ A little over a month later, he had made sufficient progress to record on 3 September that he had ‘spent two or three hours every evening this week in studying heraldry, and I think I shall soon understand it perfectly’.³⁹ Twenty days later, he had achieved this and noted that ‘I begin to understand [heraldry] very well now. I can decipher coats of arms very well’.⁴⁰ Like many antiquaries, for Shaw understanding armorials was important: ‘the study of Heraldry is very amusing, to a person fond of antiquities. It explains the bearings and marks of honour, or dishonour of the old chiefs or feudal lords. &c’.⁴¹ Comprehending this visual language was therefore highly beneficial to Shaw’s antiquarian pursuits, and it had direct utility when he came to producing furniture presented as ancient family relics. He also displayed heraldry widely when fashioning church interiors and his own house, St Chad’s in Uppermill (Fig. 5).⁴²

Fig. 5. View of the Hall at St Chad’s, Uppermill, as seen in 1920. From Allen Mellor & Co., ‘St. Chad’s,’ Uppermill, Saddleworth, Yorks (Oldham 1920)

Public Domain

As with heraldry, Shaw also recorded and, whenever possible, collected pieces of ancient furniture. Very little medieval and Tudor furniture had survived down to the 18th and 19th centuries, and this precipitated the trade in cut-and-shut furniture. Shaw was aware of this, but rather than reassembling fragments of ancient carved woodwork to create new pieces of marketable furniture, most of his output is entirely modern but derived directly from late medieval woodwork that he had surveyed and, on occasion, collected and reused.⁴³ Describing the pulpit at St Chad’s in Rochdale, for example, Shaw wrote that it is ‘a very handsome one, made of oak and covered with carving[.] It is very old, and nearly as black as ebony […] Every thing about it is so very perfect’.⁴⁴ Similar records concerning furniture can be found throughout Shaw’s descriptions of historic buildings in Lancashire, such as Glodwick Hermitage in Oldham; the hall contained ‘beautiful ancient carved oak work from the old Hall of Dene Street belonging to the family of the Swires, [and…] an old black oak chair, from the same place, in the corner of the room’.⁴⁵ He also drew records of such interiors and furniture, including Tabley Hall in Cheshire, the ‘Prior’s chair from Southwick Priory, Hampshire’, and an Elizabethan bed (Figs 6–7).⁴⁶ Complementing his understanding of Gothic architecture and heraldry, Shaw had clearly acquired knowledge of ancient woodwork too.

Fig. 6. George Shaw, Interior of Tabley Old Hall. M175/2/3, 49

Courtesy of Oldham Local Studies and Archives

Fig. 7. George Shaw, an Elizabethan bed. M175/2/3, 139

Courtesy of Oldham Local Studies and Archives

Furniture’s provenance, material, colour and ornate carving all attracted his attention, and Shaw’s interest in these historic fragments grew over time. Much like the ‘true black blood’ — turned ebony furniture — to which Walpole was so attracted, Shaw also clearly equated dark or black wood with the antique, as seen in his record of the St Chad’s pulpit. Representing his matured interest in historic furniture is the following description of

a most curious old oak bed, very richly carved […] The top part of the bed or what is generally termed the beds head, has two Saxon arches, in the manner of niches, ornamented in that curious quaint style so common in that kind of architecture. These arches have on each side of them statues of human beings, two men, and one, woman, who is in the centre between the arches. The posts are very thick and massy, and covered with carving. The cornice is very much spoiled, in fact so little of it left that people can scarcely tell what was its original shape.⁴⁷

Shaw acquired parts of an old bed that he is recorded having ‘put together’ with new carved wood to fill in the gaps: approximately half of what is known as the Ordsall Hall ‘Radcliffe’ bed is fabricated by Shaw including the tester’s royal arms, the whole of the heraldically rich footboard converted from an earlier chest, and the canopy’s outer frieze. It was photographed at his house, St Chad’s in Uppermill, in the ‘bedroom over dining room’ in 1920 when the contents were put up for auction (Fig. 8).⁴⁸ He also collected other pieces of furniture, and on 5 September 1829 recorded ‘varnishing an old oak chair, which I got a short time ago. It is a most superb piece of Antient chair furniture that I ever saw [… and] is all open flowers carved by a masterly hand. — Date 1537’.⁴⁹ It was even shown off to visitors including other antiquaries ‘who examined it very minutely’.⁵⁰ Such relics — even restored examples covered in dark varnish — had currency. Shaw also learned early on that not all ancient furniture was as old as it appeared; one such example included a

Fig. 8. George Shaw, the Radcliffe bed seen at St Chad’s, Uppermill, in 1920. From Allen Mellor & Co., ‘St. Chad’s,’ Uppermill, Saddleworth, Yorks (Oldham 1920)

Public Domain

beautiful oak bookcase apparently very old, but my obliging conductor told me that it was made up of various pieces of carved oak which had come into his possession. If it could not be termed an original antique, it certainly merited admiration from the very tasteful manner in which it was put together.⁵¹

As a piece of cut-and-shut made from fragments of historic carved wood, the bookcase was not ‘original’. Yet this re-composition did not appear to have unduly concerned Shaw. Indeed, this may have provided him with a template for creating his own re-compositions or modern fabrications.

A significant piece of historic furniture was in the collection of James Dearden, another figure in Shaw’s antiquarian circle; writing on 3 October 1829, Shaw recorded how Dearden had ‘showed him [Raines] a very capital collection of Antiquities and curiosities of every kind, and amongst other things, the state bed from Latham House which was there during the siege’.⁵² A recently discovered photograph of the bed included in the house’s 1913 contents sale shows it replete with a footboard and tester, both of which are now lost, and if coeval with the bed’s construction, the heraldic ornament links it directly to Sir Thomas Stanley (1435–1504), 1st earl of Derby (Fig. 9).⁵³ Shaw was clearly aware of the Stanley bed in Dearden’s collection when it and other antique material was shown to Raines in 1829, and a drawing of the derivative Lovely Hall bed made for the Lancashire Molyneux family is included in one of his notebooks (Fig. 10).⁵⁴ Shaw was therefore not only well connected to collectors with important Tudor furniture, but also an active collector of antique material necessary to inform his own studies and output as an antiquary, architect, designer and furniture-maker.

Fig. 9. The Thomas Stanley bed as seen in 1913. From Messrs C. W. Provis and Sons, The Manor House, Rochdale (Immediately Opposite the Town Hall) (Manchester 1913), opp. 17

Courtesy of Touchstones, Rochdale

Fig. 10. George Shaw, drawing of the Molyneux bed at Lovley Hall. M175/2/5, 11

Courtesy of Oldham Local Studies and Archives

a peddler of fake furniture, and the mosleys

The largest client to unwittingly amass Shaw’s fake ancestral furniture was the 4th duke of Northumberland.⁵⁵ Shaw also tried to pass off his forgeries to other aristocrats, including George Bridgeman (1789–1865), 2nd earl of Bradford, and Edward Smith-Stanley (1775–1851), 13th earl of Derby. These three ‘victims’ are well known, but the Uppermill faker was also working for yet more families that have not been addressed at length in recent criticism. For example, he was ‘re-olding’ the interior of Hopwood Hall in Middleton, Greater Manchester, for Susan Hopwood in the 1850s, and this commission demonstrates a far wider repertoire of decorative forms than found in his work from the preceding decade.⁵⁶ There is far more to Shaw’s output than his fakes suggest. He also attempted to pass off pseudo-ancestral furniture to William Perry Herrick (1795–1876) who was at the time building Beaumanor, Leicestershire, in the clearly historicizing Jacobean style (1842–53). In early 1848, Herrick wrote about the furniture Shaw attempted to pass off to him, as well as the approach he took to make his new work appear old:

I had some Furniture offered to me by a Mr Shaw who lived near Manchester, & who said it had belonged to one of my Family who was Warden of Manchester College: I requested my Architect to go & look at it, he being in the Neighbourhood, but he was put off with a shuffling excuse; afterwards Mr Shaw sent of his own account a Bedstead to Beau Manor with the Herrick Arms upon it, I had it examined, & had every reason to think it was all humbug so I returned it; I have heard of no less than three other Galleries to whom similar offers have been made; there is a mode of staining the Arms so that you cannot tell the difference between the New & the old Finishes in which they are placed.⁵⁷

Shaw was clearly busy churning out new-old furniture, and he appears to have hoped that the work would be good enough in its own right and with limited explanation to fool or appeal to his victims. Some, like Herrick, were not taken in, and the 1848 letter clearly indicates that Shaw’s luck passing off his fake furniture was waning; the duke of Northumberland was also questioning the authenticity of the material Shaw was sending at this time.

Assessing the full range of work by this industrious architect-designer-antiquary is hampered by his marginal, provincial status — he is afforded less prominence than his contemporary Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin — and his frequently uncatalogued letters, diaries and sketchbooks are scattered amongst private collections and archives. But given a clearly established 1840s corpus — particularly of furniture demonstrating idiosyncratic design — stylistic comparisons can help to identify his hand elsewhere. Not only was his work highly repetitive in terms of style and decorative patterns in the 1840s, but he also reproduced similar suites of ‘ancient’ furniture for numerous clients that are differentiated largely by their heraldic augmentation.⁵⁸ His repetitive approach also extended to the ploy used to pass off his fakes: repetition appears to have been his modus operandi in general.

Visual evidence indicates that Shaw worked for the Mosley family; this is significant not because of the family’s rank — none of Shaw’s known victims comes close to the 4th duke of Northumberland in this regard — but because this work has otherwise been forgotten and because it was displayed alongside genuine antique furniture held by the family. Headed from the late Georgian period by Sir Oswald Mosley (1785–1871), 2nd baronet, the significance of this ancient furniture did not escape his notice: Sir Oswald knew they retained several important pieces of furniture gifted to Sir Nicholas Mosley (c. 1527–1612), his ancestor, at the turn of the 17th century. These pieces came into the family as a gift from Elizabeth I to Sir Nicholas because of his service as Lord Mayor of London in 1599–1600, and in Family Memoirs (1849) Sir Oswald recorded that,

Before the termination of his year of office, the Queen [Elizabeth I] was graciously pleased to mark her high approbation of the services of the lord mayor by conferring upon him the honour of knighthood, and she gave him, at the same time, a handsomely-carved oak bedstead, together with some other articles of furniture, for the new house which he had recently erected at Hough End [Manchester], on the site of the old mansion which his ancestors had inhabited.⁵⁹

Elizabeth I’s gift does not appear in royal household accounts; however, it has a well-established family tradition, and it is mentioned specifically in Sir Nicholas’s will as a gift from the Queen: ‘Also I give and bequeath to my said wief in lieu of her chamber two of my best beddes w^th the ffurniture accordinglie, except the best tapestrie coverings, and the best bedstocke, the Queen’s gift, also excepted’.⁶⁰ A bed included in the 1542 Whitehall and 1547 Henry VIII post-mortem inventories matching the size and description of an example that had a profound impact upon Shaw’s later faked furniture, left the royal collection at some point after 1547 and its disappearance would be accounted for if it was the gift from Elizabeth I to Sir Nicholas. The inventory descriptions for the now ex-royal collection bed are the same and read: ‘oone bedstede gilt and painted with iiij of the planettes in the hed/and sondry other stories in the sides and fete being in length ij yerdes quarter and in bredith oone yerde iij quarters di/having Ceeler Tester’.⁶¹ This certainly appears to fulfil the description of the bed made by Sir Oswald as a ‘handsomely-carved oak bedstead’, and, as noted, it matches the unaltered size of what is now known as the Henry VII and Elizabeth of York marriage bed (Fig. 11). The bed was seemingly a larger and far more sophisticated model for at least three beds that Shaw produced in the 1840s, including for the duke of Northumberland (Fig. 12).⁶² Shaw described the Northumberland version as,

Fig. 11. The ‘Henry VII and Elizabeth of York Marriage Bed’

Courtesy of The Langley Collection, Hexham

Fig. 12. George Shaw, The duke of Northumberland ‘Paradise Bed’, 1847

Courtesy of Christie’s

In the same style [as a pair of buffets — ‘perforated & cut through’ and] is a most magnificent bedstead — pillars similarly carved — foot board like the upper part of the cupboard or buffet — head part with Adam & Eve standing on each side of the line of life […] & inscription &c also cut through and on each side the Adam & Eve carved panel two sides partly with shields hung in shafts upon arabesque foliage similar to those in the drawing of the buffet — A very rich perforated cornice runs round & the pillars are surrounded by small lions, forming the most superb specimen of Tudor furniture in existence and traditionally designated the Paradise Bed. — Its price 70£. —⁶³

This description helpfully emphasizes the repetitive, en suite nature of Shaw’s furniture from this period. Although the Henry VII and Elizabeth of York bed has been identified by some as another of Shaw’s fakes,⁶⁴ this does not account for a substantial history of structural modification consistent with repeated transportation, nor that there are fragments of a medieval paint scheme found on parts of its structure, or that the quality of the carving and iconographic scheme are distinctly superior to Shaw’s work.⁶⁵

The ancient bed and the rest of the furniture gifted by Elizabeth I to Sir Nicholas Mosley passed down through the family, and, in August 1933, the fascist politician Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), 6th baronet, wrote to the Hough End Hall Preservation Society in Manchester proposing that these family heirlooms, along with paintings, could be returned to the house for display. Although this correspondence is now lost, extracts were transcribed and published by the Ancient Monuments Society and certain pieces of furniture are mentioned with helpful detail:

Sir Oswald Mosley showed great interest in the project, and wrote in August, 1933, to say that although he no longer had any connection with the house, he would be willing to give pictures, furniture, or anything associated with the family history if the Hall were turned into a museum. He specifically mentioned the carved oak bedstead presented by Queen Elizabeth I to Sir Nicholas Mosley; a long carved oak settle marked ‘N.M.1596’; and a carved oak sideboard marked ‘N.M.’. Sir Oswald also offered a portrait of Sir Nicholas copied by Tonneau from the original in Chetham’s Hospital.⁶⁶

These ‘heirlooms’ — a term used to identify them in 1940s correspondence regarding the settlement of the Mosley estates — were catalogued with at least three copies of the schedule in circulation; these records have also since disappeared.⁶⁷

Correspondence linking Shaw with Sir Oswald and placing him and his work at Rolleston has not emerged (these letters could have been destroyed in the 1871 fire that gutted the house’s library), but documentary photographs taken of Rolleston’s interior at the end of the 19th century are indispensable.⁶⁸ These photographs show not only ancient furniture, but pieces that demonstrate Shaw’s unmistakable hand and are comparable to his other 1840s fakes. We can be certain that Shaw supplied the Mosleys with ancient-style furniture given their appearance and that the escutcheons are charged with Mosley armorial devices (the battle-axe), but we cannot tell whether these pieces were sold to Sir Oswald as genuinely ancient relics in the same way that he passed off his pseudo-Tudor works to the duke of Northumberland et al., or whether he was instead supplying Sir Oswald with furniture complementing his genuinely ancient examples. The latter makes the most sense, particularly if the Henry VII and Elizabeth of York bed at Rolleston served as a model for his work. Underhanded dealing cannot be ruled out, however.

Before turning to consider Shaw’s work, as seen in these Victorian photographs of Rolleston, it is helpful to consider the family’s historic furniture. The most important example documented by the photographs is the settle marked N.M. 1596: this can be seen in multiple shots of the house’s interior, and it is certainly the example that Sir Oswald Mosley wrote about in August 1933. Fittingly, it was displayed prominently on the first landing of the house’s principal staircase; lit from above and apparently raised on a towering dais, its significance to the family and any visitor to the house was inescapable (Fig. 13). It was ostentatiously located directly beneath the royal coat of arms of England. Almost every part of the settle’s structure is covered with repetitive carved detail (especially guilloche), consistent with elaborately carved chests and other box-like furniture from the time, and it could be one of the most significant pieces of domestic furniture surviving from Elizabethan England.⁶⁹ N.M. refers to Sir Nicholas Mosley, and 1596 is the year that he purchased the Manor of Manchester and began to build Hough End Hall. This settle is almost certainly not in its original Tudor condition, particularly given the incoherently plain stiles; however, without first-hand study it is impossible to come to firm conclusions.

Fig. 13. Views of the interior of Rolleston Hall, Staffordshire, showing the N.M. 1596 settle on the house’s principal staircase landing, 1892

Source: Historic England Archive

Whilst exhibiting typically Tudor decoration, the settle’s cresting rail formed from scrolled cockatrices (a serpent with a crested head) is striking given that this beast is unusual in furniture from the period, although other serpents feature in Tudor pattern-books.⁷⁰ The settle’s arms are formed from the same scrolled cockatrice, and this matches the cockatrice found on the headboard of the Henry VII and Elizabeth of York bed. Shaw copied this repeating band of cockatrices on the settle, save for the intermediary ogival ‘flowerings’, and he applied it repeatedly on the staircase at his Uppermill house (Fig. 14). Shaw’s staircase cockatrices are clumsier when compared with those on the settle and the bed’s headboard, notably the characterization of the beak, tongue and flowered tails. This clumsy style characterizes Shaw’s outputs as exhibited also by his paradise beds, such as that for the duke of Northumberland where the lion beneath Adam looks like a caricatured pig and the dragon beneath Eve is awkward and the wing appears more like a holly leaf. If we compare these with the beasts on the royal bed’s headboard there is a patent difference in craftsmanship (Fig. 15). This staircase has been misdated to January 1831 because of an erroneous transcription from Shaw’s diary which in fact reads, ‘I have four massive oak pillars carved in spirals, and partly turned’: this has nothing to do with the staircase’s construction as claimed elsewhere.⁷¹ We can, however, see Shaw’s early awareness of the cockatrice given their incorporation into the frontispiece of his Antiquarian Scraps (Fig. 3), which appears to date from around 1833.⁷² This suggests Shaw visited Rolleston no later than 1833; pre-dates his forged furniture by more than a decade, but we also know Shaw passed within a couple of miles of Rolleston on 19 April 1831 whilst on business.⁷³ He was also connected to the Mosleys via his antiquarian network: the Rev’d William Hay (1761–1839), a correspondent of his, was employed by Sir John Parker Mosley (1732–98), 1st baronet, as steward of the Manchester court, meaning that Shaw was well placed in the Mosley circle to get access to and view their antique furniture.⁷⁴

Fig. 14. Comparison of the cockatrices on the N.M. 1596 settle at Rolleston Hall, 1892, and George Shaw’s cockatrices on the staircase at St Chad’s, Uppermill

Source: Historic England Archive and © Peter N. Lindfield

Fig. 15. George Shaw, detail of the central panel of the duke of Northumberland’s ‘Paradise Bed’ headboard, 1847, and the central panel of the ‘Henry VII and Elizabeth of York Marriage Bed’

Courtesy of Christie’s and The Langley Collection, Hexham

Whilst some of the furniture recorded in the 1892 photographs of Rolleston can be accepted as part of the Elizabeth I gift (the elaborately carved bed is notably excluded from the photographs), others are clearly far more modern. Indeed, some of the furniture is unmistakably Shaw’s: several pieces exhibit his very specific and idiosyncratic ornamental repertoire, for example as found at his own house in Uppermill, as well as furniture that he supplied to the duke of Northumberland. The most prominent and explicit example of Shaw’s work is the ‘hall cupboard’ in Rolleston’s entrance hall (Fig. 16): this piece almost exactly matches a pair (Fig. 17) that Shaw described to the duke of Northumberland on 12 August 1847 as being

Fig. 16. View of the entrance hall of Rolleston Hall, Staffordshire, showing the hall cupboard, 1892

Source: Historic England Archive

Fig. 17. George Shaw, duke of Northumberland’s hall cupboard, 1847

© Peter N. Lindfield

about the time of Henry VIIth — There are two of them apparently intended to stand on each side of the door of a dining hall, being in fact the ancient ‘hall Cupboard’, or board for the display of plate, these being three stories or stages in height — They are of 6 in: heigh & 3ft wide. — The panels in the upper part are perforated or cut Through, and have recently been lined with Ultramarine blue which gives a good effect, the whole being in good repair. — 30£each. —⁷⁵

The Mosley version is almost identical to the hall cupboards Shaw made for Northumberland, and each features posts carved with diaper, rails ornamented by rinceaux, an overhanging cornice, an upper register backed by pierced tracery panels separated by diaper-covered mullions, a lower register backed by linenfold and mantled hour-glass escutcheons on the posts. Unlike the Northumberland example with its shields charged with Percy devices, the Mosley hall cupboards have shields featuring a single battle-axe derived from the family arms.⁷⁶ These hall cupboards are essentially identical, save for the heraldry: like Shaw’s paradise beds, they illustrate his remarkable economy and reuse of ornament and structure. Indeed, the same architectural characteristics found on these hall cupboards are shared by the paradise beds and other piece of furniture, such as the cabinet-on-stand seen behind the Radcliffe bed in Figure 8. This recycling could, perhaps, have been influenced by late 15th- or early 16th-century furniture Shaw knew of, specifically the Thomas Stanley bed in the collection of his friend and antiquary, Dearden, and the related Adam Hulton bed at Chetham’s Library, Manchester, that had been converted at some point before 1827 into a ‘bookcase’ or hall cupboard remarkably like Shaw’s examples made for Northumberland and Mosley.⁷⁷

As he did for the duke of Northumberland, Shaw produced other pieces of en suite furniture for the Mosleys. One of Rolleston’s bedrooms was photographed, and therein are numerous pieces of woodwork matching Shaw’s work elsewhere. Notably, the Rolleston bed (Fig. 18) matches that seen in the Bedroom over Hall at St Chad’s (Fig. 19), but with the headboard featuring a suitably specific heraldic panel depicting the Mosley arms surrounded by gadrooning. Each headboard’s central panel is set amongst fluted pilasters, flanked by panels with S-scrolled cockatrices and finished throughout with pyramidal finials: these are also replicated at Shaw’s house, seen in Figure 5. Shaw supplied another version of this bed to the duke of Northumberland with suitable arms, and he described it on 14 March 1848 as an ‘Elizabethan State bed with the Earls Arms badges Supporters — garter &c’ and he valued it at £55.⁷⁸ Another example of this bed by Shaw is preserved at Gawthrope Hall in Lancashire (Fig. 20), where the arms carved into the headboard panel approximate Shuttleworth impaling Fleetwood, and the footboard is decorated with two barbed hour-glass escutcheons charged with R and S for Richard Shuttleworth (presumably c. 1613–48). These four beds form a coherent group within Shaw’s repertoire, and they relate to an example included in Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836), that, in the annotation to the plate, is recorded in the collection of Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848) — a personal contact of Shaw’s — at Goodrich Court in Herefordshire (Fig. 21):⁷⁹

Fig. 18. View of the interior of Rolleston Hall, Staffordshire, showing the Oak Bedroom, 1892

Source: Historic England Archive

Fig. 19. George Shaw, bed in Bedroom over Hall at St Chad’s, Uppermill, in 1920. From Allen Mellor & Co., ‘St. Chad’s,’ Uppermill, Saddleworth, Yorks (Oldham 1920)

Public Domain

Fig. 20. George Shaw, the Richard Shuttleworth bed at Gawthorpe Hall, Lancashire, c. 1840s

© Peter N. Lindfield

Fig. 21. 1682 bedstead from Shaw and Meyrick, Specimens of Ancient Furniture (London 1836), pl. XXXIX

Public Domain

This bedstead has upon it the date 1682, and stands in what is termed, from the period of its furniture, the Charles the First’s room, at Sir Samuel’s residence. It is of oak, very dark from age; and the panelling of the apartment, which is of the same time, reaches only half-way up the wall.⁸⁰

Meyrick’s collection had repeated influence upon Shaw’s historical forgeries, for, as noted elsewhere, he loosely copied another bed illustrated in Specimens of Ancient Furniture (pl. XXXVIII) that was also in Meyrick’s collection. Shaw sold a bed following the Meyrick example to the duke of Northumberland as ‘a very curious half headed bed’ in October 1847.⁸¹ The central portion of this headboard was, in turn, reconfigured to form the back of a sideboard Shaw supplied to the duke in November 1847, again demonstrating Shaw’s limited repertoire of designs.⁸²

The Rolleston bedroom contains other pieces of furniture revealing Shaw’s influence. A cabinet adjacent to the doorway is ornamented with four Romanye heads set within a circular frame decorated with a fleur-de-lis on each of the diagonals (Fig. 22). This matches the alternating Romayne heads and barbed hour-glass escutcheons in the plasterwork added by Shaw to the Drawing Room at St Chad’s, as well as on doors at the house. Above these heads on the cupboard — consistent with Shaw’s work at his house — there is also a band of S-shaped cockatrices forming a frieze like that applied to the St Chad’s staircase discussed above. In this instance, the cockatrices are excessively stretched to fill the frieze (Fig. 14). The over-door cresting to this room also matches Shaw’s placement of the royal arms of England over the doorway from the Drawing Room into the Hall at St Chad’s, again suggesting a distinctive approach to styling furniture and romantically historicizing interiors.

Fig. 22. View of the interior of Rolleston Hall, Staffordshire, showing the Oak Bedroom, 1892

Source: Historic England Archive

Whilst we lack documentary evidence to substantiate Shaw’s work for Sir Oswald Mosley, pieces of furniture seen at Rolleseton in the late 19th century reveal significant overlap with his known work form the 1840s. They demonstrate his reach was larger than previously thought, and that his he drew on the same stock of pseudo-Tudor motifs. His subterfuge emerged in the 1840s: in a letter from 17 November 1842 Shaw wrote about the Trinity Aisle at St Chad’s in Rochdale: ‘let me commence with the perforated oak screen work and a cumbent stone figure in chain mail’, the latter of which, he suggested, ‘I could set a clever mason here to work upon a monumental effigy this winter under my own eye, and proceed with him as I saw him succeed — you give the name and time of existence’.⁸³ His diaries and correspondence also reveal his custom of imaginative reproduction. For example, on the evening of 10 January 1829 Shaw was drawing ruins: ‘I drew two small views of Architectural ruins for him [Mr Raines] on blank cards, and an old fashioned armchair in his S.[ketch] Book to correspond with some verses which he had on the same subject’.⁸⁴ Shaw’s admiration for reproductions is clear from his description of an engraving by George Henry Phillips from 1829 after The Delivery of Israel out of Egypt by Francis Danby (1793–1861), in which he asserted that ‘it is a complete imitation of the style of [John] Martin, both the design and the execution of the engraving; but still there is such an air of magnificence in the piece that it must call forth the admiration of its beholders’.⁸⁵ The multiple copies of supposedly ancient furniture that he sold with suitably amended heraldic insignia took such copying to new ends. Irrespective of how he sold ancient-style furniture to the Mosleys, these objects add more weight and colour to his role as a predatory antiquary-forger specializing in Tudor-inspired design.

Additional information

Funding

The Leverhulme Trust;

Notes

1 A. Bowett, ‘George Shaw, Rogue Antiquary: Fake Furniture for the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Northumberland’, Furniture History, 57 (2021), 109–47; A. Bowett, ‘Antiquarianism in Early Victorian Rochdale: The Trinity Chapel at St Chad’s’, Regional Furniture, 34 (2020), 141–63; G. B. Howcroft, George Shaw of St Chad’s Saddleworth 1810–1876: Architect and Church Furnisher (Greenfield 1972), 3–22; M. Hyde and A. Petford, ‘George Shaw of St Chad’s: The Making of a Provincial Architect’, Transactions of The Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 102 (2006), 36–52; A. Petford and M. Buckley, ‘George Shaw and the Duke of Northumberland’, Saddleworth Historical Society, 47 (2017), 6–18; J. Foyle and P. N. Lindfield, ‘A Forger’s Folly?: George Shaw’s Productions for Chetham’s Library, Manchester’ The British Art Journal, 21 (2020–21), 42–50.

2 His biography can be found in Bowett, ‘Antiquarianism’, 143–47.

3 P. N. Lindfield, ‘George Shaw Revisited: Ancient Oak, and Beds’, Furniture History Society Newsletter, 225 (2022), 2–12.

4 C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750–1850 (London 1989), 1–69.

5 See C. Hartwell, M. Hyde and N. Pevsner, Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (New Haven and London 2004), 131, 587–89; R. Harman and N. Pevsner, Yorkshire West Riding: Sheffield and the South (New Haven and London 2017), 159, 255, and Bowett, ‘Antiquarianism’, 143–59.

6 They come from the Coromandel Coast and are from the 17th century at the earliest. See W. S. Lewis et al. ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols (New Haven and London, 1937–), X, 76–77, and C. Wainwright, ‘Only the True Black Blood’, Furniture History, 21 (1985), 250–57.

7 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, I, 90.

8 M. Westgarth, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Antique & Curiosity Dealers with Full Explanation and Plates’, Regional Furniture, 21 (2009), 2.

9 Ibid., 7, 9.

10 Ibid., 9; I. Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament, 1839 (Stroud 1986), and K. N. Watts, ‘Samuel Pratt and Armour Faking’, in Why Fakes Matter: Essays on Problems of Authenticity, ed. Mark Jones (London 1992), 100–05.

11 Westgarth, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 14.

12 C. L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (London 1868), 57–58.

13 Anon., ‘Ancient Domestic Furniture (with Four Plates)’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 171 (1842), 19.

14 H. Rodd, Catalogue of Portraits, Pictures, Drawings, Carvings in Oak, Ivory, & Boxwood, Antique Furniture & Plate, Crosses, Chalices, Tabernacles, Shrines, Stained Glass, &C. For Sale (London 1824), title page.

15 Anon., ‘Ancient Domestic Furniture’, 19.

16 Ibid.

17 See C. Wainwright, ‘The Banker, the Prince and the Dealers: Three Renaissance Objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum’, Apollo, 151 (2000), 41–46.

18 R. Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London 2004), 31–33.

19 Oldham, Oldham Local Studies and Archives (henceforth ‘Oldham’), M175/1/1, 5.

20 Ibid.

21 Oldham, M175/1/1, 5 and M175/1/3.

22 See Sweet, Antiquaries, 14–20.

23 Ibid., 26–27.

24 Oldham, M175/1/1, 27.

25 Oldham, M175/1/1, 27. See L. Steil, The Architectural Capriccio: Memory, Fantasy and Invention (Farnham 2014), 5–13.

26 Ibid., 29.

27 Ibid., 30.

28 Oldham, M175/2/3 title page.

29 See, for example, in respect of Forde Abbey, Somerset: W. Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty. To Which Are Added a Few Remarks on the Picturesque Beauties of the Isle of Wight (London 1798); M. Carter, P. Lindfield, and D. Townshend ed., Writing Britain’s Ruins (London 2017), and Sweet, Antiquaries, 327–30.

30 Oldham, M175/1/1, 38–39.

31 J. Carter, ‘The Pursuits of Architectural Innovation, No. VII’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (1799), 92–94, at 92. See J. Frew, ‘Gothic Is English: John Carter and the Revival of Gothic as England’s National Style’, The Art Bulletin, 64 (1982), 315–19; P. N. Lindfield, ‘Serious Gothic and “Doing the Ancient Buildings”: Batty Langley’s Ancient Architecture and Principal Geometric Elevations’, Architectural History, 57 (2014), 141–73, at 144–46.

32 Oldham, M175/1/1, 42.

33 Ibid., 73.

34 Ibid., 74.

35 Ibid., 92.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 143.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 161.

40 Ibid., 182.

41 Ibid.

42 See P. N. Lindfield, ‘Heraldic Forgery: The Case of George Shaw’, The Coat of Arms, 4th series, 4 (2021), 177–204.

43 Foyle and Lindfield, ‘A Forger’s Folly?’, 47–49.

44 Oldham, M175/1/1, 108–09.

45 Ibid., 81.

46 Oldham, M175/2/3, 47, 49, 51, 59 and 139.

47 Oldham, M175/1/1, 130–31.

48 A. Mellor & Co., ‘St. Chad’s,’ Uppermill, Saddleworth, Yorks.: Catalogue of the Valuable Antique & Modern Furniture Etc., Including a Very Fine Collection of Old Oak (Oldham 1920), 22, lot 509; A. Bowett, ‘New Light on the Ordsall Hall Bed’, Regional Furniture Society Newsletter, 72 (Spring 2020), 8–9; Peter N. Lindfield, ‘Transformation of Heraldic Decoration: The “Radcliffe Bed”’, The Coat of Arms, 5th series, 4 (2022), 108–19.

49 Oldham, M175/1/1, 162.

50 Ibid., 168.

51 Ibid., 193.

52 Oldham, M175/1/1, 207.

53 Messrs C. W. Provis and Sons, The Manor House, Rochdale (Immediately Opposite the Town Hall). Catalogue of the Valuable Old Oak, Chippendale and Sheraton Furniture, Pewter, Oriental Porcelain, English China &C., to Be Sold by Auction (Manchester 1913), opp. 17. For the Stanley bed, see V. Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Woodbridge 1986), ill. 3:454; and for the Sefton bed, see H. Shaw and S. Rush Meyrick, Specimens of Ancient Furniture Drawn from Existing Authorities (London 1836), pl. xxxvi, 39. The Hulton bed is now a bookcase at Chetham’s Library in Manchester: A. Bowett, ‘The Great Chair of Sir Ralph Warburton, 1603’, Regional Furniture, 33 (2019), 117–18. For 16th-century beds with original footboards, see for example the Scheurl bed, 1601, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, Germany. See also, Peter N. Lindfield, ‘Medieval Beds and Footboards’, History Today, November (2022).

54 Oldham, M175/1/1, 207 and M175/2/5, 11.

55 See Bowett, ‘George Shaw, Rogue Antiquary’, 109–47.

56 Hartwell, Hyde and Pevsner, Lancashire: Manchester, 64.

57 Alnwick Castle, The Archives of the Duke of Northumberland, DP/D4/I/99, c. March 1848.

58 Lindfield, ‘George Shaw Revisited’, 2–12.

59 O. Mosley, Family Memoirs (N.P. 1849), 6.

60 A. C. Williamson, Sketches of Fallowfield and the Surrounding Manors, Past and Present (Manchester and London 1888), 39.

61 M. Hayward ed., The 1542 Inventory of Whitehall: The Palace and Its Keeper (London 2004), 69.

62 See Lindfield, ‘George Shaw Revisited’, 2–12.

63 Alnwick Castle, The Archives of the Duke of Northumberland, DP/D4/I/99, 12 August 1847.

64 See Bowett, ‘George Shaw, Rogue Antiquary’, 128, 146 (n. 42).

65 H. Hughes, The Paradise Bed — Paint Analysis (London 2013); A. Moir, Dendrochronological Analysis of Oak Timbers from an Antique Bed Tree-Ring Services Report: Lfll/16/16 (Mitcheldean 2016), 1–17; Lindfield, ‘George Shaw Revisited’, 11.

66 L. M. Angus-Butterworth, ‘The Early History of the Ancient Monuments Society’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, new series, 20 (1975), 49–84, at 57.

67 Matlock, Derbyshire Records Office, D769, B/8A/82/2, 13 July, and D2375M/127/16, 1 February 1944.

68 F. O. Morris, A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland, 6 vols (London 1880), IV, 7.

69 See Chinnery, Oak Furniture, 362, 368–70, 413–15.

70 Such as by Vredeman de Vries and Theodor de Bry. See P. Brears, ‘Leeds and West Yorkshire Carved Oak Furniture of the Seventeenth Century’, Regional Furniture, 33 (2019), 1–65.

71 Oldham, M175/1/2, 2. This passage has been published as ‘I have [been] making oak pillars carved in spirals, and partly turned’: Bowett, ‘George Shaw’, 116.

72 Oldham, M175/2/3, 93 (dated 1833), 97 (dated 1834).

73 Oldham, M175/1/2, 96–97.

74 F. R. Raines and H. Hoyle Howorth, The Vicars of Rochdale (Manchester 1883), 284.

75 Alnwick Castle, The Archives of the Duke of Northumberland, DP/D4/I/99, 12 August 1847.

76 P. N. Lindfield, ‘The Mantled Hour-Glass Escutcheon: A Snapshot of Court Fashion c. 1480–1510?’, The Heraldry Gazette, new series, 162 (December 2021), 9–11.

77 See Lindfield, ‘George Shaw Revisited’, 2–12.

78 Alnwick Castle, The Archives of the Duke of Northumberland, DP/D4/I/99, 14 March 1848.

79 Meyrick, for example, wrote to Shaw concerning Dearden’s proposed fortification of his house, Rochdale Manor, in September 1842: Rochdale, Touchstones, DEA/2 Box 19, Meyrick to Shaw, 30 September 1842.

80 Shaw and Meyrick, Specimens of Ancient Furniture, 40.

81 Ibid., 40.

82 Bowett, ‘George Shaw, Rogue Antiquary’, 135.

83 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, Raines/2/2/178, 2.

84 Ibid., 9.

85 Ibid., 102.