Are these actually chairs for children?

A few are. "Childs" and "child" together appear in fewer than a hundred titles, against "windsor" in 242, so children's feeding chairs are a real but minority strand. The rest is high-back seating: Windsor armchairs, wing and library chairs, carved oak and walnut, and sets of tall dining chairs.

Which timbers turn up in the Windsor chairs?

Elm, yew and ash carry the group. Ash and elm is the standard country pairing, bent ash for the back and elm for the seat. Yew, named in around ninety titles, sits toward the top of the range, and burr or figured yew higher again. Beech, birch and stained softwood sit lower down.

What does a regional name on a Windsor mean?

Titles use place names as origin tags. Worksop, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, the Thames Valley, High Wycombe, Lancashire, the West Country, Wales and Darvel in Ayrshire all appear that way. An attributed Windsor sits well above an unattributed one in the range. Where no origin is given, the evidence offers no way of assigning one.

How old are the chairs in this category?

The dated field runs 1700 to 1940. Around a third of listings give a clean year; the rest use a century or a reign, and "19th Century" and "Victorian" between them cover a large share. There's a 17th-century tail of about thirty listings, and a body of 18th-century chairs. Titles reading "Carolean style" or "Jacobean style" describe the look, not the date.

Do listings cover single chairs or sets?

Both. "Pair" appears in 137 titles and "eight" in twenty-eight, with sets of six, ten and twelve in the record, so a fair number of listings are for multiples. Single chairs are still the common case. Matched and harlequin sets of yew Windsors sit at the very top of the range.

What unusual forms have appeared?

One-offs surface now and then: an Orkney chair standing 103cm, an Anglo-Indian cane peacock chair, a Ceylonese teak veranda chair and a Scottish lambing chair in oak. Others include a giant Philippine throne chair, a Burmese temple pair, a child's exercise chair in yew and a Dutch-painted child's chair in the Hindeloopen manner.

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Antique High Chairs

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Tall-backed seating of every kind, from stick-built Windsor armchairs in native timbers to winged fireside chairs and carved oak, gathered under a heading that also holds a smaller run of children's feeding chairs.