Antique Plank Chests between £0 and £0
A plank chest is a lidded box built from a handful of wide solid boards nailed or pegged together, used for centuries to store linen, clothes, grain and valuables.
What Is A Plank Chest?
Six boards, usually: two ends, front, back, base and lid. The end boards run down past the box to make the feet, so nothing is added on underneath. There's no frame-and-panel joinery anywhere in the construction, and that plainness is the whole point of the form.
Dealers on Sellingantiques nearly always call them coffers. The word appears in 165 of 191 titles, with oak in 132 and elm in 33. The six-plank build is named in 99 titles, and a five-plank variant, with one board fewer, turns up as a persistent minority.
The listing you are most likely to meet is a plain English oak six-plank coffer of the 17th century. Seventy-nine listings are dated to that century outright, with 18 more filed only as "Before 1700". Decoration is the exception: only 17 titles mention carving at all. Sizes skew small.
The 18th century and later account for roughly a quarter, including pine and elm trunks, a Georgian group, and revival work. Only two listings are labelled Victorian. Most dates are century-wide brackets rather than years, and titles often hedge across a boundary, so read a century label as the dealer's bracket. The long, narrow sword chest, named in 14 titles, is a recognised sub-type of its own.
Where The Range Splits
Apparent age does most of the work. Sixteenth-century attributions are the smallest group in the archive, eleven listings in all, and they sit at the very top of the range. Plain oak and elm coffers put at the 18th or 19th century occupy the bottom of it.
After age, decoration. A carved, fluted or inlaid front lifts a chest well clear of the undecorated majority, and the recorded motifs are modest things: chip carving, fluting, a lozenge, a pair of fighting birds. Timber follows the same logic. Oak reads as the default, elm and pine sit lower, and the two walnut pieces in the samples both sit near the top.
Scale rewards both extremes rather than the middle. A miniature 18th-century chest and a "Monster Size" Cumbrian coffer both sit well above the ordinary run. A stated region or reign in the title does the same, and those labels appear only occasionally: West Country, Westmorland, Cumbria, the Welsh Gower peninsula, or a monarch's name attached to the date.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for plank chests between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Coffer comes from the Latin cophinus, a basket, by way of the Greek kophinos. The word travelled from wickerwork to six boards of oak.
The Antique Plank Chests between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Coffer
- The usual trade word for a boarded storage chest, and the one used in the great majority of titles in this category. Blanket box is used by some dealers for the same object.
- Six plank
- Built from six boards: front, back, two ends, base and lid. The standard construction here. Five plank means one board fewer, usually a one-piece back or base.
- Stile feet
- Feet formed by the end boards continuing down past the body of the box, rather than being added separately underneath.
- Cleated lid
- A plank lid with battens across the ends to stop it warping. Lids are hinged, and occasionally detachable.
- Chip carving
- Shallow gouged geometric decoration, the commonest ornament on these chests. A lozenge is a diamond-shaped motif, recorded on one front.
- Primitive
- Dealer shorthand for an unrefined, country-made example. Pollard oak, figured timber from a repeatedly cut tree, appears once.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many plank chests come up each year?
About 22 a year come to market on Sellingantiques, and 59 different dealers have listed one at some point.
That spread means no single stockholder shapes the category. What you see is a broad cross-section of the English trade.
What timber are they made from?
Oak and elm carry the category almost entirely. Oak appears in 132 titles, elm in 33, and elm six-plank coffers are a group of their own.
Pine turns up in later trunks, sometimes combined with elm or ash. Walnut surfaces just twice in the samples, once English and once French.
Is a coffer the same as a plank chest?
In this category, yes. Coffer is the word dealers reach for, used in 165 of 191 titles, and it describes a boarded storage chest.
Some listings say blanket box instead, and a few describe a trunk. All three point at the same construction: wide boards, nailed or pegged, no panels.
What is a sword chest?
A long, narrow plank chest. Fourteen titles use the name, and one dealer calls the same idea a weapons chest.
It is a recognised sub-type here rather than an occasional oddity, accounting for something like one in twelve listings, and several sampled examples are simply titled as long.
Why are so many dated to the 17th century?
The archive is front-loaded into it. Seventy-nine listings are dated 17th Century, and another 18 are filed only as "Before 1700".
Eleven are put at the 16th century and only seven at the 19th. The dated field as a whole runs from 1670 to 1940, but only 23 listings across the archive carry a clean year.
Do later plank chests appear as well?
They do. The 18th century accounts for 33 listings, with 16 more given only as "1700s" and 13 as Georgian, and pine six-plank trunks belong to this later end.
Revival work turns up too. One 1910 coffer is openly described as "17th Century Style", and the latest thing in the archive is a 1940 pollard oak coffer chest.