Dining Chairs are chairs for dining tables in dining rooms…? Maybe a hundred years ago, or for a traditional household that has the space to label a room the “dining room”, and then of course they would have a dining table & dining chairs to fit into that space. BUT, for the majority of city dwellers, tendency would be to have a table and chairs which fits into a smaller space. Mind you the table is used for eating (aka dining table), and when eating at the table we are seated on chairs (guess they could be referred to as…dining chairs)…
Anyway, lets talk about the transition from the formal dining room to the modern day kitchen area. Here is a little more for you city dwellers to digest about the dining room and its furniture… A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level. Historically the dining room is furnished with a rather large dining table and a number of dining chairs; the most common table shape is generally rectangular with two armed end chairs and an even number of un-armed side chairs along the long sides.
In the Middle Ages, upper class Britons and other European nobility in castles or large manor houses dined in the Great Hall. This was a large multi-function room capable of seating the bulk of the population of the house. The family would sit at the head table on a raised dais, with the rest of the population arrayed in order of diminishing rank away from them. Tables in the great hall would tend to be long trestle tables with benches. The sheer number of people in a Great Hall meant it would probably have had a busy, bustling atmosphere. Suggestions that it would also have been quite smelly and smoky are probably, by the standards of the time, unfounded.
