Reading a Cradle

One of the joys of living with antiques is that the better you get to know them, the more they tell you of their history.
Listen to this little cradle, for example. It’s clearly from seventeenth-century England, but its plain and simple construction gives us no clue about a more precise date or region.
So what can it tell us? Plain and simple, nothing fancy, so its babies were born into a modest family, probably living in a cottage or a small house in a country town. Its wear gives a clue as to just how many generations of babies slept and screamed in it, and the hand-worn finials tell us that many generations of mothers sat beside it, and kept it gently rocking.
The bottom boards have been replaced, and the board that is now there was sawn in a mill, not a pit, and by a reciprocating saw, not a circular one. It’s held in place by cut nails. So the new board was put in, we might guess, sometime between about 1750 and 1830.
It took at least 100 years, and maybe 150, to wear out the original boards, and whoever had the new one made clearly expected it to go on rocking babies to sleep for an indefinite future.
The repair is a clue to the modest situation of the family: it’s typical of the less well-off to keep things going instead of replacing them. It’s also typical that the less well-off couldn’t keep up with fashion, even if they wanted to. In the prosperous households of the eighteenth century, old oak furniture from the previous century seemed out of date, ugly, and fit only to be discarded or passed down to the servants.
This cradle never lived in the great house, so it was never a victim of fashion. Instead, it testifies to how traditional ways and traditional things just kept on keeping on among the everyday folk of the English countryside.
It’s a warm and living object to bring into your home.