The name of the chair

The Windsor chair makers in the forests were probably doing it since the 16th century but it may be that it was first done not by forest bodgers but, as a sideline, by wheelwrights in their shops. It wasn't called the Windsor or acquired the distinctive steam-bent bow back until the 18th century. And why 'Windsor', in Berkshire, when it was mostly made in the beechwoods of Buckinghamshire? It is thought to be because it was middle-men in Windsor who were first responsible for buying up the chairs and shipping them off to markets in London. Another nail in the coffin of the idea of the self-sufficient craftsman and an early case of London being where the money was. Metropolitan domination plays a role in the development of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods too. They were first actively managed on a large scale to send coppiced firewood for the domestic hearths of nearby London - nothing to do with furniture and bodging. But the canals and coal put paid to that trade and only then did the bodgers move in, finding a convenient and underused source of small-section timber. They continued to coppice much of the woodland but towards the end of the nineteenth century furniture manufacture in High Wycombe had become sufficiently mechanised in factories for it to be using a significant number of local large timber trees. It was, however, a short-lived phenomenon, because it very quickly became cheaper to import beech timber from Europe. Thus the substantial markets for both the coppice wood and timber of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods disappeared, leaving them to become 'amenity' woodlands (at least for the owners, if not for the masses). And, of course, it soon became the case that the complete chairs themselves, at least for the mass market, were imported.