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More boxes have survived from the seventeenth century than any other form of furniture. Contemporary inventories show that most households owned many of them. Like their larger cousin, the chest, they were very useful, and comparatively easy to make. Chests stored larger items, and boxes the smaller ones: almost anything that today we might stuff into a drawer would have been kept in a box - drawers were rare until the second half of the century. Though the boxes are from the seventeenth century, the commonly applied name of "bible box" is from the nineteenth. They were obviously used to store far more than just bibles, indeed, boxes outnumbered bibles by many times.
In 1547, the inventory of King Henry VIII listed many boxes: in the closet next to his privy chamber were boxes which contained "painted antiques", "table men" (carved figures, or chess men), "pictures of needlework", "12 pairs of hawks' bells, small and great, and a falconer's glove", "slippers of velvet for women", "burning perfumes" and two or three containing dolls for his children.
Fiske and Freeman
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