There were two branches of the furniture-making trade during the seventeenth century: joiners, who "joined" together straight wood that had been shaped with axes and saws and smoothed with planes; and turners, who shaped wood with chisels and gouges while it spun, or turned, on a lathe. The Museum owns impressive examples of both joined and turned Seventeenth-Century style seating furniture. Turned chairs were cheaper than joined ones because of the speed with which their component parts could be turned on a lathe and the simple round mortise-and-tenon joints that held them together (51.12.2). By contrast, joined chairs relied on more complicated rectangular mortise-and-tenon joints, which required more time to lay out, saw, and fit (1995.98).