shopboards

If you do tether your cleverest artisans on tailors 'shopboards and cobblers' benches, and they -- as sedentary folk will -- fall a thinking, and come to strange conclusions thereby, they really ought to be much more thankful to you than you are to them.

Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet An Autobiography Charles Kingsley 1847

Ostlers quarrelled over such questions as they groomed their masters 'horses; old women mourned across the village shopboards of the evil days which were come or coming; while every kind of strangest superstition, fairy stories and witch stories, stories of saints and stories of devils, were woven in and out and to and fro, like quaint, bewildering arabesques, in the tissue of the general imagination. [

The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) James Anthony Froude 1856