Brick pavement laid in a herringbone pattern.

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The herringbone pattern was widely used for laying brick floors and pavements as far back as Ancient Rome. The first confirmed use of opus spicatum in modern parquet is the Palace of Fontainebleau in France, first half of the 16th century, in particular the Gallery of Francis I. The word "parquet" itself is also of French origin and originally meant a small regular park or garden (French parquet - literally "small park", "small fenced space").

A similar floor covering was known in Muscovite Rus' in the 16th-17th centuries, where it was called a slanting floor, and its individual elements were called oak bricks. According to I.E. Zabelin, the thickness of oak bricks was 2-3 vershoks, i.e. 8.8-13.2 cm. Unlike modern parquet, slanting floors were laid on dry sand with resin or lime, and sometimes painted. Wax, oil, and especially varnish finishing coatings were not used.

The next stage in the development of geometric patterns in parquet is the so-called French herringbone. As the name suggests, the French herringbone comes from France, where this type of macedonia mobile database became widespread in the 17th century. The rivets of the French herringbone are cut at the ends at a certain angle, which allowed parquet layers to create a new pattern - a chevron. The ends of adjacent rivets no longer intersect at a right angle, but are lined up in one straight line. Interestingly, in France, the French herringbone is called the "Hungarian pattern" (Point de Hongrie).

Trajan's Market, Rome, 2nd century AD. Herringbone parquet flooring in the Salle de Francis I, Fontainebleau, France, 16th century. Piece parquet laid in a herringbone pattern, USSR, 1930s. Herringbone parquet, Battle Hall, Versailles, France, 17th-18th century. French herringbone parquet, Paris, France, 19th-20th centuries.
Finally, at the end of the 17th century, also in France, a decisive transition was made from a pattern of identical parquet rivets to more complex decors, in which several different types of rivets were connected into identical panels – modules (le parquet en feuilles). The first reliably known case of the use of modular parquet was the Palace of Versailles, many halls of which are still decorated with Versailles squares. One of the reasons that contributed to the spread of modular and parquet in general was the difficulty in combining a marble finishing floor and wooden floors. The need to regularly wash the marble led to the rotting of the floors.

Soon the fashion for parquet floors spread to other European countries, including Russia. Very quickly, other patterns were added to the Versailles squares, some of which received special names: Chantilly, Sheremetyev star, Aremberg, etc. In Russia, artistic parquet gained particular popularity - complex compositions made using different types of wood. The sizes of modular and artistic parquet boards in pre-revolutionary Russia were multiples of arshins.