[97] M. Schuermans, however, brings forward passages to show that in early days the term was applied to a small flask carried about the person.
[98] What little we have comes mostly from the Venetian archives. We hear already in the fourteenth century of German hawkers of glass, and of the skill of the Germans in making glass mirrors.
[99] To hollow ware, that is to say. Stained glass for windows, of which examples still survive, was made in England in the fifteenth century, and probably even earlier.
[100] Compare with these the four hundred and thirty-two urinalia supplied to the Dauphin of the Viennois for a year’s consumption. Glass, it would appear from an epigram of Martial, was put to a similar use by the Romans.
[101] The village of Kirdford is situated about four miles to the north of Petworth.
[102] It stood for long against the wall of the South Ambulatory. As in this position the paintings appeared to be suffering from the damp, it has lately been removed to the Jerusalem Chamber.
[103] A fifteenth-century plaque at South Kensington is possibly an exception. Here the gold leaf lies between two sheets of glass, the lower one of considerable thickness, but how these sheets are united I cannot say.
[104] In shape they resemble the little bottles in which attar of roses is still sold in Oriental bazaars, and this resemblance may give a hint as to their original use.
[105] Schefer, Relation des voyages de Nassiri Khosrau(1035-1042 A.D.), pp. 42 and 46. The information from Arab writers collected in the notes to this work must not be confused with what Khosrau himself says. There is, however, one important reference to our material in the text:—we are told that glass, transparent and pure as the emerald, was sold in Cairo by the weight. This was in Fatimi times. There may, perhaps, have been some confusion with the glass weights themselves, of which we have spoken above.
[106] We may find, perhaps, what is the last reference to Alexandria in connection with glass in ‘the most precious vase, Alexandrini generis,’ that the Emperor Henry II. (d. 1024 A.D.) presented to the Abbot of Cluny. This was probably an example of sculptured glass, which may have come to Henry through his relationship with the Byzantine emperors.