Mr. Hartshorne (Old English Glasses, p. 119) has attempted to reconstitute the steps by which these ‘thorn-bossed beakers’ were made. He thinks that after the vessel had been blown from a ‘gathering,’ lumps of molten glass were applied one by one to the sides. ‘The hot liquid metal acting upon the thin cooled sides of the object caused it to give way successively at the points of attachment under renewed pressure by blowing. The concavities thus formed extended into the bodies of the prunts, the projecting points of which, being seized by the pucella, were rapidly drawn forward to a tail and attached to the outside of the glass lower down,’ This, of course, was before the vessel had been removed from the blowing-iron, and Mr. Hartshorne finds in this fact a reason for the prunts in this early glass always drooping downwards, while the somewhat similar stachelnuppen, or ‘blobs,’ on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German glasses, added as they were after the transference of the vessel to the pontil, invariably point upwards. ‘The whole of the pendant lobes,’ continues Mr. Hartshorne, ‘having been thus put on and quilled and ornamented, as some examples show, the pontil was attached to the base, the blowing-iron wetted off the other end, and the closed bulb being softened at the mouth of the pot, presently became an open cup; the mouth of the glass was now sheared, widened, and finished, the stringing of the upper end of the vase usually forming part of the final operation.’
The tall conical cup of olive-green glass in the British Museum, found a few years ago with so many fine specimens of Anglo-Saxon metal-work and inlaid jewellery, in a tumulus opened by Mr. Grenfell, at Taplow on the Thames, may be taken as an example in which these processes may be followed ([Pl. XVI.]). The quilling or toothing along the side of the prunts is very similar to that often seen at the point of attachment of the handle on Roman vases.[[76]]
Now these prunted beakers are of interest for two reasons. In the first place, we cannot find any Roman prototype for the long drooping tears of glass. Again, the fact of the wide distribution of almost identical pieces would point to the necessity of throwing back the date of origin for some considerable time. But at what point in their wanderings did these Germanic tribes acquire this remarkable skill in the handling of glass? The fact that these processes were known to the Ostrogoths in the fifth or sixth century makes an Oriental origin for this system of decoration not unlikely. In any case, this type of prunted surface seems to have had a special attraction for the Germanic peoples, for we can hardly doubt that from these old thorn-bossed beakers and horns, by continuous tradition, the stachelnuppen on the krautstrunk and the roemer of the sixteenth century were derived.
Much more numerous in the Anglo-Saxon tombs are—1st, the little bottles of simple form often stringed spirally round the neck (or in other cases the stringing may be applied to form rude gadroons and other patterns on the body); and 2nd, the small wide-mouthed and footless cups, often of bell-like section. These were held in the palm of the hand while drinking, as we may see in contemporary manuscripts and perhaps in the Bayeux tapestry.[[77]] They are true tumblers in the original sense of the word, in that they have no foot and will not stand upright. A very similar form is common in Merovingian graves.
DRINKING CUPS FROM ANGLO-SAXON GRAVES
The tall, conical, trumpet-shaped cups are often carefully made and of considerable artistic merit ([Plate XVII.]); the sides are sometimes gadrooned and fluted, and threadings of glass of various colours are applied to them. On a fine specimen found in the cemetery of the South Saxons near Worthing, the stringing has been ‘dragged’ to form graceful festoons or chevrons, calling to mind the patterns on the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The simpler forms—the little bottles and cups—may well have been made in some of our southern counties, perhaps in the very glass-houses abandoned by the Romans; at any rate in Kent, the Jutish graves from which so much of this glass has been derived are, as I have said, intimately associated with the earlier Romano-British cemeteries. On the other hand, for the north of England, we have the distinct statement made by Bede, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, that at the end of the seventh century the glass-workers who were brought over from Gaul taught to the natives not only the making of glass for windows, but also of glass ‘for the lamps in use in the church, and for vessels for other various and not ignoble uses.’ So again a little later, in the middle of the eighth century, Cuthbert of Jarrow, writing this time to the Bishop of Mainz, says: ‘If you have any man in your diocese who is skilful in the making of glass, I pray you send him to me, ... seeing that of that art we are ignorant and without resource.’ That at this later period Cuthbert should have had to send all the way to Mainz is, I think, a point of some significance.
The ensuing centuries are the most barren in the whole history of glass. We know that in France the glass-workers returned to the woods to manufacture in large quantities the verre à fougère—common glass for domestic use, which does not seem to have come into any close relation with the artistic movements of the time. Here before long all interest was centred in the manufacture of stained glass for the windows of the churches, and this art became of supreme importance with the rapid development of the new architecture in the twelfth century. Whether we in England at so early a date manufactured glass to any extent on either of these lines is, I am afraid, still a disputed point.