These perle a rosette are at the present day made at Murano for the African market. When in the spring of 1903 I visited the glass-works of the ‘Venice and Murano Company,’ I was shown by Signor Andrea Rioda specimens both of these beads and of the canes from which they are prepared; the company was at that time executing a large order from a French firm, for the Congo. This work, however, is not generally undertaken by the firms that make the ordinary conterie, for these large beads have to be separately ground and polished on a wheel—an important point, as we shall see. They have been made at Murano, the local tradition affirms, from time without memory.

Quite recently, in the immediate neighbourhood of Treviso, a deposit of these chevron beads has been discovered in a bank beside an open field; ‘bushel loads’ of fragments were extracted, but not a single perfect bead. They were without exception broken fragments, not improbably ‘wasters,’ thrown aside possibly by those who were employed in grinding them. Treviso, I may note, is a town of mills and swift-flowing streams—in fact, the nearest point to Venice where abundant water-power could be found. Unfortunately no light so far has been thrown upon the age of this curious deposit.[[141]]

In general aspect, in the scheme of colour especially, there is something unmistakably African about these chevron beads. To say nothing of their exceptional size, they have little in common with any other type of polychrome bead, whether Egyptian, classical, or from Teutonic graves.

I may at once say that I consider these perle a rosette as essentially of Venetian origin, and made, above all, for the African market. How the industry arose, and whether the Venetians in this instance as in other cases took the place of earlier Byzantine or Syrian glass-workers, there is nothing to show. We know that the Alexandrians of Greek and Roman times, like the Phœnicians before them, traded with the native races of Central Africa. These beads have certainly been found in Egypt,[[142]] especially in Upper Egypt and Nubia; it is even said that some of the Soudanese tribes have succeeded in making passable imitations of them.

It must be remembered that the Venetians, at least in later times, did not trade directly with inland and barbarous races. Their business was to deliver their merchandise at certain seaport towns where they had factories or agencies. The goods then fell into the hands of local merchants who distributed them by caravans or sent them on coastways in their ships. So the Arab traders of Egypt, reshipping the Venetian wares at Suez or other ports of the Red Sea, would carry them in their dhows to Zanzibar or India; and so again in later days the merchants of Amsterdam and London, who held at times vast stores of Venetian beads, distributed them in Dutch or English ships to the very extremities of the world. The trade in beads was very active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the present day, in the warehouses of Bevis Marks and Houndsditch, there is probably accumulated a larger stock of beads than in Venice itself.

So far we are on firm ground, nor is there anything surprising when we are told that the large chevron beads have been found in Central Africa,[[143]] in the South Sea Islands, and even in Canada and the United States. But when we hear of examples being taken from Red Indian grave-mounds and even from ancient Peruvian tombs, we feel some need of hesitation before accepting the statement. So of the specimens found in England, many of them are water-worn and have an air of the remotest antiquity: they have been extracted from wells, from river-beds, and, it is stated, from Anglo-Saxon graves. I may mention that these chevron beads early attracted the attention of English antiquaries. Dr. Stukeley, who had several in his possession, brings them up in his disquisition on Druidical remains, and Bishop Gibson, as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century, figures them in his edition of Camden’s Britannia. Gibson mentions that when he was opening a grave (presumably Anglo-Saxon) at Ash, a worthy friend by way of jest placed one of these glain nidr or ‘serpent’s eggs’ among the genuine ancient beads. I will not say with regard to this attempt at mystification—ex uno disce omnes; but the story suggests an attitude of caution in the case of other similar finds.

I cannot discuss this thorny question here, and must refer those interested in such subjects as the Glain Nidr or ‘Adder Beads of the Druids,’ or again, the Breton Ouef rouge du Serpent Marin, to the exhaustive paper by the late Mr. John Brent in the forty-fifth volume of Archæologia.

CHAPTER XII
THE ENAMELLED VENETIAN GLASS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, the Venetian galleys brought glass ware to the ports of England and the Netherlands. M. de Laborde (Les Ducs de Bourgogne) found in the archives of Lille an order for payment, signed by Duke Philip of Burgundy, ‘pour seze voirres et une escuelle de voirre, des voirriers que les galées de Venise ont avan apportez en nostre pays de Flandres—quatre franc.’ This is dated from Paris, 1394. Even after making every allowance for the larger purchasing power of money in those days, the seventeen vessels of glass bought by a royal prince for four francs cannot have been of exceptional quality. Again, in the year 1399, Richard II., shortly before his deposition, granted permission to certain traders to sell, on the decks of the Venetian galleys lately arrived in the port of London, their cargo of small glass vessels and earthenware plates (Calendar of State Papers—Venetian, 1899-1900). Here again there is nothing to suggest any high artistic value in the glass offered for sale.