LLED HEDW

these tribes to Christianity, we have in the objects found in their graves a comparativ

wns, some five miles to the west of Worthing.[73] The design which encircles the body of this vase has been engraved somewhat summarily with the wheel; we see a hound pursuing two hares-formal fern-like fronds rise between. The Greek inscription round the

eople who dwelt for some time before their conversion to Christianity in the district between the Rhine and the Ardennes. It is here, more especially in the middle valley of the Meuse,

some reason to believe that the Frankish fashions and traditions of glass-making were carried on without any break during the Middle Ages-that, in fact, in this early medi?val glass may be found a link between the glass of Roman times and that in use in the Rhine district up to the time when the influence of the Renaissance first asserted itself. In S

periods. As for the earliest of these, it is not only pre-Roman but probably pre-Hellenic: its relations are rather with Asiatic than classical lands. The brooches and buckles inlaid with garnets, and the quaint animal forms with which the metal designs are built up, take us back perhaps to an earlier Asiatic civilisatio

AT

ORATION GREEK OR PH?NICIAN

ADS, FORMED F

BLY V

FROM FRANKISH AND OTHER TOMBS

Y ME

Of these last, the dominant type-and we must confine ourselves to this-is of a turquoise or deep blue, generally more or less transparent, and they are often longitudinally ribbed. In a collection of Germanic beads, on the other hand, the prevailing colours are red and yellow, of ochry tints; they are almost invariably quite opaque, and the pattern

, lately added to the collection in the Glass Room at the British Museum. Here we see for the first time the drinking-horn of the north; this fine specimen, trumpet-ended and fluted with long gadroons, is of a deep blue glass wound round with white threads. Of similar origin is the rhyton, of moulded glass of a rich amber colour, whi

ncestors during the two centuries that followed their arrival in England, we have a fairly intimate acquaintance; as I have said,

f the country. I refer of course to the horns and conical cups decorated with long pendulous lobes or 'prunts.' These drinking-cups have been found, apart from the Kentish examples, in Durham, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, and in the upper Thames valley. Individual prunts (these 'thorned bosses' are more substantial than the thin surrounding glass) have occasionally turned up in excavations in London and elsewhere. Abroad, precisely similar vessels have been taken from Frankish graves in the Rhine province

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PL

e 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 vess

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.

nsiderable 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. I

er 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

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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, th

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 o

oes 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 supr

e new waves of influence from the East, by various and sometimes very circuitous paths,-in Charlemagne's time by way of Ravenna and Rome, more directly from Constantinople in the tenth century, when Otto the Great married his son to the grand-daughter of t

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CARVED IN

AL. TWELFTH OR T

und their way westward. I refer to the rare carved goblets, about which so much has been written in Germany. The glass of these little cylindrical cups-they vary in height from three to five inches-is of a yellowish-green or brownish tint, at times indeed nearly colourless; i

eracy of these motives; on some examples, as on the Halberstadt glass, the design has become a meaningless pattern. This, as in the case of other similar breakings up of design,[82] would point to the copying and recopying by a semi-barbarous people of a subject the original significance of which had been lost. In any case, we may see in these little beakers the last examples of a dying art. Some of them may be traced back, on the ground of their mounting, to the fourteenth, perhaps to the thirteenth, century, but the glasses themselves may

ved glasses, basing my description in part upon the caref

y a crescent and star; on either side heraldic lions, each surmounted by a small three-cornered

shields as above, and eagle 'displayed.' It is claimed

ions 'passant' in the same direction; small s

s formerly an heirloom in the Nassau-Orange family. On the base is engraved 'Alsz diesz glas war alt ta

each case the design is relieved upon a scalloped back, s

with a shield containing a triangle, an eagle displayed and a 'tree of life,' somewhat similar to that on

, in private hands. Of greenish glass, only three and a ha

s little glass has degenerated into a meaningless juxtapositio

be classed with them; on the other hand, the 'voirre taille d'un esgle, d'un griffon et d'une double couronne,' mentioned in the inventory