We must now turn to the Germanic tribes of the north. Thanks to the late conversion of these tribes to Christianity, we have in the objects found in their graves a comparatively rich store of information, up to as late a date as the sixth and seventh centuries.

A few rare specimens of glass of an essentially Byzantine character have been found in these pagan cemeteries. The most remarkable, perhaps, is the tall, somewhat spindle-shaped vase discovered in 1894 in a South-Saxon cemetery at the foot of the South Downs, 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 top in large letters is similarly cut; the expression ? ? ?G???O? ??O may be regarded as equivalent to the Latin Utere feliciter—‘May the draught do you good!’ In this little vase we have perhaps the latest example of classical glass of sepulchral origin.

The glass of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors must be considered in connection with that found in the graves of kindred tribes on the Continent. Of these, the most important are the Frankish people 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, about Namur and LiÉge, that the most important finds have been made; the more elaborate examples, at any rate, of this Franko-Saxon^[74] glass were possibly manufactured in this district.

Now the importance for us of this glass from pagan cemeteries lies in the fact that in it we have the latest important and independent group of glass of which anything is known, until we come to the Saracenic enamelled ware of the thirteenth century. In England, indeed, the gap extends to a much later period; but in the case of Western Germany there is 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 mediÆval 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 Southern and Western France, on the other hand, although the glass-workers may in places have carried on the old workings, what they made was of no artistic importance. We have in this case nothing equivalent to the outcome of the renewed interest taken in the material by the northern chieftains—the verre À fougÈre was a product of the woods and heaths.

The Oriental influence—the distinguishing feature in all the glass of which I have treated in the last chapter—is not so pronounced in the glass of the Franko-Saxon peoples as in their jewellery and metal-work. In these we find the mark of influences that had their source in the East at two if not three widely separated 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 civilisation which is best represented in the Persia of AchÆmenid times.^[75] The second of these periods of Oriental influence is to be associated with the introduction of the Christian religion. Again, at a still later time some of the older Oriental motives crept in in a modified form with the pagan Danes and even with the Normans.

As far as glass is concerned, it is in the beads that we see most clearly the return to the older fashions. Of these Franko-Saxon beads the British Museum has a great store, not only from English graves but from those of the Franks and other Germanic tribes on the Continent. Now these beads differ entirely from those found in Celtic and Roman tombs. 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 patterns are mostly built up on the surface in a way that reminds us of the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean (Plate XV. 3). A herring-bone pattern of fine lines is very characteristic, and the delicacy of the designs on some of the beads from Allemanic graves in Switzerland and elsewhere rivals that of the highly finished work of the Egyptians.

Of this early Germanic glass generally, we may say that the greatest interest lies in the types that depart most from the Roman glass which preceded it, and on which it is of course as a whole founded. In some cases the northern influence is only seen in a certain barbaric magnificence—as in the examples from Germanic graves in Italy, 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, which lies beside it. It may be noted that this form too, in spite of its classical associations, was originally, as the name implies, derived from the horn of some animal. It is not impossible that these vessels were made by local Italian glass-workers to the order of the barbarians, on the occasion of the burial of one of their leaders.

These are, however, only local accidental finds. With the glass used by, or at least buried with the bodies of, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors during the two centuries that followed their arrival in England, we have a fairly intimate acquaintance; as I have said, it differs little from the contemporary or in some cases rather earlier Frankish glass of the Rhine, Moselle, and Meuse districts.

That glass was made in the south of Britain in Roman times there is every reason to believe, and we look in Kent for the most probable place for its manufacture, somewhere, perhaps, not far from the estuary of the Medway (cf. p. 86). It is the Kentish graves again that have yielded the largest quantity of Anglo-Saxon glass, as well as the greatest varieties of forms. It is noticeable, however, that specimens of what is the most remarkable and characteristic type of Anglo-Saxon glass have been found in many other parts of 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 provinces. It is more remarkable that several cups so ornamented have been found in Illyria, in the Narenta Valley. Mr. Arthur Evans traces these ‘thorn-bossed beakers’ to the graves of Ostrogothic chiefs, and thinks that their fragility may be taken as a proof of local manufacture (ArchÆologia, vol. xlviii. pp. 75-84). On the other hand, the high technical skill required in the blowing of such glasses has led most antiquaries to regard our English examples as of Continental origin, not improbably from the Rhine or Meuse country.

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.

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.

It was in Germany, and especially in the intermediate tract that for a time existed as an independent kingdom—in Lotharingia, I mean—that the old traditions seem to have held their ground most firmly. To Germany from time to time during the Middle Ages came 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 the Greek Emperor. About the same time we hear of Greek craftsmen at work in German monasteries, as at Reichenau on the lower Lake of Constance, where, by the way, a great slab of bluish-green glass, traditionally of Byzantine origin, is still preserved.^[78]

But it was probably by more remote paths, through Poland and other Slavonic lands to the east,^[79] that the designs on the only specimens of mediÆval glass still existing in Germany that show distinctly oriental motives^[80]—if indeed the glasses are not themselves Oriental—found 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; it contains many bubbles. These so-called Hedwig glasses are carved in high relief on the outside: as many as nine examples have been described by Von Czihak (Schlesische GlÄser, p. 184 seq.), but of these only two can in any way be brought into connection with St. Hedwig.^[81]

The carving upon these glasses is deeply cut, but excessively rude. They bear the mark of a large coarse wheel, applied for the most part in two directions more or less at right angles to one another, and little attempt has been made to round off the edges and angles. We see in the decoration—figures of lions, griffins or eagles, as well as formal leaf-like patterns—motives that are essentially Oriental; indeed we are taken back rather to the Persia of Sassanian times than to Constantinople. What is above all noticeable is the extreme degeneracy 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 well be considerably older. The important point to remember is that during the later Middle Ages the carving of glass was quite unknown in Europe, and that the art of employing the lapidary’s wheel as a cutting instrument appears to have been lost. Indeed we do not meet with carved glass again in any form until the beginning of the seventeenth century, and then the rapid development of the art by the Lehmanns and the Schwanharts at Prague is acknowledged to have depended upon technical processes learned from Italian carvers of rock crystal.

I will now enumerate the most characteristic of these carved glasses, basing my description in part upon the careful account given by Von Czihak in his Schlesische GlÄser.

1. In the Museum of Silesian Antiquities at Breslau. The design consists of a vase, surmounted by a crescent and star; on either side heraldic lions, each surmounted by a small three-cornered shield, beyond them a conventionalised tree; the whole most rudely cut. (Figured by Von Czihak.)

2. In the treasury of the Cathedral at Cracow. Lions and shields as above, and eagle ‘displayed.’ It is claimed for these two glasses that they were used by St. Hedwig.

3. In the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg. Two lions ‘passant’ in the same direction; small shields as above and a griffin (Plate XVIII.).

4. In the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. Eagle ‘displayed,’ two lions and triangular shields. This glass was formerly an heirloom in the Nassau-Orange family. On the base is engraved ‘Alsz diesz glas war alt tausend Jahr, es Pfalzgraff Ludwig Philipszen Werehret war—1643.’ (Figured by Hartshorne and by Garnier.)

The above four examples closely resemble one another; in each case the design is relieved upon a scalloped back, something like the linen-fold of late Gothic wood-panelling.

5. In the Cathedral treasury at Minden. The glass is of a pale honey tint. The design is formed of a lion with a shield containing a triangle, an eagle displayed and a ‘tree of life,’ somewhat similar to that on No. 1. The elements of the design are arranged stiffly with a wide field between. (Figured by Von Czihak.)

6. Formerly in the Cathedral at Halberstadt, now in Berlin, in private hands. Of greenish glass, only three and a half inches in height. Design—two lions and triangular shield.

7. In the Cathedral Treasury at Halberstadt. The design on this little glass has degenerated into a meaningless juxtaposition of bosses, bars, and fretted bands. (Figured by Von Czihak.)

This appears to exhaust the list of these little carved glass beakers. There is nothing in the treasury of St. Mark’s that can distinctly 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 of the possessions of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, may well have been a cup of this class (Laborde, Les Ducs de Bourgogne, ii. No. 2753).