As to the three ‘verrers’ of Colchester who paid taxes about the year 1300, the distinction between _vitrier_ and _verrier_ does not seem to have been as sharp then as it is now; they may well have been makers of glass windows. It is more significant to find in Henry III.’s day a Laurence Vitrearius holding land at Chiddingfold in Surrey, still in the time of Elizabeth a centre for the manufacture of the native glass made of fern-ash and sand. Again, William le Verir of the same place is mentioned in a deed of 1301. But perhaps the strongest case is that of John Glasewrythe of Staffordshire, who in 1380 had a grant of house and land at Shuerwode, Kirdford,[101] and there made ‘brodeglass and vessel’—that is to say, window-glass and hollow ware (Nesbitt, _South Kensington Catalogue_, and Hartshorne, p. 132, etc.). I reserve what I have to say of the mediæval glass of Italy—of the early Altarists and Muranists—until I have described the enamelled Saracenic glass which in some measure influenced it. But before turning again to the East, I must not omit to mention certain applications of glass that found favour in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages; indeed, apart from the coloured windows, such objects constitute the only _genre_ of glass that can distinctly be classed as Gothic. I group together here various devices by means of which a design or pattern was applied to the back of a small sheet of glass—in gold for the most part, but other colours were sometimes used. The plaque thus decorated was either fixed into a piece of furniture, or simply backed with some impervious material. In this somewhat indefinite group is included, on the one hand, what is in fact a kind of thin mosaic; on the other, something that passed into the variety of painted glass known in later times as _verre églomisé_. What distinguishes all this class of decoration is that neither the colour nor the backing is fixed by any furnace process—it is scarcely to be regarded as an _art du feu_, and thus lies somewhat outside our subject.