The province of NORMANDY has played a not unimportant part in the history of glass. It was from the Norman duchy and from Brittany, according to the tradition preserved at L’Altare, that the glass-workers wandered forth in the tenth or eleventh century to find a more peaceable home at L’Altare, in the mountains above the Ligurian coast. As early as the year 1302 we hear of the famous glass-house at La Haye, in the forest of Lyons, near Rouen. This is in a charter which mentions incidentally the bracken, the ‘_feucheriam ad faciendum vitrum_’—for all this early glass was, as I have said, _verre de fougère_—which was to be cut only at specified times. It was here, about the year 1330, that Philippe de Cacqueray is said to have first made the _plasts de verre_, otherwise known as _verre de France_,[174] for long the most important product of the Norman glass-houses. These _plasts_ were indeed merely small sheets of glass, with a thickening or ‘bull’s-eye’ in the centre; they were made by the familiar ‘spinning’ process, which, however, must surely have been known before the fourteenth century. In any case this _verre de France_ was widely exported at a later time, and much of it must have found its way into England.[175] It would appear that the gentlemen of the _grosses verreries_ where this window-glass was made, held their heads above those of _petites verreries_ which turned out only ‘hollow ware,’ and this fact would point to the outcome of the latter works not being of a very superior kind. If, however, we may judge from the examples reproduced by M. Gerspach (_L’Art de la Verrerie_, figs. 104-113) from the collection of M. le Breton, who has done for Norman glass what M. Fillon has done for that of Poitou, the table-ware made in Normandy during the seventeenth century possessed no little artistic merit, and what is more, it had a _cachet_ of its own.