It may be said that the history of English glass divides itself into two periods. For the first we have abundant documentary evidence—patents for new processes and petitions for or against these patents, to say nothing of notices in contemporary journals and memoirs—but against this an almost total absence of examples of the glass actually made. This period extends from the early days of Elizabeth almost to the end of the seventeenth century. In the second period, on the other hand—and this includes nearly the whole of the eighteenth century—the documentary evidence almost completely fails us; but in its place a fairly rich material harvest is available—the wine-glass, above all, so dear to the collector, now asserts itself. When at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, or even a little earlier, a few rays of light begin to be thrown upon the glass made in England, we find the industry centred in a district on the borders of Surrey and Sussex: we are here at the western extremity of the great forest of the Weald, that was a little later to become for a time the home of an important iron industry. Here the raw materials and the fuel were at hand. Fuel from the oaks and beeches, and from trees of smaller growth; the silica from the ‘Hastings sands,’ selected from spots where the beds were tolerably free from iron; and finally the alkali, for the most part from the ashes of the bracken that then as now grew so abundantly in the glades of the woods. For this old English glass, like that of France, was essentially a _verre à fougère_,[229] made in districts remote from towns. At a somewhat later time the glass-workers were indeed forbidden to set up their furnaces within twenty-two miles of London, seven miles of Guildford, or within four miles ‘of the foot of the hills called the Sussex downs.’