The little village of Chiddingfold, just within the boundary of Surrey, may perhaps lay claim to be the original ‘metropolis of English glass,’ and a line measured from Hindhead to Petworth passes close to the various places—Loxwood, Kirdford, Fernfold, Wisboro’ Green—where we know that furnaces were already established early in the sixteenth century. I have already referred to this district when speaking of the English glass of mediæval times (see p. 139). Fragments of green glass have been found on the site of a glass-house at Chiddingfold. In the Museum at Lewes are two bulbous flasks with long necks of this green Weald-glass. There was another centre of the glass industry in East Sussex, in the country to the north of Hastings. In a mediæval document concerning Beckley, in this district, the name Glassye Borough occurs. At these woodland glass-houses, for many generations, the wandering pedlars, the ‘glass-men,’ had been wont to renew the stock of ‘vrynells, bottles, bowles, cuppis to drinck and such lyke,’ that they hawked along the country-side. You may send, says Thomas Charnock in his _Breviary of Philosophy_ (1557), to Chiddingfold, to the ‘glassemaker,’ ‘And desire him in most humble wise To blow thee a glass after thy devise.’ That is to say, that the glass-blower, as we have seen in other cases, worked from the patterns provided by his customers. Camden says of the Sussex glass that in his time it was only used ‘of the common sort.’ Possibly the Sussex glass-blowers made quarrels and bull’s-eyes for windows also;[230] this, however, was an industry that centred rather in London, especially in Southwark. Now it was above all the demand for larger and better made panes for use in the new mansions with spacious windows—the ‘glass houses’ of the proverb about throwing stones—that were now springing up on every side, that gave the most powerful impulse to the introduction of the newer methods of working glass that had already taken root in France and in the Low Countries. It must be remembered that in the preparation of the stained glass for church windows large pieces were not required. Considerable artistic skill in this branch would be quite compatible with a very primitive method of blowing and ‘flashing’ the glass. At this time the new industry—the making of large sheets of broad-glass, that is to say—was centred in Lorraine, in the country stretching from the Vosges to the Ardennes; in a lesser degree in Normandy. It is uncertain in what the superiority of the ‘_verre en tables quarrées_’ made by the Lorrainers consisted; there is no positive proof that they had as yet adopted the German cylinder process (see pp. 129 and 234 _note_), though this is in every way probable.