The French glass-workers who came to England belonged, for the most part, to the old noble families. We find in our English documents some of the very names—Hennezel, for instance—that occur in the famous _Charte des verriers_ granted by John of Calabria, son of King René, in the year 1448 (see p. 230).[231] When these foreigners are mentioned in our English documents they are invariably described as gentlemen or esquires. We must remember that in the sixteenth century Antwerp held a commercial position something like that taken later by Amsterdam and London: the town was, above all, the centre of the glass trade. It is not surprising then to find that it was through the medium of an Antwerp merchant, one Jean Carré, that the French glass-makers were now introduced into England.[232] Carré, in association with a certain Briot, brought over both Normans and Lorrainers, and the quarrels and disputes that soon broke out appear to have had their origin in the fact that the men to whom the first patents were granted were not practical workers themselves, and that they were therefore dependent on others.[233] In any case, before the year 1570, gentlemen of Lorraine bearing the well-known names of Hennezel, Du Thisac, and Le Houx, as well, probably, as representatives of the Le Vaillant and other Norman families, were making glass in more than one spot in the Weald as well as in London. But these proud, hot-headed foreigners do not seem to have been popular in Sussex. There were frequent petitions against the destruction of the woods to supply the fuel for their glass-houses, and we hear of an attempt made to rob the ‘outlandish men’ that made glass near Petworth and to burn their houses. Before 1576, then, the Lorrainers were already in search of forests where they could work without hindrance; they began that long peregrination that took them by way of the Hampshire woods to the Forest of Dean, and finally to Stourbridge and Newcastle.[234]