The glass of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors must be considered in connection with that found in the graves of kindred tribes on the Continent. Of these, the most important are the Frankish people who dwelt for some time before their conversion to Christianity in the district between the Rhine and the Ardennes. It is here, more especially in the middle valley of the Meuse, about Namur and Liége, that the most important finds have been made; the more elaborate examples, at any rate, of this Franko-Saxon[74] glass were possibly manufactured in this district. Now the importance for us of this glass from pagan cemeteries lies in the fact that in it we have the latest important and independent group of glass of which anything is known, until we come to the Saracenic enamelled ware of the thirteenth century. In England, indeed, the gap extends to a much later period; but in the case of Western Germany there is some reason to believe that the Frankish fashions and traditions of glass-making were carried on without any break during the Middle Ages—that, in fact, in this early mediæval glass may be found a link between the glass of Roman times and that in use in the Rhine district up to the time when the influence of the Renaissance first asserted itself. In Southern and Western France, on the other hand, although the glass-workers may in places have carried on the old workings, what they made was of no artistic importance. We have in this case nothing equivalent to the outcome of the renewed interest taken in the material by the northern chieftains—the _verre à fougère_ was a product of the woods and heaths. The Oriental influence—the distinguishing feature in all the glass of which I have treated in the last chapter—is not so pronounced in the glass of the Franko-Saxon peoples as in their jewellery and metal-work. In these we find the mark of influences that had their source in the East at two if not three widely separated periods. As for the earliest of these, it is not only pre-Roman but probably pre-Hellenic: its relations are rather with Asiatic than classical lands. The brooches and buckles inlaid with garnets, and the quaint animal forms with which the metal designs are built up, take us back perhaps to an earlier Asiatic civilisation which is best represented in the Persia of Achæmenid times.[75] The second of these periods of Oriental influence is to be associated with the introduction of the Christian religion. Again, at a still later time some of the older Oriental motives crept in in a modified form with the pagan Danes and even with the Normans. [Illustration: _PLATE XV_ 1. BEADS WITH _APPLIQUÉ_ DECORATION GREEK OR PHŒNICIAN. ABOUT SIXTH CENTURY. B.C. 2. CHEVRON BEADS, FORMED FROM SOLID RODS PROBABLY VENETIAN 3, 4 & 5. MISCELLANEOUS BEADS, FROM FRANKISH AND OTHER TOMBS IN RHINE AND MOSELLE DISTRICT EARLY MEDIÆVAL]