Mr. Hartshorne (_Old English Glasses_, p. 119) has attempted to reconstitute the steps by which these ‘thorn-bossed beakers’ were made. He thinks that after the vessel had been blown from a ‘gathering,’ lumps of molten glass were applied one by one to the sides. ‘The hot liquid metal acting upon the thin cooled sides of the object caused it to give way successively at the points of attachment under renewed pressure by blowing. The concavities thus formed extended into the bodies of the prunts, the projecting points of which, being seized by the _pucella_, were rapidly drawn forward to a tail and attached to the outside of the glass lower down,’ This, of course, was before the vessel had been removed from the blowing-iron, and Mr. Hartshorne finds in this fact a reason for the prunts in this early glass always drooping downwards, while the somewhat similar _stachelnuppen_, or ‘blobs,’ on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German glasses, added as they were after the transference of the vessel to the _pontil_, invariably point upwards. ‘The whole of the pendant lobes,’ continues Mr. Hartshorne, ‘having been thus put on and quilled and ornamented, as some examples show, the _pontil_ was attached to the base, the blowing-iron wetted off the other end, and the closed bulb being softened at the mouth of the pot, presently became an open cup; the mouth of the glass was now sheared, widened, and finished, the stringing of the upper end of the vase usually forming part of the final operation.’ The tall conical cup of olive-green glass in the British Museum, found a few years ago with so many fine specimens of Anglo-Saxon metal-work and inlaid jewellery, in a tumulus opened by Mr. Grenfell, at Taplow on the Thames, may be taken as an example in which these processes may be followed (Pl. XVI.). The quilling or toothing along the side of the prunts is very similar to that often seen at the point of attachment of the handle on Roman vases.[76] Now these prunted beakers are of interest for two reasons. In the first place, we cannot find any Roman prototype for the long drooping tears of glass. Again, the fact of the wide distribution of almost identical pieces would point to the necessity of throwing back the date of origin for some considerable time. But at what point in their wanderings did these Germanic tribes acquire this remarkable skill in the handling of glass? The fact that these processes were known to the Ostrogoths in the fifth or sixth century makes an Oriental origin for this system of decoration not unlikely. In any case, this type of prunted surface seems to have had a special attraction for the Germanic peoples, for we can hardly doubt that from these old thorn-bossed beakers and horns, by continuous tradition, the _stachelnuppen_ on the _krautstrunk_ and the _roemer_ of the sixteenth century were derived.