Much more numerous in the Anglo-Saxon tombs are—1st, the little bottles of simple form often stringed spirally round the neck (or in other cases the stringing may be applied to form rude gadroons and other patterns on the body); and 2nd, the small wide-mouthed and footless cups, often of bell-like section. These were held in the palm of the hand while drinking, as we may see in contemporary manuscripts and perhaps in the Bayeux tapestry.[77] They are true tumblers in the original sense of the word, in that they have no foot and will not stand upright. A very similar form is common in Merovingian graves. [Illustration: _PLATE XVII_ DRINKING CUPS FROM ANGLO-SAXON GRAVES] The tall, conical, trumpet-shaped cups are often carefully made and of considerable artistic merit (Plate XVII.); the sides are sometimes gadrooned and fluted, and threadings of glass of various colours are applied to them. On a fine specimen found in the cemetery of the South Saxons near Worthing, the stringing has been ‘dragged’ to form graceful festoons or chevrons, calling to mind the patterns on the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean. The simpler forms—the little bottles and cups—may well have been made in some of our southern counties, perhaps in the very glass-houses abandoned by the Romans; at any rate in Kent, the Jutish graves from which so much of this glass has been derived are, as I have said, intimately associated with the earlier Romano-British cemeteries. On the other hand, for the north of England, we have the distinct statement made by Bede, in his _Historia Ecclesiastica_, that at the end of the seventh century the glass-workers who were brought over from Gaul taught to the natives not only the making of glass for windows, but also of glass ‘for the lamps in use in the church, and for vessels for other various and not ignoble uses.’ So again a little later, in the middle of the eighth century, Cuthbert of Jarrow, writing this time to the Bishop of Mainz, says: ‘If you have any man in your diocese who is skilful in the making of glass, I pray you send him to me, ... seeing that of that art we are ignorant and without resource.’ That at this later period Cuthbert should have had to send all the way to Mainz is, I think, a point of some significance. The ensuing centuries are the most barren in the whole history of glass. We know that in France the glass-workers returned to the woods to manufacture in large quantities the _verre à fougère_—common glass for domestic use, which does not seem to have come into any close relation with the artistic movements of the time. Here before long all interest was centred in the manufacture of stained glass for the windows of the churches, and this art became of supreme importance with the rapid development of the new architecture in the twelfth century. Whether we in England at so early a date manufactured glass to any extent on either of these lines is, I am afraid, still a disputed point.