13 - Table Glass in the West Country Home, c. 1500–1700

Summary

This paper examines selected groups of excavated table glass from the three urban centres of Exeter, Poole and Plymouth. By examining the changes in provenance and range of forms present it is possible to chart the evolving patterns of consumption taking place in the West Country home during the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as growing competition between the emerging European centres of production, innovations in style, technological advances and developing patterns of trade can all be seen to have affected directly the consumer choices of the emerging middling sort.

INTRODUCTION

The detailed examination of 16th- and 17th-century vessel glass has a relatively short pedigree, and it has only been in the last quarter of a century that a greater appreciation of the range and numbers of vessels used in England has developed. Since relatively few glasses dating to this period have survived in art historical collections, it is only through the study of the growing corpus of excavated archaeological material that is it possible to gain a more sophisticated appreciation of the patterns of consumption of early postmedieval glass. The late Robert Charleston was the pioneer of this process, studying many of the key assemblages excavated in the 1970-80s, and publishing in 1984 English Glass and the Glass Used in England circa 400–1940. Although a more detailed survey of the archaeological evidence for glass of this period has been produced more recently, this, like Charleston's book, remains in practice a synthetic work, largely dealing with the individual vessel types in isolation and removed from their contextual background.

Despite this growth in the number of specialist reports in recent years, to date there have been no wider regional surveys of archaeological glass. Whilst many specialist studies, such as Courtney's 2004 report on Acton Court, have provided fully contextualized examination of the glass and even contributed to the wider site narrative, this format only really allows for a relatively restricted intra-, rather than inter-, site analysis.