Great Tower Street beaker

Only those with sufficient means could afford the best quality European table glass. Vessels like this exquisitely decorated, inscribed, 'paynted and guilte' beaker were greatly prized and often made to commission. The beaker has the characteristic gilt dotted enamel 'patera' decoration common on fine Venetian glassware of about 1500, and was recovered from a chalk-lined cesspit in Great Tower Street with a leather patten and other table-glass fragments. The vessel was probably 'cristallo' (colourless) originally, the present purple tinge having been caused by the chemical breakdown of the manganese oxides which were originally used as a decolourising agent. Italian merchants brought consignments of glassware into London with sacks of sponges, carpets, pepper and soap. The English appetite for fine glass from Venice, France and Spain was a luxury which some Londoners thought was an unnecessary expense.