The Romans brought the closely-guarded secret of glassmaking to Britain during their occupation of those fair isles. But they did not share the arcane knowledge of the craft with the indigenous population. The first evidence of a native glass industry in England is in 680 AD, in the area of
Jarrow and Wearmouth. There is evidence of other glassmaking centers in operation by the thirteenth century in several areas throughout England.
The first major milestone in the development of glass since Roman times occurred in London in 1675.
George Ravenscroft, an English merchant who had spent some time in
Venice, and had traded in glass from the island of
Murano, began to experiment with new formulas for glass. His intent was to improve English glassware to compete with European, especially Venetian, products. He set up his glassworks on the north bank of the Thames at the Savoy in 1673. There he began his experiments, and eventually discovered that replacing part of the volume of silica in the glass with
lead oxide, called "red lead," enhances the properties of transparency, purity and lustre in the glass. Thus was born English lead crystal, called so because of it similarity to the natural
quartz stone commonly known as "rock crystal."
It is the considered opinion of most experts on
glass that the cut glass made during the Regency is some of the finest ever produced by English glassmakers. Within the study of glass, the stylistic "Regency" period is loosely defined as the years between 1800 and 1830. Why were these years so influential in the history of glass?
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Or not. But authors, if your Regency hero does take off his shirt, or, even more enjoyable, if your heroine chooses to help him, please be sure they take off a Regency-era shirt, not a modern one. It does so ruin the mood to have a present-day garment appear in a delicious Regency seduction.
What precisely are the salient features of a man's shirt from the time of the Regency?
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Tea parties are common events in innumerable Regency romance novels. Countless characters in attendance at those fictional events take
sugar in their tea. But the manner in which they take that sugar is not always historically accurate.
Will that be lumps or cubes?
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Certainly not during the years of the English Regency. And yet, in the past couple of years, I have read perhaps a dozen novels set during the Regency in which characters select a decanter containing their alcoholic beverage of choice from a tantalus. And never once did any of these characters use a key to liberate their preferred libation from this devious device.
So, what is a tantalus, and when did it make its debut on the stage of English domestic furnishings?
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