Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 9

Table Glass Excavated at Fort Amherst, Prince Edward Island

by Paul McNally

Identification, Dating and Attribution

No table glass in the Fort Amherst collection can be related to the French occupation prior to 1758. With the exception of only one fragment, the glass is British and, where datable, was manufactured in the second half of the 18th century. There is no table glass from any later period. The collection is very small—only 16 objects—but 15 of them are identifiable and represent a surprising cross-section of the fashionable glass styles available in England in the 1760s. In addition to fragments from three tumblers, two firing glasses and a probably plain monteith, there are a teared ball finial from a decanter stopper, a knopped air-twist stem, five opaque-twist stems; a facet-cut stem and a facet-cut cruet. A sixteenth artifact, a fragment of a handle from a vessel of non-British origin, is not certainly identified.

Plain tumblers of lead glass remain ubiquitous and undiagnostic. They occur on sites of British occupation from early in the 18th century until well into the 19th and as yet there is no way of dating them within these boundaries.

Preliminary evidence from sites so far studied indicates that firing glasses may have been much used on ship board in the 18th century because of their stability; that is, their occurrence is high on sites such as Fort Beauséjour and Beaubassin in the maritime provinces, and low on sites otherwise quite similar but inland, such as the fort at Coteau-du-Lac. This can only be tentatively suggested because Fort Beauséjour and Beaubassin date from the 1750s and the fort at Coteau-du-Lac dates from 1779, and therefore the variation in the occurrence of firing glasses at these sites may reflect decreasing popularity of the glasses.

The popular connotation of firing glasses is as toasting glasses, the heavy feet sounding loud approval on table tops. They are primarily British and occur from 1730 until well into the 19th century (Ash 1962: 84-6). Although firing glasses are a long-lasting form, their period of popularity may be limited to the second half of the 18th century (Hughes 1956: 229). The Fort Amherst examples are typical of the form (Fig. 2).

2 Typical English firing glass, lead metal; popular about 1760-1800. The example shown is from Fort Beauséjour.

A fragment of a foot is from either a jelly glass or a monteith, the distinction being based largely on bowl form. This particular artifact has very little bowl extant, but corresponds closely to a monteith (or salt) illustrated by Haynes (1964: Plate 96e) and dated to the third quarter of the 18th century. Whichever it may be, it probably dates after 1750 and not much later than 1800 (Haynes 1964:291) since this period encompasses all specimens found to date on Canadian historic sites.

Teared ball-stopper finials have been considered, for want of other evidence, to have been too heavy to have lasted very long into the Excise Period of English glass (after 1745) when glass was taxed by weight. They appeared about 1710 (Hughes 1956: 254) and were associated with a type of decanter, the shaft and globe, which did not last long after the middle of the century (Ash 1962:123). However, archaeological evidence has emerged to indicate that the finials were popular into the Seven Years' War. An example found at Fort Beauséjour (McNally 1971: 89-90) probably was deposited after 1755; another at Beaubassin (Harris 1972: 35), not until 1760; and now this specimen, 1758 or later. The similarity in manufacture and decoration between teared finials and air-twist stems may be considered to indicate that they enjoyed concurrent popularity at least until 1760. The air enclosures in the finial from Fort Amherst form a circuit of rather irregular bubbles around the horizontal circumference: a better preserved example from Fort Beauséjour is illustrated in Figure 3.

3 English teared ball stopper finial, horizontal diameter; 36 mm., lead metal; made from the early 18th century until at least 1760. The example is from Fort Beauséjour.

The fragments of glass which represent the leading styles of the English Excise Period are mostly stemware. In this period the demands of rococo decoration, particularly the emphasis upon delicacy, curvature and ornament, merged with a need to make vessels light enough to offset the economic effects of taxation by weight. The two types of twist stem and the sparkling refractive effect of light faceting may thus be viewed in terms of "compensation by ornament" (Thorpe 1969:201).

Earliest of the three stem types is the air-twist stem with which glassmakers had experimented well before the Excise Period. They became very popular when that ill-advised regulation was implemented and were eclipsed through the late 1760s by opaque-twist and facet-cut stems. Thus 1740 to 1770 is a safe dating range (Elville 1961: 13; Thorpe 1969: 213). The example from Fort Amherst is a single-series multiple spiral with a swelling knop (Fig, 4).

4 Knopped fragment from an English air-twist stem. single-series multiple-spiral twist, lead metal; popular 1740-70.

Opaque-twist stems, probably inspired by the example of the air-twist and Venetian filigree precedents, commenced by 1750 and lasted until 1780 (Thorpe 1969: 213-4). Four of the examples from Fort Amherst are double-series twists, and the fifth, shown in Figure 5, is a single-series cork screw twist with a plain conical foot.

5 English opaque-twist stem, single-series corkscrew twist, with foot, lead metal; popular 1750-80.

The facet-cut stem has a longer history than either of the twist stems, being made as early as 1745 and lasting as late as 1810. Several considerations narrow the dating somewhat in this instance. They did not become very popular until about 1760 (Haynes 1964: 284) and the facets evolved into flutes late in the period, Bridge-fluting (carrying the facets onto the bowl) apparently did not commence until 1760 (Ash 1962: 104-5) and the style became less popular after 1780 or 1790 (Ash 1962: 106). The Fort Amherst specimen has hexagonal facets and bridge-fluting (Fig. 6) and 1760 to 1790 is probably a reasonable date to assign to it.

6 Conjectural reconstruction of an English facet-cut stemmed glass based on a stem-bowl fragment found at Fort Amherst, lead metal; 1780-90.

Not dissimilar in conception is the facet-cut cruet. The fragment in question has diamond cutting on the body and scale cutting on the neck. Thorpe's illustration of various mid-century cruet types (1969: Plate 151) shows two very similar examples, dated 1750 and 1770. A designation of third quarter 18th-century English is reliable for the Fort Amherst fragment since shapes changed markedly after that time.

The final specimen from Fort Amherst is a puzzle. It is the top part of a wide flat handle, attached to a thin-walled vessel of which little is left. It is of non-lead glass while all other table glass found is of lead crystal and this makes an English attribution questionable. The form of the handle tells us little, although it may be dated before 1830 because the handle was apparently attached initially at the higher of the two weld points (Wilkinson 1968: 21). Small as the fragment is, it bears close comparison with a Bohemian export decanter found at the Fortress of Louisbourg. The decanter dates to the second half of the 18th century (Charleston: pers. com.) and was found in a 1760s archaeological context (McNally 1973: Fig. 8).