Great Yarmouth stained-glass rose explained

Last year, Cotswold Archaeology and a team of local volunteers excavated seven test pits within Great Yarmouth’s historic town.  Excavated finds included copper ship’s nails, fragments of 16th-century pottery (including a piece of Cologne or Frechen jar with oak-leaf decoration and a sherd of bi-colour Dutch pottery) and carved stone, but the most impressive was a beautiful piece of painted window glass. With its stunning yellow colouring and fine painted details, it was a piece we just had to know more about!

Often described as the ‘Tudor’ rose, its design shows two five-petal roses with a cross-hatched centre, concave petal edges and thin lines depicting stamens radiating from the centre.

Any archaeologist worth their salt is always asking questions, and this intriguing piece of glass gave us many, including: when was this stained-glass window made? Is the rose associated with anyone or a family? And most importantly, why was it in our test pit?

Our first port of call was to look at other surviving stained-glass windows to see where our rose fragment may have come from. Its design is very similar to the rose seen in the west window at St. Mary’s Church, Shrewsbury, originally made for town’s Greyfriars chapel in c. 1330–53. However, the method in which the yellow colour was achieved in both pieces is very different – the Great Yarmouth’s yellow colour was achieved by adding metallic oxides to the glass when molten (hence the name ‘pot-metal’), while the example at St. Marys was achieved with silver stain.

Depicted as a simplistic two-dimensional flower in thick paint, the Great Yarmouth rose is also similar to a probable 14th-century simple five-petalled rose in a window at St Michael’s, Barton Turf, Norfolk. Both roses have similar petals with radiating lines and central cross-hatching within the flower.

The rose design also bears similarities to the various 15th-century double roses in the windows at St Mary the Virgin, Saxlingham Nethergate, Norfolk. One of the St Mary’s double roses is made entirely of yellow glass, although it is not known whether this is pot-metal yellow or silver stain, but the roses there have a more three-dimensional style than the Great Yarmouth example.

According to Rachel Tyson, a consultant glass specialist, there is no exact parallel for the Great Yarmouth double rose glass fragment. The style dates it most probably from the middle of the 14th century, when heraldic display was at its height, but without any associated fragments and context, we cannot rule out a slightly later date into the 15th century.

At that time, coloured glass was not made in England and would have been imported from the continent, from places like Burgundy, Flanders, Normandy and Lorraine. While yellow glass probably wasn’t the most expensive glass to produce, this does show a level of wealth and importance.

Why would such a beautifully crafted stained-glass window end up broken and in our test pit? Much of the stained glass found in archaeological contexts has gotten there either during the Dissolution of the monasteries in the early 16th century, or during Puritan iconoclasm of the mid-17th century. As the other material in the test pit was later medieval or Post-medieval in date, it seems likely that this was also the fate of our glass rose.

Indie Jago