THIRTEENTH‐CENTURY ISLAMIC ENAMELLED GLASS FOUND IN MEDIEVAL ABINGDON

Summary. Eight fragments of a glass beaker with enamel and gilt decoration have recently been found during an excavation in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. The beaker was obviously thirteenth‐century Islamic work, and a combination of several distinctive decorative elements serve to date it rather closely to the first years of the Mamluk period, circa 1250, and to suggest an Egyptian rather than Syrian provenance. The beaker's decoration shares a style of eulogistic inscription and its mounted‐horsemen iconography with a number of other vessels which seem to date to the Ayyubid period, but adds to them a known Mamluk heraldic badge. In discussing the horsemen vessels the suggestion of Egyptian origin is extended to cover them, and is made in conjunction with a critique of C.J. Lamm's classification which has previously been used to describe all such work as Syrian, even when excavated in Egypt. Lamm's classification is seen as based on a use of only marginally relevant literary evidence unsupported by excavation results. It is notable that most of the other medieval Islamic glass finds in England share features of the decorative manner of the horseman group, and it seems that this type might have been favoured by importers.