Glass was certainly made in England during the later Middle Ages, but most of it was used for church windows (see stained glass). The vessel glass of the period has not been much studied and is only imperfectly understood. Only by the second half of the 16th century does the picture become clearer. Two lines of development may be traced in this period. One is the glass of German waldglas type, made in the woods that supplied the furnaces with fuel and a source of potash. These glasses were made by workers whose traditions were those of Lorraine and northern France. Much of their production was of window glass, but they also made vessels in a modest variety of shapes and modes of decoration. Chief among them was a tumbler-like drinking glass with a low, double foot-rim produced by pushing in the bottom of the bulb from which the glass was made; this might be decorated either by mold-blown diaper (overall repeat) patterns, by swirled ribbing imparted by mold blowing and subsequent twisting, or by a zone of trailed threading below the rim. Applied notched ribbons or small circular motifs also were used. Small bottles of mold-blown hexagonal section or of flattened ovate form with diagonal ribbing also were made. The second line of development was that of the international Venetian style brought by immigrant Italians; this, however, in time acquired an English idiom. The work was done mainly in London.

In the 17th century these two traditions were welded into one, spurred by the proclamation of 1615 that forbade the use of wood in glass furnaces, as well as in certain other industries, in an effort to prevent the deforestation of the country. Thereafter, with coal as the sole means of fusing glass, glassworks tended to be located where coal deposits (and the frequently concomitant fire clays for making glass pots) were abundant. Since such areas for the most part were those that have been continuously occupied by industry (e.g., the Stourbridge area and Tyneside), exploration of the early glass factory sites has seldom been practicable. Little, therefore, is known of provincial glassmaking in England in the 17th century, but it is clear that Venetian influences gradually replaced the earlier waldglas tradition, which had depended on supplies of wood. Some idea of the new style may be gained from the fragments of glasses often excavated in London and other cities. It is frequently difficult to distinguish between an English glass and an imported European one, although a certain coarseness may be taken as symptomatic of English make.

During the first half of the 17th century, glassmaking was among the English industries for which monopoly rights were granted by the crown; the greatest of a series of monopoly holders was Sir Robert Mansell, who effectively controlled the industry from 1623 until his death in 1656. After the Restoration, although some monopolies were granted for certain categories of glasswares, an increasingly important role in the English industry was played by the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers (reincorporated in 1664), which was able to keep closely in touch with the needs of the English market. Its members seem to have laid stress on simplicity of shape and durability of material, as appears from the correspondence of one of them, John Greene, with his suppliers in Venice. Dissatisfied with the quality of glass supplied to them and no doubt also anxious to make England independent of foreign sources of both finished glass and raw materials, they commissioned George Ravenscroft to make experiments with native materials in the hope of evolving a more solid glass than the Venetian and one that more closely resembled rock crystal.

Ravenscroft was completely successful; his crucial discovery was the value of adding lead oxide. His “glass of lead,” evolved about 1675, was perfected toward the end of the century and set a standard for the rest of Europe. It was solid and heavy and more durable than the Venetian-type glass, which it progressively displaced. It was also characterized by brilliance and dark shadow paradoxically combined. It was slower to work than the Venetian glass and gradually the Venetian idioms were dropped from English glassmaking in favour of a genuine native style. This style is best exhibited in the drinking glasses that, by the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, constituted the chief glory of the English industry. These often massive baluster-stem glasses were composed of a usually funnel-shaped bowl and a stem compiled of any of a large variety of pear-shaped and bulbous knops (ornamental knobs). In their simplicity and the harmony of their proportions they rank among the classics of the Queen Anne style.

Toward the middle of the 18th century, taste in the arts generally inclined to lighter forms, and in glass this tendency was given additional impetus by an excise (1745–46) levied on glass by weight. Drinking glasses became slighter, the bowls smaller, and the stems taller and more slender. The loss in architectonic values was often offset by extraneous decoration. At first this tended to be concentrated in the stem. Bubbles of air had sometimes previously been enclosed in a knop forming part of the stem of a wineglass, and these bubbles were now drawn out and twisted so that they formed a cable of air ribbons inside a cylindrical stem. Stems of this type were popular about the middle of the century. Just before 1750 a stem decorated with threads of opaque white glass instead of air twists came into favour. These stems were made by much the same techniques as the Venetian latticinio glass. They remained in fashion until about the time of the second Glass Excise Act in 1777, which imposed a tax on the opaque white “enamel” glass, previously exempt.

These forms of ornament had been restricted to the stems of glasses, but other methods of decoration were simultaneously evolved to embellish the whole glass. First of these was engraving, which had been sporadically practiced in England as early as the end of the 17th century. This work and the inscriptions, coats of arms, and arabesque borders in German style that were engraved during the first 20 years or so of the 18th century were undoubtedly the work of immigrant (probably German) artisans. By 1735, however, at least one English engraver was capable of executing such commissions and from about this time engraving on glass began to take on a more English character. An artless use of floral motifs, chinoiseries (Chinese themes), and scenes from country life is typical of the engraving of the third quarter of the 18th century, as were the frequent representations on glasses of Jacobite themes—portraits of the Old and Young Pretenders (James III and Charles Edward), the rose with buds, the honeysuckle, and the other flowers used in the symbology of the Stuart cause, together with the mottoes of such “loyal” societies as the Cycle Club.

Engraving never reached great heights in England, but English glasses were in demand by engravers in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, where the work of at least one notable artist—Jacob Sang, of Amsterdam—was almost exclusively done on imported English drinking glasses. English lead glass also seems to have been particularly favoured by the Dutch diamond-point engravers, whose work in this period was executed almost exclusively in stipple (i.e., dotted engraving). The chief masters of this delicate art, in which the design seems no more than a bloom on the surface of the glass, were Frans Greenwood of Dordrecht, the originator of the style, and David Wolff of The Hague, whose work, if uninspired, is of high technical accomplishment.

Enamelling, the second decorative technique of foreign inspiration, began to be used on English glass in the mid-18th century. It embellished opaque white glass in imitation of china—a type of work usually associated with the name of Michael Edkins, a Bristol artist, but in fact done in many parts of the country. Perhaps the most original work in this medium was done on clear glass by members of the Beilby family of Newcastle upon Tyne during the 1760s and 1770s. Their rendering in usually blue-toned white enamel of ruins, trophies of arms, and rural pastimes, often framed in scrollwork of the utmost delicacy, is one of the best things in English Rococo glass. Gilding was also used at this time to decorate glasses, usually with simple designs of vines and grapes.

These ornamental techniques, however, were of ephemeral growth in England. Far more significant than any of them, because more firmly rooted in the very nature of English glass, was the art of cutting. Although literary references to cut glass occur before 1720, the earliest known pieces can hardly be dated much before 1725. On them the cutting is mainly confined to brims and feet, which are scalloped or notched; or, on wineglasses to the thicker parts of the glass, such as the stem, which might be fluted or cut in an allover pattern of flat diamonds. Throughout the period from about 1745 to 1770, shallow cutting was the norm. Diamonds, hexagons, flutes, and scale pattern were combined with segmental lunate cuts (produced by holding the glass at an angle to the cutting wheel) and with triangular and diamond motifs in very low relief. All of these elements could be combined to produce designs of great complexity and richness. This period marked the golden age of English cutting.

About 1770 a plainer style, employing mainly flutes, responded to the rising Neoclassical fashion in the other arts. The flutes were sometimes combined with diamonds in relief. When further taxes were imposed on glass in 1777 and 1781 and when in 1780 trade between England and Ireland was freed, it was this relief-diamond style that was taken up in Ireland by the glasshouses founded there. The Irish glassworkers could afford to be more lavish with their material and on this thicker glass increasingly deeply cut diamonds and other relief motifs could be produced. About the turn of the century the diamonds began to be reduced in size and to be incorporated into a diaper pattern covering whole areas, often alternating with fields of larger truncated diamonds, the surfaces of which were themselves diversified with cut crosshatching. Such designs were often combined with deeply cut horizontal grooves. These styles, which were subsequently followed in England as well as in Ireland, finally led to a complete breaking up of the face of the glass into points and ridges, with increased prismatic effect but with a disastrous loss of surface quality, which is one of the peculiar beauties of glass. The prismatic brilliance was enhanced by the progressively greater purity and whiteness of the glass made during the second quarter of the 19th century. The temptation to cut ever more deeply and with greater complexity finally seduced the glassmakers into producing the “prickly monstrosities” of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Throughout the 18th century there had been great admiration in Europe for English lead “crystal,” and in the second half of it some of the European glasshouses were using lead oxide and had contrived to produce a comparable material. English cut glass was admired and exported, and the styles of cutting of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were much imitated abroad.