Armour and Weapons

To have the privilege to hold a real medieval object in oneapos;s hand is to experience a tangible link to the past. To grip the hilt of a sword or the shaft of a pollaxe, to hold a helmet or gauntlet is quite remarkable. Close examination trains the eye to recognize such details as the manner of manufacture and application of decoration. To compare the size, weight, and ‘feel’ of various pieces gives an incredible insight into how they have been borne and wielded. To a greater extent, museums are facilitating this cotton-gloved ‘hands-on’ approach. Indeed, readers are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity whenever it arises. Second to this invaluable experience is the provision of images: these must suffice for the purposes of our study. Wherever possible, images of objects from the pertinent era have been chosen to illustrate the glossary. Where this is more difficult, earlier or later examples are used.

As outlined in the preface, the surviving artefacts from our century represent a miniscule fraction of those that had been in use. Metals and fabrics were (and are) valuable commodities. After the Battle of Bannockburn the slain were completely stripped and left ‘nakyt’. Such rich pickings could be reused in multifarious ways. In the British Museum is a fourteenth-century kettlehat that has been converted into a kettle for domestic use. In 1423 ingenious London brewers found that mail links of an old haubergeon made ideal curtain rings for a wall hanging in their meeting hall.

Another good case of re-use has been revealed in the excavated remains of a sixteenth-century body defence known as a jack of plate. The small metal plates sewn into its fabric were cut-down pieces from a defence much in use in the previous century – the brigandine. This flexible torso defence could, itself, be constructed from sections cut from plate armour.

Unknown or murky provenance (i.e. ‘said to have come from’, ‘attributed to’) bedevils the study of many an artefact. When presented with such unreliable information, we are often forced to rely on stylistic grounds such as comparison with artworks and similar pieces with better-known provenance for the purposes of dating and place of origin, production, and use. Even objects with an impeccable provenance are not always cut-and-dried cases. A good example is the past life of the ‘Avant’ armour in Glasgow Museums’ collection.