posted 10-18-2002 08:31 PM
This is available on the net somewhere. Does anyone know where?
"Most Assuredly Harnessed":
the Effectiveness of Medieval Knightly Armour
Michael Lacy, Ph.D., Reading University, © 1997
In the summer of 1361, the Baltic Island of Gotland stood braced for invasion. King Waldemar Atterdag of Denmark, at war with Sweden, had landed with a large army of well-equipped German mercenaries and Danish royal troops, and was making for the Islands' largest town, the prosperous hanseatic port of Visby. The Swedish defenders, largely made up of a poorly armed peasant militia, included in their ranks old men, young boys and the lame. A small number were armed in mail shirts, while even fewer were armed in antiquated coat of plates armour. Outside of the city walls, the defenders formed their battle lines and awaited the Danish onslaught. The battle opened with a murderous shower of crossbow bolts, which played havoc amongst the lightly armed islanders;
This was followed by an equally bloody hand-to-hand combat that left over 2,000 dead on the field. The corpses were heaped into five large common graves, several of which were excavated by the Swedish archaeologist Bengt Thordemann in the early part of this century. The 1,185 bodies recovered bore mute witness to horrible effectiveness of medieval weaponry; skulls pierced through by crossbow bolts, bones crushed and holed by blows of the axe and mace, and even one unfortunate defender who seems to have had both of his legs hacked off with a single blow of an axe or greatsword.1
The excavations at Visby show the brutal effectiveness of medieval weaponry (figs 1-4), but they also raise some interesting questions about the effectiveness of medieval armour. Romances abound with tales of armoured villans being cleft in twain by a single stroke of a heroes's sword, of helms split asunder and hauberks rent and torn; there is also a good deal of iconography, such as the examples from the famous Maciojowski bible (5,6), which shows in great detail old-testament warriors (depicted as European knights of the mid-thirteenth century) doing battle with bloody effectiveness, their armour apparently of no more use than helmets of paper-machie.
But do accounts such as these produce a realistic pictures of the effectiveness of medieval armour, or are they the medieval equivalent of Rambo single-handedly ejecting the Red Army from Afganistan, as it was written in the third film of his name. A future historian, viewing the final scene in which our bemuscled hero destroys the villan in his attack helicopter by charging at it, like a jousting knight in days of old, and impaling it on the barrel of his T-55 tank would no doubt be impressed by the realism of the late 20th century Soviet military equipment depicted - yet he would perhaps be misled in the matter of contemporary ground-to-air combat tactics.
Medieval troubadors, and their modern succesors in the motion picture industry have been responsible for the propagation of a number of absurdities that have shaped the popular perception of armour as clumsy, heavy and ineffective. Sir Olivers' depiction of the French knights being hoisted onto their mounts before the battle of Agincourt is one of the better known examples of this kind of cinematic misrepresentation. But the effectivenes of armour has also been greatly downplayed throughout Hollywood's depiction of the middle ages, in keeping with the heroic tradition of many medieval romances. Due to the needs of dramatic pacing, the villans, however well armoured, are dispatched with great rapidity by the heroes, with single strokes of the sword blade, or by a single arrow which sails unerringly through the heaviest armour. The public can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that knightly armour was little more the costume or uniform of the warrior class, and that combat between even heavily armoured opponents was a quick and bloody affair. Bloody it often was, but a close look at the evidence from medieval chroniclers and eye-witnesses shows that these combats usually proceeded more at the pace of a boxing match than of a gunfight.
The medieval knight was a well-trained and well equipped warrior, who was expected to "see his blood flow and hear his teeth crack under the fist of his adversary" when training as a young man. "When he is thrown to the ground, he must fight on with all his might and not lose courage." wrote Roger of Hoveden in the 12th century, "The oftner he falls, the more determinedly he must spring to his feet again".2 The knights had access to the best weapons and armour that the smiths could produce. How effective was medieval armour at protecting the knight in battle? To answer this question, one must examine the developments of the armourer's art, as they sought new methods to keep pace with the development of offensive weapons and tactics. Challenges such as the couched lance, the crossbow and the longbow were all faced, and to a great extent overcome by the skill of the armourer. In this brief survey, I will atttempt to point out some of the more interesting examples of contemporary accounts of arms vs armour.
The Age of Mail
Mail armour had been used in Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. The construction of mail, composed of links of iron, each one interlocked with four of its neighbours and then rivetted, had not changed since its invention, possibly by early Celtic tribes, nor was it to do so throughout its use by European armies. Only the style of the garment, the length and cut of sleeves and skirt changed as the decades went by. Mail armour is as flexible as fabric, and is remarkably effective against a slashing cut - so much so that it is used to this day in such places as abattoirs to protect workers from accidental cuts. By the end of the twelfth century, the armoured knight is often depicted encased in mail, from head to foot.
The armour used by the early crusaders was, by most contemprary accounts, much heavier than that used by their moslem opponents. The Byzantine princess Anna Comnena laid great stress on the advantages of their heavy armour and equipment, which made it possible for a charge to be so violent that the Moslem cavalry never stood their ground, and generally avoided hand to hand combat. The lighter-armed moslem cavalry relied on speed and the use of the bow in many of their engagements, and although the crusaders' armour was effective against their arrows at long range, the arrows took a terrible toll on their horses, as many accounts tell. At the battle of Dorylaeum, in 1097 it was said that the crusaders lost far more horses than knights.3
A knight whose horse was killed from under him was doomed to capture, unless his side was to win posession of the field, or he was able to find another mount and make his escape. The plight of a well armoured, but dismounted, surrounded and exhausted crusader army is amply shown in the accounts of the Battle of Hattin, fought near lake Tiberias in 1187. Military Historian Charles Oman recounts;
"When the second attempt to pierce the Moslem circle had failed, and all hope was gone, we are told that in their despair the Franks dropped from their exhausted horses, cast down their lances, and threw themselves sullenly upon the ground. The Turks ran in upon them and took them captives without another blow being struck. To their great suprise, they found that very few of the knights were seriously hurt; their mail-shirts had protected them so well from the arrow-shower that few were badly wounded and hardly any slain. Thirst and exhaustion had brought them down, rather than the shaft or scimitars of the conquerors. On the other hand, there was hardly a horse that was not sorely hurt, and not one that cold have carried his rider out of the battle."4
Another military Historian, J. F. Verbruggen, notes a moslem witness to the battle who wrote "It was an extraordinary and wonderful thing that the French knights kept on fighting as long as their horses were all right. They were armed from head to foot in a sort of armour made of a fabric of iron rings. They seemed to be an iron mass, off which blows simply glanced."5 Yet, like a modern tank, immobilized by the loss of a track, and out of ammunition, their heavy armour was of little comfort to them, and they had no choice but to surrender.
To judge the effectiveness of armour in pitched battle, it is of greater use to look at the casualties suffered by the victors, as often times the end of a battle was followed by a general massacre of the defeated. The casualties on the victorious side, however, are more likely to reflect the lethality of the combat itself. In most battles, it will be seen that knightly deaths in the melée were remarkably low. At Tinchebrai, in 1106, Henry I, leading an army of Angevins, Bretons and English numbering 2,400 fought an hour long battle with Robert Curthose and his force of 700 knights and an unknown number of footsoliers, with the loss of only 2 knights and "a few score of foot soliders". The defeated army had 60 knights killed, another hundred captured, and some 250-300 footmen dead.6 At Bremule in 1119, 500 French Knights faced 400 English, and in the resulting combat, the English won with, apparently no losses, while even the French knights only had 3 killed, while 140 were taken prisoner! This was explained by the chronicler as being due to the fact that they were "clothed from head to foot in mail, and because of the fear of God and the fact that they were known to each other as old comrades, there was no general slaughter."7 Indeed, capturing one's enemy and extracting a ranson was far more profitable than killing them, and the knightly battles of this period reflect this basic economic principle.
The armour of the knight changed little in its outward appearance during the 13th century; the body was protected by mail armour, which covered more and more of the knight, till he was completely encased from head to foot. The only real innovation was the introduction of the helm, a somewhat clumsy and claustrophobic looking head piece, but one which offered greater protection to the face from the point of an oncoming lance, at the expense, it seems, of protection from downward blows.
The effeciacy of the knightly panoplie of the 12th and 13th centuries is demonstrated not only by accounts of battles, but also in the accounts of tournaments of this time, which had not yet evolved into the formal pageants of later centuries. They were at this time, still rough and tumble affairs. Verbruggen writes, "Tournaments did not differ greatly from real combat on the battlefield;"..."The knights fought with their normal equipment, and there is no mention of the use of other weapons, nor that the point of the lance or cutting edge of the sword were dulled."8 Indeed, specialised tournament armour and weaponry, such as the blunted sword and coronel lance were not to be introduced until the late 13th century.
Historian David Crouch, in his biography of William Marshal, vividly describes the early tournament as being rather like "horseback American football with sharp sticks and no referees." - which is a fair analogy.9 The violence of some of these "sporting encounters" is attested by the amusing account of the great knight and tournament champion, William Marshal, who after a particularly brusing day upon the field, could not be found for the presentation of the prize that he had won. He was eventually located at the local blacksmith's forge, with his head on the anvil while his helm was being hammered back into shape so that it could be removed.10 But despite the violence, the armour of the time was sufficient to prevent most fatalities - althought they did occur from time to time, much to the annoyance of the Church, which sought unsucessfully to ban the tournament on several occasions.11
Transition period; 13th Century
While mail armour is very effective at stopping slashing blows delivered with a blade, it offers little protection against a powerful thrust, such as a blow delivered by a couched lance, which, even if it did not penetrate the armour, could still break bone and cause internal injuries. There are even accounts of knights being run clear through with a powerful lance blow, and these are probably not exaggerations; the full weight of a charging horse and rider, concentrated on the sharp end of a lance amounts to a tremendous force - and only 3 or 4 links of mail need be burst to allow the lance head to penetrate completely through the armour.
To meet this challenge, an additional defense for the torso was developed in the form of the curie, a breast-plate of stiffened leather which was worn under the surcoat, and sometimes under the mail hauberk as well. The curie makes its appearance in documents beginning around the third quarter of the twelfth century, but by the fourteenth century, the curie had been supplanted by a garment of thinner leather or fabric that derived its defensive qualities from metal plates riveted to the inside of the garment; this form of armour has come to be known as a coat of plates.
The effectiveness of the coat of plates in battle is attested by the chroniclers of the Battle of Benevento, when the predominantly French army of the Papal crusade led by Charles d'Anjou met the forces of King Manfred of Sicily, which contained a force of 1,200 German heavy cavalry. Oman recounts "In 1266, at the battle of Benevento, chroniclers wrote that the German cavalry was armored with coats of plate, and were quite invulnerable to the blows of their enemies swords. The French knights had great difficulty in harming them, until they spied a weak point in the armpit and thrusted with their swords, eventually defeating and killing many of the German knights."12 Although the German military historian Delbrück dismissis this account as aphocrical, it stands to reason that a knight so armed would be very difficult to harm with the blade of a sword, and that a thrust to the armpit would be a more effective attack; it is also true that the fourteenth century saw the development of swords more adapted to the thrust than the cut - the account may be wrong in the particular, but correct in the general.
Whatever the case, the new armour proved quite popular, and spread rapidly; by the fourteenth century, the coat of plates was the predominant form of body armour among the knights of Western Europe. References to coats of plates, also called pairs of plates, hauberks of plates, cote a plates or simply plates, become increasingly common in wills, inventories and accounts, and they are often depicted in sculpture, illumination and paintings.13
The most important source of information on the construction of the coat of plates in the fourteenth century is the collection of 24 armours found at the mass graves on the Baltic island of Gotland, the remains of the fallen warriors from the aforementioned battle of Wisby, of 1361. The armours uncovered at Wisby were composed of iron plates that had onece been secured to a fabric or leather covering, long since rotted away. The number of plates on each armour varied in from 8 to almost six hundred, and were attached by rivets to the outer coat.
In addition to the 24 more or less complete suits of coat of plate armour, several mail shirts, a great number of mail coifs, as well as a number of early gauntlets. It is interesting to note that, although most of the skeletal remains show evidence of servere damage from weapons such as the crossbow, none of the harnesses of coat-of-plates show any sign of penetration damage - although one would think that had any armour been pierced by bolts, it would have been the first to be discarded. The mail armour is so badly corroded, it is often impossible to analyse it for battle-damage, although the abundance of small pieces of mail would seem to indicate a violent battle.14
By the end of the 14th century, the armour used by Western knights had changed appearance considerable from the mail harnesses of of the crusading era. The great helm had given way to the bascinet with its tall point and moveable visor, and the limbs were increasingly covered by large plates of iron and steel. The coat of plates also changed, and as the armourers improved their methods of making harder and more durable steel, the individual plates of the torso armour grew in size and decreased in number, until the fabric covering became superfulous, and the "white" or polished steel armours were worn exposed.
One of the few armours of this period that has survived is a composite harness from the castle of Churburg, from which this model at the Royal Armouries in Leeds is based (fig. 20). Formed of steel plates fastened to an interior lining of leather, it is basically a coat of plates turned inside-out, providing a glancing surface for enemy weapons. As the plates became larger, the need for the interior lining dissapeared, and solid breastplates like that show on the effigy of Walter von Hohenklingen (c1386, fig. 19) became more common.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the plate armour of the knights had made them all but invulnerable to most hand weapons; Froissart describes the tournament St. Ingelvert, held in 1390, in which 136 courses are run with the lance of war in full battle armour - which resulted in only one serious injury. The force of the impacts between the charging knights was indeed considerable, as the case of the joust of Sir Godfrey Seton and Regnault de Royes shows;
"The two knights spurred foreward simultaneously and came together as squarely as they knew how, stiking a violent blow on each others' shields. Ther lances were stout and did not break, but curved up, and the powerful thrusts by strong arms stopped the horses dead in thier tracks." in their next joust, the only wound of the entire tournament was recieved, when the Frenchman hit the English knights' shield "with such a firm, powerful thrust, delivered with a strong arm...that his lance pierced the left-hand-side of the English-knight's shield and went straight into his arm."15
The wound, however, was soon bound and the tournament continued.
Yet despite the heavier and more protective armour, the battlefield offered dangers other than the weapons of the enemy. At the battle of Rosebeke in 1382, Froissart relates the scene as the French cavalry outflanks the Flemish under Philip van Artevelde
"...the wings rode round and enveloped the Flemish, so that they became very hard-pressed. The men-at-arms began thrusting at their flanks with their stout, long-bladed lances of hard Bordeaux steel which penetrated their coats of mail to the flesh. Those who were attacked shrank back to escape the thrusts, for it would have been beyond human endurance for them to stand their ground and be impaled. They were rammed so closely together that they could not move their arms or use their pikes to defend themselves. Many lost strength and breath, falling on top of each other, so that they collapsed and died without striking a blow."..."Knights and squires did not spare themselves, but went to work with a will, vying with one another. Some advanced too far into the press and were surrounded and crushed...for which reason there were a certain number of French dead....there was a great pile of Flemish dead, long and high, but never before in so great a battle in which so many were killed had so little blood been seen flowing. This was because by far the greatest number were crushed or smothered to death, and these men did not bleed."16
Such scenes were repeated at Agincourt in 1415; after the second French line was broken, it fell back onto those arriving to the battle, and the resulting press left a pile of bodies taller than a standing man in which, as at least one English eye-witness believed, more "were dead through press than our men could have slain". Large numbers of wounded or uninjured prisoners were extricated from these heaps of fallen Frenchmen over the next 2 hours, and Oman recounts that the French knights "were so jammed", like the Flemings at Roosebeke, "that, save those in the front ranks, they could not even raise a hand to strike."17
But at Agincourt, it was not long-bladed lances of Bordeaux steel that drove the flanks to press in on the center, but the powerful yew longbow. Although the Welsh longbow has often been described as a "killing machine" that could easily penetrate armour, there is in fact little evidence to support the claim that the longbow was any more lethal to the fully armoured man than the pike, lance or halberd also in use at the time. Although Agincourt is usually offered as the evidence of the longbow's killing power, it is impossible to judge how many of the French knights were actually felled by the bow, particularly when such large numbers of them were crushed in the press, and, rather unchivalricaly, massacred by king Henry Vs' orders after they had surrendered.
The Agincourt victory was won, not so much by a decisive weapon, but by a decisive tactic; that of enticing an enemy to rashly assault a prepared position that was held by a combination of dismounted men-at-arms, archers and obstacles. This was the tactic that the English used so well at Dupplin moor, Crecy, Poitiers, and most of their other great victories in the 100 years war. The longbow was an intregal part of this tactic, but it alone could not decide the outcome of a battle. Although the English armies of the 100 years war won many spectacular victories, they did in fact loose the war - despite an ever increasing proportion of archers in English field armies of fifteenth century.17
Perhaps the longbows' greatest power was in its ability to kill and maim lightly armed infantry, and the unprotected horses of knights. At the battle of Poitiers, the first French charges was stopped by the English archers at the hedge; "The Marshals' battalion had already advanced for action, headed by the men who werer to break through the ranks of the archers. All on horseback they entered the road which had the thick hedge on either side. No sooner were they engaged in it than the archers began to shoot murerously from both flanks, knocking down horses and piercing everything before them with their long barbed arrows. The injured and terrified horses refused to go on. They swerved or turned back, or else fell beneath their riders, ..."18 At close range, the longbow was indeed lethal in the hands of a trained man, and could, as accounts relate, penetrate even the bascinets of the French knights with a lucky shot, but at even long range, it could wound and kill unprotected mounts, depriving the heavily armed knights of their mobility.
To examine the true lethality of the longbow as a "killing maching", one should look at the battles in which it failed to turn the tide of battle, such as Patay (1429). Although the English were rushed before they had fully deployed, and had relitavely few archers (200 under Talbot, and an unspecified proportion of the 3,500 under Bedford) the fact that French chronicles record only 2 or 3 deaths among the French knights implies that the armoured knight were not being shot from their mounts like Indians in a John Wayne film, as some would have us believe. Although the casualties among the french horses was unrecorded, it was undoubtedly much higher than the losses among the knights. As the French won the field, any knight who had been unhorsed was spared from capture and death.
The Age of Plate
By the middle of the fifteenth century, full plate armour was used by many knights in Western Europe. One of the key developments which allowed the armourers to create these complex metal exoskeletons was the discovery of reliable methods of carbeurizing iron plate into steel, and of then tempering this steel to create a tough and resilient armour. Complex harnesses like the one shown here, that of Frederick I, now at the waffensamlung in Vienna, are composed of dozens, and sometimes hundreds of individual pieces, each carefully engineered to fit with its neighbor to provide a close-fitting and fully articulating defense. Only with toughened steel, however, could such an armour be constructed; a complex harness like this made of simple iron would have prone to jamming if any of the close-fitting plates became dented or warped; Imagine William Marshal's discomfort if not just his head, but his entire body was locked rigidly in dented armour!
Dr. Allan Williams, author of The Royal Armoury at Greenwich 1515-1649, has made a metalographic study of a number armours from the 15th - 17th centuries, and has shown that the most skilled armourers of the time could produce steel with a surface hardness approaching the levels of modern tool steel - quite a feat when one considers that they were working completely by eye and intuition in the days before reliable methods of measuring the hight temperatures of the forge were avaliable.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the art of the armourer reached its apogee, both in the functional aspect of protecting its wearer from the weapons of his enemies, and in aesthetic form and decoration. The high quality armours from this period are elegant and functional, finely crafted by master armourers who were both artists and engineers of the highest order; the great wealth and reputation of armouring families such as the Missaglias, the Negrolis, the Helmschmids, and the Seusenhofers tell of their prestige and skill.
The two great centeres of armour production during this time were located on the North and South side of the Alps, in Southern Germany and Northern Italy, where abundant iron ores, wood for charcoal, and, importantly, fast moving streams to power the hammer mills, were to be found. Armours of the Italian school were, in the 15th century, notable for their rounded and smooth shapes, contrasted with the German high Gothic, with its elaborate decoration, angular form, and graceful fluting.
The patrons of these highly skilled craftsmen were the wealthy nobility of European courts, who would spend lavishly on armours, both for the sake of safety on the field of battle and tourney, and for display and aggrandisement. Armours were prize possessions, and were often exchanged as gifts at great court occasions such as marriages and treaties. The great wealth of the ruling houses in Europe allowed many of them to amass huge collections of armour, their patronage giving further impetus to the development of the armourers' art.
The armies that fought in the Wars of the Roses were well equipped with armour of such high quality, and this may go a long way to explain the very small casualties suffered by the victors in most battles; with the exception of the gruelling 10 hour battle of Towton, in which the victorious Yorkist army suffered an appaling 20% casualty rate (no doubt made worse by the bitterly cold weather that condemned many of the wounded to death by exposure). Other than Towton, few of the battles resulted in more than 500 deaths on the side of the victors - despite the fact that both sides were equipped with more or less identical armour and weapons - including the longbow.
The Final Flowering
The sixteenth century saw the final flowering of the armourers' practical skill; armours of the "Maximilian" style, with their powerful lines and columnar fluting, were some of the finest examples of the armourers' work. The coming age of firearms was to render obsolete many of the techniques of the sixteenth century armoureres, as hard steel can be shattered by the impact of high-velocity projectiles; softer armours were better able to absorb their energy, and the armours of the seventeenth century tended to be of softer, thicker, and thus heavier construction.
While Henry VIII was campaigning in France in 1513, King James IV of Scotland had been amassing large quantities of armaments, including new German armour. He had also been supplied with military advisors from the French King, who were to train the Scots in the latest contenental tactics. As in 1346, when the Scots under David II made an opportunistic attack while the English king was embroiled at war with France, James IV invaded England in August, one month after Henry's victory at the battle of the Spurs.
Unfortunately, as with the Battle of Nevilles' Cross, fought only months after the English victory at Crecy, Flodden was to prove even more disasterous for the Scots, despite an advantageous position on a ridge, and a probable slight numerical advantage (the sources tend to exaggerate the size of both armies, but Oman puts the Scots at 28-30,000 and the English at about 26,000) The battle of Flodden field, 1513, was to be the last major battle fought on British soil in which the majority of the combatants were armoured
On the 7th of August, The English army opposing the Scots, with dwindling supplies, was facing an intolerable hardship - their supply of beer had been exhausted on the 6th, they had been forced to drink water for 3 days, and were no doubt in a foul mood, and looking for a fight. The Earl of Surrey maneuvered the army around to the north of the Scots position, and was deploying his forces when the Scottish army launched their attack. Formed up into 5 columns, all on foot and armed with the long pike "in the Geman fashion", they moved in echelon down the hill and crashed into the English ranks, where a fierce hand-to-hand struggle developed.
Even the longbow, so decisive in the wars of the last century, was defeated by the heavy German armour of the Scottish front ranks; a contemporary accounts describe them as "most assuredly harnesed" in armour, and that they "abode the most dangerous shot of arrows, which sore them annoyed but yet exept it hit them in some bare place, did them no hurt." Bishop Ruthal, writing 10 days after the battle remarked "they were so well cased in armour that the arrows did them no harm, and were such large and stout men that one would not fall when four or five bills struck them."
However, not all of the Scots army was so well armoured, and the lightly armed highlanders on the right flank were scattered, leaving the centre to be slowly anhilated by the English, who gave no quarter. The battle raged, and the result was particularly bloody; the English losses were reckoned at 1,000 - 1,500, mostly from the early rout of a corp under Edmund Howard, which was hit early in the battle. As for the Scottish losses, the most moderate Scottish chronicle puts the number at 5,000, although English sources put it as high as 10,000 - in any case, it is clear that the Scotts suffered a terrible defeat, as their King, 10 Earls, 13 Barons, as well as 90 heads and 400 other members of gentle houses were among the slain. Thus ended the last great "medieval" battle fought on British soil.
Conclusion
The armourers of the middle ages were to a very large degree sucessful in their battle to keep the technological edge over weaponsmith. Indeed, the evidence suggests that fully-armoured combatants were usually not killed outright in battle, but that the majority of even the defeated knights were captured alive, their fates to be decided by their captors. Weapons such as the pike and the longbow were decisive tactically in that they forced the men-at-arms to fight dismounted; If they did not then prevail, they were almost certain to be caputured, as exhausted, heavily armed men would have little chance of escape in a general rout on foot. "There can be no doubt", writes Oman, "that the battles were very costly to the defeated army when its men-at-arms had dismounted and were unable to recover their horses". Armour also could not protect the knights from other dangers on the battlefied, such as the chance of being caught in a crush of panicked troops and suffocated. Verbruggen writes;
"Their armour and heavy weapons were tremendously important to the knights because they made them invulnerable, or greatly restricted the numbers of those killed in action and there is ample evidence that a greater sense of security due to their good protective armour supurred the knights on to the utmost bravery on the battlefield."
In the struggle between offensive and defensive arms, armour held the upper hand while the weapons' impact was largely dependent upon human strength alone - with the advent of chemically propelled weapons - firearms - the armourer were at last defeated by weaponsmiths, and to this day find themselves lagging behind the developments in offensive technology. But during the middle ages, the fully armoured man had little to fear other than capture by a foe who was not willing to give quarter. At no time, before or since was the fighting man better protected from the weapons of his enemies.
1. Thordeman, B. Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361, 2 vols., Stockholm, 1939.
2. Roger of Hoveden (d. 1201), Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs, London, 4 vols. 1868-71.
3. See Oman, C. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, (1928) 1991, Volume I, Book V.
4. Ibid, p. 331.
5. Verbruggen, J. F. Art of War in the Middle Ages, translated by S. Willard and S.C.M. Southern, 1977, p. 63
6. Oman, C. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, (1928) 1991, Volume I, p. 383.
7. Ibid, p. 388.
8. Verbruggen, J. F. Art of War in the Middle Ages, translated by S. Willard and S.C.M. Southern, 1977, p. 30-36
9. Crouch, D. William Marshal, 1990, pp. 176-177.
10. Barber, R. and Barker, J. Tournaments; Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages, 1989, p. 23.
11. Ibid, p. 24.
12. Oman, C. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, (1928) 1991, Volume I, pp. 502-503.
13. Lacy, M. 'Coat of Plates to Brigandine; the Development of Cloth Covered Armours,' MA dissertation, Reading University; printed by the Society for Creative Anachronism as Compleat Anachronist no. 69, Coat of Plates.
14. Thordeman, B. Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361, 2 vols., Stockholm, 1939.
15. Froissart, Chronicles, (1369) Penuin Edition, 1968, pp. 376-377.
16 Ibid, p. 248.
17. Oman, C. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, (1928) 1991, Volume II, p. 383.
18. Froissart, Chronicles, (1369) Penuin Edition, 1968, pp. 134-135
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