Late Middle Ages

Armor, fashion, and identity in the late Middle Ages

The suit of white armour worn by an English knight at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 was, at one and the same time, a weapon, a costume, a heraldic statement, a social certificate, and a work of art. It was also the end of a long technical and visual story that began in the chainmail hauberks of the 1200s and ended in the fluted Maximilian harnesses of the 1510s and 1520s. The article below traces that story, with particular attention to the workshops of Milan and Augsburg, the role of the *atour of the tournament, and the slow collapse of the harness before the pike square and the harquebus. The wider setting is in the overview of clothing, fashion, and sumptuary laws; the garments that the harness protected, and which it sometimes imitated, are in Late medieval clothing and the rise of the houppelande; the law that policed the corresponding display of the civilian wardrobe is in Sumptuary laws and the regulation of dress.

From mail to plate: the arms race of the long fifteenth century

The harness of the high medieval knight was a flexible, mail garment: the long hauberk of interlinked iron rings, supplemented by the aventail (a curtain of mail protecting the neck and the lower face), the chausses of mail for the legs, the coif of mail for the skull, and the padded gambeson worn beneath. The mail hauberk of the 1200s — visible in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the great seals of Richard I and Philip Augustus — was, against the weapons of its day, an effective defence. Against the crossbow of the 1300s it was less so. The long, heavy quarrel of the war crossbow could pierce mail at two hundred paces, and the longbow of the English could drive a yard of ash through a hauberk at a hundred. The response, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, was the addition of plate reinforcement: a bascinet with a movable visor, a gorget of plate, vambraces and rerebraces for the arms, cuisses and greaves for the legs, and spurs of iron. The transitional harness of Edward III’s reign — represented in the Westminster Retable of c. 1290–1300 and in the brass of Sir John d’Abernon at St Margaret’s, Cobham (c. 1327) — is half mail and half plate.

The full plate harness emerged in the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century. The development is closely tied to the Hundred Years’ War and to the appearance of new weapons on the field: the coustille (a long, narrow dagger used in the close fight), the bonnettes of plate over the joints, the pauldrons (shoulder plates), and the gauntlet of fluted and articulated plate. The harness of Henry V at Agincourt (1415) was still partly transitional — the king himself wore a bascinet with a gorget and a hauberk of mail beneath his jupon — but the harness of Louis XI of France at the Battle of Guinegate (1479) was the full white harness of plate. The armour of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (c. 1470, in the Wallace Collection) and of Maximilian I (the Hofjägerharnisch of c. 1480, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) shows the mature form: a complete covering of polished steel, articulated at the joints, with the lifter of the visor, the rondel at the armpit, the lame of plate over the lame de bras, and the solleret of overlapping plates over the foot.

The technical literature of the armour is in the manuscripts of the period. The Gladiatoria group of manuscripts (the Königsteiner Fechtbuch, the Gothaer Codex, the Gladiatoria of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Fechtbuch of Hans Talhoffer, c. 1450) shows the armour in the upright, the ochs, the vom tag, the zornhau, and the schielhau of the German school; the Le Jeu de la hache and the Talbot Shrewsbury book of c. 1440–1450 show the English and Burgundian traditions. Sydney Anglo’s The Martial Arts of Medieval Europe (2000) is the standard study; A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger’s English Weapons and Warfare, 1400–1660 (1966) and Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre au Moyen Âge (1980) cover the French and English cases.

The workshop of the armourer: Milan, Augsburg, Greenwich

The Milanese harness-makers, working in the Brescia and Milan workshops of the Sforza dukes, were the most famous armourers of the fifteenth century. The Missaglia family, the Negroli family, and the Seregni workshop produced the all’antica harnesses of the 1440s and 1450s: harnesses that imitated the antique cuirass, with muscle cuirasses in the classical style, pteryges of plate at the shoulders, and the parma equestris of the parade harness. The famous parade armour of Guidobaldo II della Rovere (c. 1550, in the Metropolitan Museum) and the all’antica harness of Charles V (the armour of the Grand Tour, c. 1530, in the Real Armería, Madrid) belong to a later phase. The Milanese export trade was substantial: the Milanese armour of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century is found in the inventories of English kings, French dukes, the Hanseatic merchants, and the Hospitallers of Rhodes.

Augsburg in Swabia was the second great centre, with the Helmschmid family (Lorenz Helmschmid, master armourer to Charles V, d. 1515) and the Kundmann and Treytz workshops. The Augsburg harness is recognisably different from the Milanese: a more angular, fluted style, with the characteristic rippen of fluting on the breastplate, the rolled edge, the gauntlet with the long, splayed cuff, and the sallet with the flared, lobster-tail extension at the back. The Maximilian armour of the 1510s and 1520s is named for the emperor and is associated particularly with the Augsburg workshop: the Maximilian harness, with its comb at the back of the helmet, its fluted breastplate, and its fashion of raised rather than rounded forms, is the highest expression of the late medieval armourer’s art.

Greenwich in England became the third great centre under Henry VIII (c. 1515–1540). The Royal Almain Armoury at Greenwich, founded c. 1511 with the Almain armourers imported from the continent, produced the famous Greenwich harness: the fluted, lathed, rondel’d harness of the Almain style, decorated with the roses and the portcullis and the fleur-de-lys of the Tudor monarchy, the gilded bands of the king’s own armours, and the stamped Thomas à Becket of the earlier Tudor workshops. The Almain and Greenwich workshops are documented in the Public Record Office archives of the Ordnance Office and in the Royal Collection, and the work of A. R. Dufty and Claude Blair on the royal workshops is the standard reference. The technical and aesthetic story is, of course, longer: the English harness of the 1380s and 1390s, the London workshops of the Black Prince’s reign, the *English brigandine of the 1400s, the Jack of the Bristol sailcloth, are all part of the picture.

Heraldry, livery, and the visual code of war

The harness was, in addition to a defence, a sign. The medieval knight was, in the strict heraldic sense, identified by his coat of arms and by the crest, supporters, mantling, and motto that went with it. The heraldic system of the late Middle Ages was already old: the Assize of Arms of 1181, the Heralds’ Visitation of England of the 1530s and 1540s, the Ordonnance de la Toison d’Or of Philip the Good of Burgundy (1430), and the Grant of Arms of the English College of Arms of 1484 are part of the same tradition. The late medieval lord wore his arms in the field on the jupon (the cloth coat worn over the mail), on the tabard (the heraldic surcoat), on the barding of the horse, on the pennoncelle of the lance, and on the standards of his retinue.

The harness itself was decorated in several different ways. The simplest was the damascening of gold and silver wire into the steel; the Limoges enamels of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Cloisonné of the 1200s are the most famous early examples. The more elaborate was the etching, sgraffito, and gilding of the harness itself. The all’antica harness of the Missaglia workshop, the parade harness of Charles V in the Real Armería, the Greenwich harness of Henry VIII in the Royal Collection are all decorated, and the decoration is rarely neutral: the gilded bands of the king’s harness mark the king, the engraved mottoes of the private harness mark the owner, the damascened rondels of the parade mark the workshop. The literature is enormous: A. C. Fox-Davies’s A Complete Guide to Heraldry (1909), Michelle Brown and J. McNab’s Timelines of Heraldry (2009), and the older Gerard J. Brault’s edition of the Roll of Arms of the period.

The livery — the cloth coat or badge worn by the retainers of a lord — was the civilian counterpart of the heraldic display, and the two were linked. The livery and maintenance system of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which a lord clothed his retainers in his own cloth and identified them by his badge, was the political version of the heraldic system, and it is well documented in the Stonor letters, the Paston letters, and the Cely papers. The livery was the target of repeated parliamentary legislation: the Statute of Liveries of 1390, 1401, 1405, 1410, 1421, 1426, 1429, 1444, 1453, 1455, 1461, 1468, 1470, 1477, 1483, 1484, and 1487, with the same prohibitions repeated over the same century. The liveries were, in effect, the sumptuary laws of the military household, and they are treated in the article on Sumptuary laws and the regulation of dress.

The knight in his harness: masculinity, ceremony, and display

The harness of the late medieval knight was, in addition to a defence and a sign, a gendered statement. The man in his harness was the masculine ideal of the late Middle Ages: a body shaped, controlled, and made visible by the steel, and an identity made legible by the heraldic sign. The literature of the ordre de chevalerie and the vows of the swan and the garland is full of the épreuve of the man in the harness: the joust, the pas d’armes, the emprise, the cri de guerre. The livre de chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny (c. 1350), the ordo of the Ordre de la Jarretière of Edward III (c. 1348), the livre of the Ordre de l’Épi of Charles d’Orléans (1401), the Voie de Paradis of Jean Germain (c. 1430), and the Débat du Hérault et du Chasseur of Pierre de Blarru (c. 1450) are the canonical texts.

The harness was also the setting for a ceremony. The accoutrement of a knight, from the moment he put on his cotte d’armes to the moment he removed his sallet, was a complex performance: the habillement of the man, the briding of the horse, the entry into the lists, the salute of the pavilion, the mounting, the couched lance, the encounter, the reception of the prise. The medieval tournament was a theatre of the masculine body, and the armour was both costume and scaffold. The visual evidence is rich: the Bayeux Tapestry, the Très Riches Heures, the Fechtbücher of the German masters, the Smithfield Tournament of c. 1410 as depicted in the British Library Cotton MS Julius E IV, the Basel Tournament Book of 1480, the Copenhagen Tournament Book of c. 1500. Maurice Keen’s Chivalry (1984) and Malcolm Vale’s The Princely Court (2001) are the indispensable modern studies.

The display, in turn, was expensive. A good harness in the 1470s might cost a small fief; the harness of the Black Prince bequeathed in 1376 is itemised in the Testament; the inventaire of the harness of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, taken after his death at Morat in 1477, runs to several pages. The cost was not only monetary. The harness was heavy, hot, and slow. The coustille of the foot combat, the mace of the archer, the axe of the churl could all disable the encased man; the rescue of a knight in full harness in the press of battle was, in the chronicles of Froissart and Wavrin, a serious problem. The femme chevalier in the harness, the swash-buckler in his long poulaines, the parade armour of the late fifteenth century all acknowledge, in different ways, that the harness was a self-presentation that could fail.

The end of the harness: gunpowder, pike, and the field

The harness did not end abruptly. It was defeated piecemeal. The arquebus of the 1490s, the musket of the 1520s, the pike square of the Swiss and the Landsknecht of the 1520s, the iron gauntlet of the lance of the 1530s — each made the harness more cumbersome, more expensive, and less effective. The Battle of Flodden (1513) was the last pitched battle in which the English knight in his harness played a significant role; Marignano (1515) was the first in which the Swiss and the Landsknecht showed that the pike and the hand-gun could defeat the harness. The gustav Vasa harness of the 1540s, with its lobster-tail helmet and puffed pauldrons, the cuirassier harness of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the lobster-tail helmet of the Civil War of the 1640s, are the very late chapters. The harness did not so much decline as change: the heavy parade of the early sixteenth century is replaced by the munition of the lance, the cuirassier of the Thirty Years’ War, the dragoon of the Restoration.

The story is, however, more than a technical one. The harness was, in addition to a defence, a social and aesthetic statement, and it was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, replaced by other statements. The doublet of the sixteenth century, the sash and gorget of the ancien régime, the uniform of the modern army, the battle dress of the twentieth century, are the long sequence. The late medieval harness was the high point of an old way of seeing the warrior, in which the armour and the body were one. The destruction of that unity — the Pikeman of the Renaissance, the Musketeer of the Baroque, the Soldier of the Enlightenment — is one of the more important cultural transformations of the early modern period. The article on Mystery plays and medieval theatre considers one of the other late medieval visual systems that did not survive; the article on Late medieval clothing and the rise of the houppelande considers the civilian fashion that did.

References

  • Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 2000).
  • Philippe Contamine, La Guerre au Moyen Âge (Presses Universitaires de France, 1980, 7th ed. 2003).
  • A. V. B. Norman, The Medieval Soldier (Batsford, 1971).
  • Claude Blair, European Armour, c. 1066–c. 1700 (Batsford, 1958).
  • Maurice Keen, Chivalry (Yale University Press, 1984).