Hi, first time poster here and hopeful to stick around for much longer. Anyways I've got a question I've wanted to ask about 16th century pauldrons, usually around the mid to the late parts of the century. As seen in the attachment, I'm curious on how they allowed the man inside to raise his arms in all sorts of directions. I've never seen 16th century plate armour beyond pictures so apologies if I seem to be asking a real dumb question.

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Simply, if the shaping/geometry is right, they work. The surviving numbers of these harnesses is testament to that, armour that doesn't work is unlikely to carry on for decades like these do.

I own and work in something similar and never had a problem, they float about nicely and if I do need to raise an arm they interact with the helmet well. The right one is always shorter, its going to do the most movement simply due to the fact you don't want to pull your left, rein, arm about too much, but you can if needs must.

I admit they do look like a hindrance, but they work v well.

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, from the pics I've seen and the fact that nobody I know wears 16th century plate armour of any kind, I was curious to how they functioned. From pics alone, it looks like the arms can only move sideways but I know that's wrong because that would be a terrible stupid hindrance.

Roughly how many degrees of motion in front or behind you would you say one could achieve with, say, the pauldrons pictured? I know that each set would be tailored to the breast and back and the size of the individual, so the amount would vary, but I'm curious about flexibility and ROM of tourney armor with a two-handed sword--not a polearm (think Henry's tourney armor). A polearm will be held differently at times that a large sword--does the mostly vertical compression of the lames allow for decent horizontal compression of the arms, to allow for the blade to be held directly in front of the body? Of course the stance would have to be modified, but I am wondering by how much...

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You can move around a bit actually. I mean you can't do a 360 circle or roll up in a ball, but you still have a large amount of mobility.

Somewhere online, even on the RA site maybe, there must be a video of the reconstruction of those tonlet armourers in action. admittedly they are not tailored to fit an individual (at the time they were made the Armouries had a large interpretation team and it was made to suit a few people) so they don't work 100% as good as the original but they could be described as pretty functional, if not totally perfect. as for exact ROM, I couldn't give specifics.

As they are different from the norm i think they took a bit of getting used to but as for the original, Henry would have wanted an armour he could move, work and show off in.