[Alex W.]

Greetings and salutations!
I have been lurking about for a while now as I am interested in making a late 14th century harness, but I have only now made the onerous commitment of registering an account.

I make this post as, while reading over many threads both on this site and others, I have repeatedly heard the term "pair of plates". A google search gives a bunch of pictures of modern plates and what appears to be a modern ballistic armour manufacturer, while some "medieval dictionary" type sites just say "see coat of plates".

From context and etymology I have assumed that it meant a coat of plates with few, large plates, likely just the two for the chest, much like a corrazina. However I have also heard references to the same in earlier periods where plates of that size would be uncommon if not unheard of.

However, without any way to confirm my hypothesis I come to you helpful folk in looking for a more exact definition and hopefully some examples (either historical or reproduction) of the article in question.

[Mart Shearer]

[Mikko Kuusirati]

Indeed. "Pair" used to mean something closer to "a set" rather than "two" in Medieval usage. It has absolutely nothing to do with the number or size of the plates.

[Alex W.]

Thanks for the clarification!

[Nat Lamb]

I believe that that meaning of "pair" is preserved in "a pair of pants".

[Mart Shearer]

In the Canterbury Tales Prologue, the Prioress' rosary is described as, "A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene,".
http://www.jstor.org/stable/454193?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

The English construct might be necessary to make the plural clear. For example scissors are a singular item with a plrual form, like pants or plates. If one has more than one, it's two pairs of scissors, four pairs of plates, three pairs of pants rather than the singular pair of scissors, pair of plates, or pair of pants. Stairs used to be called a "pair of stairs". I suppose if you had more than one set of stairs in the house the pairs would be plural since stairs already ended in an s. A pair of beads, two pairs of beads, etc.

[Quinn W.]

Just something to keep in mind - medieval people didn't have the same fascination with categorizing and labeling things as we do. As such, period definitions can be a lot looser than what we modern folk are often comfortable with. It can get frustrating when trying to determine the distinction between different terminology since the "exact definition" you're asking for may not exist. You can certainly argue differences between coat of plates, pair of plates, corrazine, brigandine, etc but with the lack of standardization the argument might not be a clear one.
Jut a heads up that you might not get a very satisfying answer out of this. But that's just one of the things that makes this kind of research interesting!

[Mikko Kuusirati]

[Gregory J. Liebau]

[Nat Lamb]

precision and uniformity are not the same thing.

[Gregory J. Liebau]

[Nat Lamb]

"more than 20 peckels" is less precise than "27 peckels"
one person saying "22 peckels" where another says "27 peckels" because one is using a peckel to describe the number of skutz that a master and 3 apprentices can make in a week, while the other is using peckels to describe how many a master and 2 aprentices can make in a fortnight, is an example of lack of uniformity.

As for spelling, if a single writer swaps between different spellings in a single text, or between texts, that is imprecise. Different writers using different spellings, but each one always using the same one, would be a lack of uniformity.

[Gregory J. Liebau]

Sorry Nat,

I didn't realize that you were simply referring to the two terms in a literal sense. Of course they're not the same. However, in the broad yet hazy picture formed by medieval documentary evidence, it is often hard to distinguish whether something is simply imprecise based on an authorial error, or hints at a lack of uniformity among a group of writers. There is evidence for a lack of both, but in any given scenario there may be none, or some of one or the other - each case must be appraised individually. I am speaking loosely about mentality and not referring to any particular instance, hence my generalization of the defects. Cheers!

-Gregory

[Quinn W.]

Sorry guys, I didn't mean to derail the conversation. If anyone has examples of a pair of plates please share that.I'm happy to be ignored

Communication was slower and less universal and that's a big reason I think getting to attached to specific terminology can lead to frustration. An armorer learned from an older armorer generally. There's a good chance that he was in a guild that might standardize terms and practice within its own ranks. But they didn't go take internationally accredited courses or read mass printed books or use google the model number so you aren't going to have any sort of governing body declaring "this is the difference between a brig and CoP" or "this is the distinction between a bastard sword and a long sword".
I think people weren't as nitpicky with their terminology because there just wasn't a lot of point. There isn't a period version of the Oakeshott typology. Modern archers all need to know the poundage of their bows, but we don't seem to see that in period records. If a bow is strong enough to get the job done but light enough to draw effectively then it doesn't really matter whether you can give it a number or not.
The Shakespeare quote "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" comes to mind here.

Now it's true that some people did get really particular. The middle ages were big and nuanced so any generalization is just that. There are accounts of doctors during the plague that recognized that since the plague started when Jupiter was in the house of Aquarius that it's elemental composition was hot and wet. Therefore a cure should involve crushed emeralds because they are classified as cold and dry. (Not sure if I got every one of those details right but the point stands even if it was actually Saturn, I hope). That's about as classification oriented as you can get.
Obviously a certain vocabulary is necessary to communicate - that's what language is, after all. And it is hard to talk about non-academic fields because by definition they were less likely to be put into writing. But these examples tend to come from those who are specifically scholars, scientists or otherwise full-time academics. To my knowledge that mentality was not common.

This is a really interesting conversation and I'm happy to see it continue, but as far as the original post is concerned, let's say I'm completely wrong and people were indeed as big on classification and terminology as we are now. The fact is that the terminology is poorly standardized across time, regions, guilds etc. Which means regardless of the reason, you as a researcher can't treat a particular term as universal in the same way you can modern ones.

[Lafayette C Curtis]

Medieval people could be pretty precise when they felt it was important. How many people today know the difference between "men-at-arms" ("hommes d'armes" in heavily modernised spelling) and "armed men" ("homes armetz" in one medieval document) -- and yet the two terms clearly made a pretty important distinction to the people keeping records of military recruitment and pay in late 14th-century England, and a pretty consistent one at that. It's also why I sometimes like to compare contemporary translations of foreign documents (if any exist) with more modern translations since the older translations, though they might be harder to read, tend to preserve the precision of contemporary terms better.

Of course, this kind of precision wasn't always universal, in the same way that soldiers today make a big fuss about the distinction between an "assault rifle" and a "machine gun" or between a "tank" and an "armoured car" while the press rarely does.