[Randall Moffett]

Keep in mind that the people on the edge of military tech were the noble class. Since they fought mounted often armour develops faster for the mounted man.

We see this in the text and to another extent artwork. During the 13th century rigid chest protection appears more and more common as it goes on. After that to my reading you have poleyns. Gauntlets also appear as do shoulder protection. Greaves, couters and sabatons of some nature appear next.

By 1300 head to toe plate armour has been created but it takes some decades to disseminate to all ranks of the noble and knightly class. My guess is less fashion and more simple cash being the limiting factor. Since mail was a covering that left no (large) openings from at least neck to thigh/knee it remained a major defence. The plate additions to mail in the 1300-1315 range seem to be torso, leg armour and gauntlets. Arm armour does come up more and more common and by the 1320s it is fairly common in text and becoming more common in art.

That said whereas in the late 13th to early 14th centuries texts are loaded with rigid armour popping up we have no real idea of the material type- steel, splinted, leather-hardened or soft, whale baleen, horn, etc. I just came across another reference to baleen gauntlets during the late 13th the other day. The few times any material type is mentioned helps us to know there is variation but since most simply say, jamber or gauntlet, we have no idea what medium was more common. Inventories like Ralph de Nesle help as the clerk who wrote it was very specific and makes the type of armour known. If we follow this then iron/steel was most common. That said he was the Constable of France when he died in 1302 so hard to say if his gear is representative of the others of the mounted class, as he was top tier of noble.

RPM

[Eric Forster]

Hi Craig,

Despite his fine pedigree in publishing and as a professor at NYU, it is difficult to find -- or even conceive of -- a medieval historian who takes Norman Cantor seriously, especially now. Citation patterns, particularly when looked at in detail, seem to confirm this.

He has a nice Wikipedia article, and he published lots of high-sales books, but when I was in graduate school, students would quote Cantor's often absurd claims at the pub as a point of humor. It was frankly an easy game, since so many of his assertions are either unsupported or proven false by an avalanche of counter-evidence.

A few senior scholars respected him, often seemingly more on personal than professional grounds.

At any rate, I thought you should be aware that citing Cantor on the existence of twelfth-century breastplates may be taken by many scholars and students as "evidence" that they could not have existed (I know: using "evidence" to prove a negative here, but I'm not trying to be rigorous in that sense - the point is the lack of seriousness accorded Cantor, who could even be correct here, but whose consistent silliness makes many wary).

I'd be interested to know the source you mentioned on Richard the Lionheart, however, because if it is Richard Coer de Lion, it would be a later fifteenth-century conjecture, which imagines rather a lot of fourteenth-century armor as having existed in the twelfth.

Cheers,
Eric

[Randall Moffett]

Eric,

I think Norm is right on this one at least. Richard according to the medieval text was wearing a iron plate. The source for Richard's Breastplate is William the Breton's Philippide. It is a joust between King Richard and Gerald de Barri at the end of the 12th century. Most figure William wrote it in the first decade of the 13th or shortly thereafter. I have a copy of the original text but it is in storage and finding it online is unlikely unless something has changed since last a looked a few years back. I borrowed my interlibrary loan when I was at Southampton.

RPM

[Elling Polden]

The first plate defences seems to have been the chest screen/CoP. As illustrated by this thread, there seems to be sources indicating some variety of this all the way back to the 12th c. This is followed by Iron knee protectors, which start to appear sometime mid 13th c. By the last quarter of the 13th c, elbow protectors and some varieties of greaves or vembraces are occationally seen.

These are largely suplements rather than replacements for mail and cloth, and as such it seems that their use is a matter of personal taste until full plate arms and legs become common in the mid 14th c.

[Dan Howard]