No doubt it could be a early form of CoP but it would be really early and there are no rivets depicted in the effigy I posted. Not saying it is one thing or the other just pointing to the possibilities.

Mathew, I'm not sure I would call this time way too early for a solid iron cuirass, there are literary references in the King's mirror and of a joust of a young King Richard the lionheart. Also armourers had been beating large plates of iron into comical helms for a long time before this.

Hi Chad, Merry Xmas.
Before the French Revolution, the southern tongue still held sway in Provence and Languedoc, though with much less influence than in the days of Richard, the southern duke who also was, on the books at least, king of England...
Some of the intonations of langue d'Oc, which is still studied in the South ( though not by all), can be heard in the Catalan tongue. For the Catalan for squirrel is escurol and the french is écureuil, so maybe in that case the squirrel is not from the anglo-saxon but rather from the french ( langue d'oïl) or even the Langue d'Oc of the south...
In some places in Provence you have bilingual signs French and Provençal, just like in Wales (Welsh and English) and some regions of Canada.
Now pronunciation has evolved, and the written form sometimes demands an effort to understand what was being written, but the problem with the words cuir and coeur has to do with the basic phonetics, The only thing they have in common are the consonnants at the beginning and end of the words, The central sound given by the syllables, however they may be written, are so dissimilar that they could not morph into one another.
The cu-i-rasse would have ended up sounding more like a co-euh-rasse.
By the way, where does the english ''Ok'' come from ? It's quite clear that the sailor's ''Aye'' is not far removed from the old northern french ''Oïl'' , which was the word for ''Yes'', whereas the southern ''Yes'' was ''Oc'', much closer to Ok than Yes will ever be..so did Oc morph into Ok.. or are there germanic roots I don't know about...

Mathew, I just had a quick look over Oakeshott's AOW and an online translation of the King's mirror, and to me neither imply weather the iron chest defences were made of plates or were of a single piece, but if plates were intended, then this could refer to a coat of plates type of defence or it could refer to the breastplate and backplate. Either way, like you I haven't done enough research in this area to debate it seriously. As for the above effigy, without documentation it's impossible to say what material the cuirass was made from, so there's no point in speculating.

I posted this once before, here's a couple of posts here (in english scroll down) about a leather cuirass three layers thick, sewn together with leather thongs like the sole of a shoe. http://www.13c.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=141&a...p;start=45

Thanks for that Lafayette, interesting article. Strange that he makes no mention at all of oc, but as he starts his article on the premisse that the first known references to ok are late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, I suppose that the author had no use for older similitudes. Maybe our Choctaw indians are descendants of southern french sailors who went adrift ( kidding!!!).
This language stuff is always great fun.
In Quebec, where English vs French still has some resonance in certain quarters, I remember a University language professor who would go on television to show how original our french-canadian idiom really was, as it had assimilated so many Abenaki, Huron and Montagnais words.
He loved the expression '' Bonhomme sept heures'' ( our local Boggy Man, Mamas would warn unruly children that the Bonhomme Sept Heures would get them if they didn't behave..) He would explain how it came from an old indian legend..
He was mortified when it turned out to be the english expression Bone Setter gone awry. It turns out that people would hear howling and expressions of pain from the neighbour's homes whenever the Bone Setter , a kind of rural rplacement for inexistant doctors, came by to set a broken bone. Hence the warning to naughty children, behave or we'll leave you for the Bone Setter, morphed into Bonhomme Sept-Heures.

Regarding the "Cuir/Cuirasse"-issue:

French wiktionary says the following:
"De l’ancien provençal coirassa ou à l’italien corazza ou à l’ancien aragonais cuyraça, tous les trois issus du latin coriacea (« vêtement de cuir ») dérivé de corium"

So the leather hypothesis seems to be the most plausible one.