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Sean · Sean Oct 24, 2015

An Outline of Toby Capwell’s “Armour of the English Knight”

Courier firms work in mysterious ways: Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450 in its double packaging

Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, 1400-1450 (Thomas Del Mar: London, 2015)
308 pages, 24 x 30 cm
All glossy paper, most pages contain at least one line drawing or colour photo
ISBN 978-0-9933246-0-4
GBP 54 (UK, France, Germany, Italy), 64 (other countries) including shipping and handling; I don’t see any reason to believe that it will ever be available from other sellers or in softcover.
Link to publisher’s online store– Link to publisher’s new online store – link to online store with volume 2 AOTEK 1450-1500

After five years of anticipation, the first volume of the results of the inquiries of Toby Capwell into English armour began to arrive at customers’ doors in the middle of October. For reasons which seem good to them, the publisher and author have made very little information about the book available on their website. For quite a few buyers, “a book on English armour by Toby Capwell with drawings by Mac and Jeff Wasson” was all they needed to know. But for those who are on the fence, or waiting for their copy to arrive, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out the sort of things which this volume contains.

This book has a diverse audience. I will do my best to say things which I think armourers and armoured fighters would like to know, then give my own academic thoughts. But this is definitely not a review, and I refuse to find something to quibble about. Since I do not even dabble in fifteenth-century history, there would not be much point. I also refuse to give a summary since this book is newly published.

This is a study of full harnesses in a distinctive style worn by extremely rich men in England and Wales in the early fifteenth century. The main source is effigy sculptures, but documents, literature, funerary brasses, manuscript illuminations, and other kinds of medieval evidence are used to supplement them. The author’s experience as a jouster, and his helpers’ experience making plate armour, are also used to help interpret the sources.

The contents are divided into four parts. First is an introduction which sets the effigies in context in fifteenth-century England and discusses the problems of studying a style of armour which has all been destroyed (52 pages long). Then there are two sections on armour in the periods 1400-1430 (136 pages long) and 1430-1450 (75 pages long), each broken down by part of the body (helmets, cuirasses, shoulder defenses, vambraces, gauntlets, leg armour, sabatons). Last comes a miscellaneous section with a conclusion, the author’s experiences wearing armour in the English style, a bibliography, a list of effigies divided into six styles, a glossary, and two short indices (total 45 pages).

This miscellaneous section contains 25 pages on the famous blackened and gilt harness which he commissioned from Mac, and his experiences planning it, having it built, jousting in it, and having it modified.

Pages 204 and 205 of Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450. Full-page colour photos of important sources, closeup colour photos of details, pencil sketches, written commentary

All pages are glossy, and some contain double-page spreads of important manuscripts, effigies, paintings, etc. Many of these images are not available online, and all the photos are printed in higher resolution than normal computer screens can display.

There are a series of line drawings by Mac of six typical harnesses representing six styles of English armour. Each is sketched from front, side, and rear for maximum clarity, and each of these views fills half a page.

There are a number of comments by Mac on specific technical problems which armourers in the fifteenth century faced, and how this might have affected the armour that they built.

There are pages of pencil sketches by Jeff Wasson with structural diagrams of different styles of armour and details of motifs, borders, etc. Individual sketches are scattered throughout the book alongside the closeup photos of details.

So for armourers, this is 300 pages on the development of armour in England with photos and sketches of details and suggestions of how to reconstruct it. For armoured fighters, this is 300 pages on the development of armour in England with suggestions of the advantages and disadvantages of different choices. And for academics, this is 300 pages of analysis of armour in England as a social tool and as a martial tool. While the publishers could make it easier and cheaper to buy and quicker and cheaper to deliver, and while this is a specialized book, I think it does what it tries to do very well. Although the shipping is a bit slow and expensive, the basic book is quite cheap for its size and complexity, especially considering that it will not sell thousands of copies. And everything about the physical book is professional.

Now I will put my academic hat back on and say why I think this book is important. Even though I can’t really afford it, and even though my dabblings in medieval history focus on late 14th century Italy rather than early 15th century England, I pre-ordered a copy. This was because I knew two things about this book.

First, it has managed to overcome a series of obstacles which recall the ones which Caesar’s legions laid around Alesia. For some reason conventional publishers are very reluctant to take on serious books about arms and armour. While there is plenty of room for books for beginners, most publishers don’t believe that books capable of teaching knowledgeable people something new will sell enough copies for enough money. Since so few books like that are published by conventional publishers, its hard to know if they are right. So anyone who wants to see serious studies of arms and armour should consider supporting this project. (In the case of the hoplite controversy, one of the things which became obvious in the 1990s and 2000s was that little reliable information about Greek arms and armour which would help understand what they were meant to do was available).

Second, it also shows what is possible when people with different sets of skills, developed inside and outside the university, come together. Although there is one name on the cover, the acknowledgements and notes make it clear that the author has taken advice from armourers, artists, collectors, medievalists with a focus on texts, and people with many other perspectives. Doing that is always an uphill struggle, because people with different backgrounds have different interests and different ideas of how to know what is true, and it is always tempting to give up. So anyone who approves of true interdisciplinary research, where the tools and assumptions of different disciplines reinforce each other rather than being applied in parallel, should consider supporting this project. (Again, in the hoplite controversy, some of the participants are starting to comment that they don’t know enough about what fighting with edged weapons in a group is like, or about the practicalities of making, carrying, and using ancient kit, and some have started to call upon anthropological parallels or crowd dynamics to support the traditional vase paintings and histories).

Edit 2021-10-15: Updated link to publisher’s new online store

#armour #armourOfTheEnglishKnight #armsAndArmour #bookReview #combatMechanics #fifteenthCenturyCE #medieval #Realien

Sean · Sean Jun 10, 2023

Some Thoughts on “Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3”

Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3: Continental Armour in England, 1435-1500 (Thomas Del Mar Ltd.: Great Britain, 2022) only for sale from the publisher

My copy of Armour of the English Knight, Volume 3 arrived in December 2022. I hope to publish a review somewhere which will count on my CV, so I will be brief here.

Like volumes 1 and 2, this is a chronological study of knightly armour in England based on effigies (life sized recumbent sculptures of the deceased, placed in churches as a focus of memory and prayer) and supported by other art, documents and surviving armour. This means that it is focused on the highest-status armour and has little to say about even the warriors commemorated by brasses and certainly not the mass of untitled men-at-arms and archers. It is illustrated by frighteningly powerful photographs of effigies, brasses, surviving armour, and occasionally paintings, plus technical line drawings (and one watercolour painting) by Robert Macpherson and Jeff Wasson. I was especially intrigued by two styles: the fluted and gilt Burgundian style of c. 1450-1480, and the Italo-Flemmish style from around 1500 with its big smooth surfaces interrupted with as few mechanical details as possible.

The strengths of these volumes are Capwell’s intimate knowledge of English effigies and brasses and the practicalities of fighting in armour on horseback. In addition, armour scholarship never transitioned from a hobby carried out by antiquarians to a profession carried out by salaried and credentialed experts at universities. So full-scale academic studies of medieval and renaissance armour are very rare and precious.

Volume 3 must have been especially challenging to write because it focuses on all armour on effigies which does not fit into a coherent English style. Much of this armour was imported from Italy or Flanders, but there are no similar studies of Flemish armour and nothing on Italian armour which uses such a wide range of sources. As I am not a specialist in the later 15th century, I felt that the argument often bogged down in describing differences between very similar armours (or between two armours from two shops given the same model to copy) and that important written sources and research were addressed very briefly or not at all. Surely Chris Dobson‘s books, the French Treatise on Military Costume from 1446-1448, the letter of Flemish armourer Martin Rondelle to a client in England (mentioned once but not quoted), the contrast between Flemish and London armour in the inventories of the earl of Arundel from 1397, the description of armour with a hard steel face and a tough iron back by St. Bernardino of Sienna (d. 1444), Pietro Monte‘s criticisms of Italian armour circa 1490, and Sylvia Leever’s studies of duplex armour belong in a book like this! Especially when few studies of medieval armour are published with full scholarly apparatus to help newcomers organize sources and research. Art other than effigies is covered less thoroughly than in volume 1, even though Capwell argues that the wealthy and respectable men commemorated with effigies usually wore armour in the English style from the small, expensive English armour industry. I don’t think Capwell has had an opportunity to commission a harness in any of these styles (although he has worn a classic fifteenth-century Milanese armour).

The obvious next step is a study of Flemish and Burgundian armour, and that requires time, language, and paleography skills which could only be acquired by a young scholar doing a PhD or postdoc. Whereas volume 1 feels like a definitive study, I think that volume 3 is more of a giant leap towards a way of thinking about all the slight variations on Milanese armour in 15th century Europe. After 20 years of this project, its certainly time for other scholars to do their share!

I am poor. As always, donations on Patreon or other sites are appreciated to keep me able to write for this site.

Further Reading

Sylvia Leever, “For Show or Safety?” Arms & Armour, Vol. 3 No. 2 (2006) pp. 117-125

Anthony de Reuck, David Starley, Thom Richardson, and David Edge, “Duplex Armour: an unrecognized mode of construction.” Arms & Armour, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2005) pp. 5-26

Salzman, Louis Francis (1953) “The property of the earl of Arundel, 1397,” Sussex Archaeological Collections, vol. 91, pp. 32-52 especially pp. 44-49 https://doi.org/10.5284/1085630

Edit 2023-10-02: a document identified too late to include is also relevant. In 1383, an armourer of London swore an oath not to sell bascinets of Flanders as London work and not put London marks on bascinets of Flanders (Ralph Moffat, Medieval Arms and Armour, a Sourcebook. Volume I: The Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2022) no. 122 = London Metropolitan Archives, Plea and Memoranda Roll A23)

Edit 2023-10-29: a sallet in the Wallace collection has been attributed to Martin Rondelle! A.V.B. Norman, “Wallace Collection Catalogues: European Arms & Armour- Supplement” (London: 1986) pp. 1-2 as cited in Alan Williams and David Edge, “A Suit of Armour Produced by Five Workshops: Wallace Collection A20,” in Ricardo Córdoba ed., Craft Treatises and Handbooks: The Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages (Brepolis: Turnhout, Belgium, 2013) pp. 197, 198

Edit 2024-10-31: updated link to the letter of Martin Rondelle

(scheduled 15 January 2023)

#armour #armourOfTheEnglishKnight #bookReview #medieval

Deceptichum

fashion is danger

schneckenhaus

Die Waffenkammer im Grand Master’s Palace bewahrt Rüstungen, Helme und Waffen des Johanniterordens aus dem 16. und 17. Jhd. Zu sehen sind aufwendig verzierte Harnische der Großmeister, Lanzen, Schwerter, Arkebusen und militärische Ausrüstung aus den Belagerungen Maltas. Die Sammlung vermittelt zugleich technische Entwicklung und handwerkliche Präzision, die dem repräsentativen Anspruch des Ordens entsprachen.
12.12.2025, #Malta #Valletta #GrandMastersPalace #museum #armory #arms #armour #history [2]