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

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.

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

Continuous Combat or Pulses and Lulls?

Over on his blog Bret Devereaux has followed up a chat in the comments with a post on the mechanics of Roman and Iberian combat. About ten years after historians of ancient Greece started to challenge the “rugby scrum” model, Roman Army Scholars started to think hard about what ancient writers said the Roman army and its Iberian opponents did in combat. These descriptions have significant differences from descriptions in earlier Greek writers like Tyrtaeus, Thucydides, and Xenophon (for example, Roman armies can be driven back hundreds of metres before turning the tide, whereas the first time Thucydides’ hoplites turn their backs (tropein) is so important that the other side erects a monument (trope) to it). The blog post is well worth reading. In lieu of a full response I have some comments below.

First, I don’t know anyone who denies that Republican Romans preferred to throw their javelins and charge with the sword. Writers such as Polybius, Livy, and Caesar describe this many times. The question for debate is whether if both sides stood firm, this would result in uninterrupted combat, or a few minutes of combat after which one or both sides back off to catch their breath, throw things, rethink their techniques, and build up courage to go in again. Its also up for debate how much the two lines would separate: just a few steps, or as far as they could throw a javelin? Devereaux calls these two possibilities micro-pulses and macro-pulses although of course there is no hard divide.

Second, between say 800 BCE and 200 CE, infantry with spears had one or two spears. I cannot recall a single painting or sculpture which shows more than two, and mass sacrifices of weapons at La Tène ‘Celtic’ sites or the Danish bog of Hjortspring usually contain one, two, or three spears per shield. The Christian Roman army festooned itself with spears and lead-weighted darts called plumbatae, but in earlier times the closest thing I know is Livy’s story that some Roman velites were trained to sit on the horse behind the rider and carry no less than seven short darts to hurl when they dismounted (Livy 26.4.4, cp. Polybius 6.22.4 where the darts are slightly smaller). Livy presents this as a special technique for a special situation, and troops on horses or chariots often carry more weapons than troops who have to walk on their own two feet.

Therefore, some infantry who ran around the combat zone ducking and leaping and throwing spears had just one or two spears each, and a Roman infantryman’s two pila is not a small load of missiles. One of the beautiful things about throwing spears is that you can pick up the other guy’s and throw them back, whereas a gunner who shoots all his ammunition is out of luck. Two spears is the same load as an Iberian caetratus, Germanic warrior, or Thracian peltast. If you are used to Romans and their customs, you might not realize just how unusual some of these customs are.

Soldiers with two spears, a shield, a sword, and a helmet could fight many different ways. In tenth-century England they could form a shield wall (OE bordweall) and hurl spears before they closed to trade cuts and thrusts above each other’s shields. In ancient Thrace they could form a loose cloud, run close ducking incoming missiles or beating them aside with their shields, and toss their own spears then decide whether the enemy was weak enough to close in with. Romans seem to have used both approaches some of the time, as when Roman armies in Spain adopted Iberian tactics or Arrian suggested that Romans should form a wall of shields backed by archers against Alan cavalry. There are many open questions among scholars such as whether the round flat shield adopted by the Romans in the third century was better suited for loose formations or a dense shield wall. Some people used to believe that Imperial Roman auxilliaries fought in a looser formation than the legionaries but the evidence for that seems very weak other than that they had slightly smaller and flatter shields. Gear can tell us some things, but there was a great deal of room for two groups of warriors to chose different ways of fighting with very similar equipment. There is lots more to discuss in the original blog post over on ACOUP.

Don’t let me get run down! If you can, please support this site by sharing it, donating, or talking about it over the holidays!

Further Reading

• John Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts (Yale University Pres, 2006)
• Quesada Sanz, Fernando (2006) “Not so different: individual fighting techniques and small unit tactics of Roman and Iberian armies.” In P. François, P. Moret, S. Péré-Noguès (eds.) L’Hellénisation en Méditerranée Occidentale au temps des guerres puniques. Actes du Colloque International de Toulouse, 31 mars-2 avril 2005. Pallas 70 (Presses universitaires du Mirail: Toulouse) pp. 245–263
• Bartosz Kontny, “The war as seen by an archaeologist. Reconstruction of barbarian weapons and fighting techniques in the Roman Period based on the analysis of graves containing weapons. The case of the Przeworsk Culture.” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 16 (2008) pp. 107-146

(scheduled 20 December 2025)

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From the Notebook: Cavalry Charging Infantry

Before grad school I used to scour databases and the University of Victoria library for things to read on warfare before the 18th century. One of the pieces I noted down for later use goes as follows:

In December 1522, some enslaved Africans on Hispaniola killed their overseers and marched on other plantations.  The Spaniards assembled a force of cavalry and attacked them at dawn.  “The Jolofs, upon seeing the advancing Spanish cavalry gathered together, ‘with a great shout, formed a squadron, awaiting the cavalry.’  The Spanish force charged the squadron and tore through it, causing some casualties, but the rebels, for all this, kept their order and threw ‘many stones, clubs, and javelins’ at the horsemen.  The Spanish wheeled about to attack the rebels in the rear and found them having re-formed to await the second attack.  It was only after the second charge had passed through them that the squadron broke ranks and fled to the hills and forests, leaving six of their number dead on the field and wounding one of the Spaniards seriously.”  See Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedoy Valdes, Historia General y natural des Indias (ca. 1532, several modern editions) book 4 chapter 4.  The original Spanish seems to suggest that there were twelve horsemen and an unknown number of slaves.

Notes on John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa 1500-1800 (Routledge: London, 1999) p. 141

You can find the Spanish source at https://archive.org/details/generalynatural01fernrich/page/110/mode/2up The Spanish are called jinetes and armed with daragas (probably adargas, small leather shields or targes) and lanças which I think are lances (probably light lancegays not heavy jousting lances) and targes (probably the heart-shaped adarga from North Africa). I may edit this post one day to add more of the Spanish text but its not a language I can truly read.

I still have not had a chance to use this passage in print, and I don’t trust the notes app I used to keep things like this in, so I will post it here (too late for Juneteenth sorry!) For some reason, this has not been brought into discussions of what happened when cavalry charged into infantry. Xenophon’s description of Tissaphernes’ charge at the Battle of Cunaxa is similar in many ways. It also has gente “nation, army” which is another of my hobby-horses.

(scheduled 30 June 2023)

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