The Armour Archive

I was wondering if anyone knows of a site or list of sites I can use to compare Celtic and French armour styles between the 1200 and 1500 time periods.


Many thanks!

not offhand; i think you'll find two major things first:

- first, armor changed a LOT in that time period regardless of culture or location.

- second, "celtic" as a useful descriptor of one or more cultural group(s) stops being useful by about 600-800AD.

hrolf wrote:not offhand; i think you'll find two major things first:

- first, armor changed a LOT in that time period regardless of culture or location.

- second, "celtic" as a useful descriptor of one or more cultural group(s) stops being useful by about 600-800AD.

Ah okay. I'm still pretty new to this so I'm looking for a place to start and my friend Brokk told me this was a good place for advice.
Perhaps I should rephrase my request into a couple parts for clarity

1) Anyone know of any online resources for celtic armor types?
2) Same as above except for French armor from 1200-1500?

Sorry for the vague query and thanks again

~Celeste

The so-called "Celtic" sorts of armor that show up in the historical record are very spottily recorded because the Irish and the Highland Scots were not prolific writers of records and pretty much behaved as preliterate, tribal societies anyway. What's in the "Celtic Fringe" of NW Europe, dating forward from about the fifth century AD amounts to some figural stones with reliefs and occasional runic inscriptions, either memorial stones or stone crosses of the Celtic type which sometimes include pictures. Then there is a gap of centuries, and stuff starts showing up again in the fourteenth century: a sculpture of an armored man in 14th-c. plate with a jupon over the body armor and a strange, awkwardly-shaped helmet with a barbute sort of face and the rest of which looks rather like some SCA spun-top from the 1970s or so.

The most numerous examples all conveniently gathered into one place are at the Tombs of the Kings on the Hebridean island of Iona. Numerous funerary slabs believed all to be of 14th-c. date all show variations on a single theme: an oddly tall bascinet-type helmet, no visor, and a knee-length textile cotun, a style of gambeson. Distinctive Highlands/Islands swords equip these men, showing the Celtic fondness for angled crossguards such as on the large claidmh da laimh, a/k/a claymore, but on single-hand, broadsword-length weapons. Also the pommel forms may be either the ring pommel, with the end of the tang visible through its middle, or a late, stylized survival of the Viking-era 5-lobed pommel, now curved up to give room for the heel of the hand, perhaps for a more mobile manner of swordplay. These forms are a couple centuries yet before the basket hilt really began taking hold in the latest sixteenth and on into the seventeenth, as swords incorporating protective ironmongery became increasingly the fashion.

You can find more on the 'Net by searching for "cotun" than for "Tombs of the Kings Iona," which tends to frustrate. Likewise this site. There are pic links of gambesoned, tall-bascineted warriors of quaint simplicity. And nary a bit of interlaced strapwork on any of them. Maybe fighting was thought irreligious because a whole lot of the interlace art is seen in religious applications -- but none on the figures. It was also much less in fashion by the cotun era, whenever that got started. There are numerous memorial slabs with just a sword (Highland angled crossguard again) and some Gothickish ivy floral tracery as the entire decoration. Not even a name inscribed. But handsome withal. I'd want to have one for my headstone.

Turning to the better-armored Lowland Scots, what you find was they were still an impoverished, thrifty bunch, and their armor in use might be thirty to fifty years behind the latest stuff farther south in England -- which had a lot more money. Aside from the date gap, what the Lowlanders wore in battle was what the Sassenachs did. Harness was harness, enough said.

For the arms and armor of the Irish, it's difficult to find much. About the easiest thing to discover, aside from what is hinted for the late fourteenth/earliest fifteenth in Jerpoint Abbey's sculpture, is that tall helmets were popular with the Irish as with the Scots. Both used a helmet called a clogaid, which seemed anything from a tall bascinet to a pointed-topped, finial-decorated affair -- Jerpoint Abbey's figure has a fleur de lys -- presumably devised for psychological effect. The other easy note to make is that the five-foot claidmh da laimh seems to have developed for the use of Scottish mercenaries known as gallowglasses to cut Irishmen up with. The weapon's relative lightness and emphasis on cutting rather than an estoc's stiff section and thrusting tactics tells us armor was rare indeed among the Irishmen the gallowglass went up against. {ETA} Contrast this cutting blade with the heftier blade section of the German zweihander, which often had a flattened-diamond cross section, featured a sharp point and a leather-covered ricasso every bit as long as the actual grip, a large elaborated crossguard, and a secondary guard where the cutting edges started, called "parierhaken," or parry-hooks. This roughly-six-foot weapon was designed as an armor cracker.

Down in Wales, the warriors were less known for armor than for their most impressive weapon, the heavy-drawing longbow. Their last ruling prince, Owain Glyndŵr, was head to foot in the very same plate his English opposition wore, no doubt imported from the same sources. But in the Welsh context it took a magnate like Glyndŵr to come up with that much cash.

The rest of the Celtic Fringe is mostly Brittany, colonized from Cornwall and so proudly independent and distinguished that they still wave their own flag around at the smallest provocation -- Barruly sable and argent, canton ermine, and offer ermine-spot décor and triskele patches to the tourist trade. They make a mint too. Even the bank logos adopt triskeles.

Thus, the Celts.

French, from 1200 to 1500.

Well, that's sure wide. One detail: France wasn't exactly France in 1200. It was a number of pretty independent dukedoms and smallish countries, more or less sharing a language and culture, but with their own assorted princelings. Things didn't really tie together to make modern France until into the fifteenth century, and this didn't coalesce all at once either.

The history of armor in France through these three centuries is the history of western European armor in these three centuries.

1200-1300: hauberks and helms. Some reinforcements on the torso, such as the exterior gambeson or the cuirie. Hard to find images of these, as surcoats were the invariable, and obscuring, fashion. 1204 was the time of the Fourth Crusade; the Crusades were entering their century of decline. 1250ish was the time of the Maciejowski Bible, and its detailed illuminations of all sorts of articles, including much armor and weaponry, are a tremendous source for fans of that era. After 1250, helms evolved from Maciejowski buckets towards the Bozen type, more nearly fitting the head and relying less on a spaced-armor effect derived from pothelms of the twelfth century, either the gumdrops or the saltshakers. (Some of these really did look remarkably like the top of a salt shaker.) They still looked like sinister, homicidal buckets, these later helms.

1300-1400: the century of the greatest change in armor. The century opened with hauberks, chausses, and helms; it closed with near-complete armor of plate. LOTS of experimenting went on between. The great helm descended lineally from the earlier barrel helm, and the rounded sugarloaf helm appeared. Early, small bascinets emerged, worn beneath the great helms, which would be cast off after the initial lance charge so the warrior could see better to use his sword or other secondary weaponry.

Plate armor developed for limbs, eventually articulating instead of being laced onto the hauberk, which also began to shrink to save weight as confidence increased, particularly in leg armor. There were economic and technological changes sweeping this century, and they all added up to plate armor. The "Fourteenth Century Mafia" armors itself in harness of the style everywhere prevalent from c. 1360 to 1405 or so. This kind of plate is comparatively simple to form, and gives excellent protection in the SCA game. This is why you now can't spit without hitting a bascinet. And that would hardly be chivalrous! Late-fourteenth armor was variations on a theme: camailed bascinet, a cloth jupon (the original coat-of-arms) covering all the body armor and displaying heraldry, plate limbs, short-cuffed gauntlets, sollerets that were pointy but hardly exaggerated.

1400-1500: plate armor fills in the gaps, loses the jupon from the body, so now harness is "alwyte," a panoply of polished steel. They eventually invent the articulated gorget to armor the neck, and it takes them simply decades to figure out a good pauldron layout. Breastplates are mainly globose, producing that handy spaced-armor effect again, this time against the lance thrust, and doming over the vital organs. Regional styles of armor design emerge, at first chiefly German and Italian, later Flemish and Burgundian become distinguishable from either one. Not until quite late in the century does the pauldron take on its fully developed form, and the spaudler evolved along with it, becoming a separate piece of armor from the rerebrace, and being assembled in cleverer ways.

That's pretty much the thumbnail for plate armor development.

You'll find we encourage devising one's armor to stylistically fall within a span of a decade or two, for the sake of plausibility and even a harmony among its components. Fastest way to establish a time period is to get your helmet. From there, everything else that's visible is determined.

Thank you very much! I will start looking at helmets and see if there are a few that I like.

An Oddly Tall Bascinet -- tomb effigy said to be of early fifteenth-century date. This kind of armor seems peculiar to Scotland and Ireland, and only of those decades. It's like an upgrade on the Tombs of the Kings funerary slabs.

I am going to go ahead and disagree with just one point (or clarify) that Kon said. The lowland Scottish noble and knightly class would have been nearly identical to their southern (English) enemies in appearance, both in war and peace. There is no 30-50 year lag for this group.

The Bruce started a major push to get knight, lords and household troops in armour of plate starting in the 1310s. This can be seen with various royal orders in the Scot. Parl. Rolls (now online as well). He hits the lower classes as well so I'd doubt the upper class of commoners in the lowlands would be more than a decade or so behind England in general.

Further the only scot inventories I have come across (starting right in the mid 14th) are nearly identical for men of the same rank.

RPM