The Armour Archive

On Saturday, July 8th we will be at the Higgins Armory Museum for a study session. The session will be hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng. The designated ARS representative for this event will be Dave Rylak (Cet), our newly appointed Director of Education.

There will be approximately 12 pieces made available for study. A wide range of pieces is currently being selected by Dave Rylak and I. This will be an opportunity for 6 people to not only handle the pieces, but to spend time in a group discussion format, while doing so. It will be an excellent opportunity to learn and share knowledge about the items and their construction.

The list of items will be made available in the near future. You will have time to study up on the their place of origin, regional economy, military/warfare/tournament aspects, technological capabilities, etc. of the surrounding cultures before studying the pieces.... pulling even more benefit from the study of the actual pieces.

There are currently 3 seats available for this session. If you are in the Worcester, MA area, this would be an excellent opportunity.

Cost is currently museum entry fee of $8.00. Ther will be time to spend in the main galleries, as well.

The only caveat, you must be a member of ARS to attend this event. Membership information is available here:

http://www.armourresearchsociety.org/membership.html

If you are interested, feel free to join ARS and then send an e-mail to [url=mailto:brian@armourresearchsociety.org]me[/url] or [url=mailto:dave.rylak@armourresearchsociety.org]Dave[/url].

If you are a member (you ahould already know about this) just send us an e-mail.

I so wish I could be there for that!

Chris

I want to, but I'll be in Israel.

Hot damn! This is the first reason I have to be happy my wife's thesis is taking so long. Now we won't be moving until probably the end of July, so I'll be there with bells on.

Klaus

It will be cool to see you there Nick.

I hope to have the finalized list of items in the next few days.

Beauteous. Going to Boredom War this weekend, by any chance?

I would love to go, but not at the expense of some other more-armour-loving obsessive's seat. If I stood the whole time, would I count?

-Tasha

Can we use you as an armor spokesmodel again?

The list of items will be made available in the near future. You will have time to study up on the their place of origin, regional economy, military/warfare/tournament aspects, technological capabilities, etc. of the surrounding cultures before studying the pieces.... pulling even more benefit from the study of the actual pieces.

Is this information forthcoming soon? The event is in three days. A starting time would also be good.

Nick

PM sent. e-mil me when you've got a moment

As Cet (Dave) mentioned, the information should be available to you now.

There are two spots open, if anyone is interested. Contact Dave with you inquiry, at this point.

Start time is set at 10AM. Dave will/has sent details.

Due to a scheduling conflict, I will be unable to attend. Have a great time! I think this will be a rewarding experience for all!

Dave, I sent my number by PM. I don't have your regular e-mail handy and for some reason, my e-mails to ARS addresses often bounce. You can e-mail me directly at redbarbarian(at)comcast.net- I check it throughout the day.

Nick

Klaus the Red wrote:Dave, I sent my number by PM. I don't have your regular e-mail handy and for some reason, my e-mails to ARS addresses often bounce. You can e-mail me directly at redbarbarian(at)comcast.net- I check it throughout the day.

Nick

BTW, the bounced e-mail issue should have been resolved weeks ago by our host. Let me know if you see this symptom again.

My reply to your e-mail of 6/22 bounced, but I'll try another test now.

I think I can make it after all. I will contact Cet later today by phone after confirming I can shift my work committments around. I've been to the Higgins a number of times, but the reserve collection items sound fascinating.

Richard

Quick notes on yesterday's trip. It was a great experience.

Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng despite his many obligations, spent almost the entire day with Dave Rylak, Jeffrey Wasson, Nick Friend (sp?) and I. I had not been expecting to have quite that much time offered to us, it was quite amazing.

We started just after 10 and other than a lunch break we were hands on almost until the museum closed. We set up tables to display the items on in a large room downstairs. Dr. Forgeng was very professional, but relaxed, preferring to be called Jeffrey. He gave us our choice of a variety of items to view, not just those from the 12 items pre-selected. Also some of these were out on the museum's exhibition tour (the early Flemish style couter. The fragmentary poleyn circa 1400/1420 was available, but he described it as very fragmentary so we decided to take his advice and view other collection items).

So we decided to start with a composite armour for foot combat Jeffrey recommended to us, as an interesting suit with a nice close helmet skull to work with. This allowed us to see all the pieces from the harness and how they relate to each other, had they been on display, as well as how the collector's and the restorers tried to make it all look as best it could as a composite harness (for example the pauldrons are probably 19th or 20th century and have interesting decorative marks on the inside, Jeffrey believes they are from the remains of an exterior decoration that was ground off so that they would look better with this suit).

It was a very interesting composite suit where you could see the work of the original armourers, the restorers and repair work, some items obviously created as replacement parts over time (some more modern than others). The paperwork Jeffrey provided described it as 1500-1550, Southern Germany, Austria (Innsbruck) and Flanders or Italy, AHAM936.a-0, cataloguer Ean Eaves. 54 lb 4 oz, steel, iron, modern leather and restorations. Composite, heavily restored pastiche.

We helped retrieve the suit which was in a box, from a storage and work room full of interesting armour's and components. Once spread on the table we spent the majority of the day poring over the components and discussing aspects of each. We had fun trying to determine which pieces where original vs. repairs, restorations, etc. without referring to the paperwork in advance. As usual, the extreme light weight of the pieces was interesting. This harness has a German style tonlet circa 1510-1515 made of overlapping horizontal lames articulated on leathers and hinged horizontally. We spent a lot of time on the helm which had a nicely constructed skull from around 1505-1515.

We took a lot of pictures and Jeffrey seemed to be enjoying himself as much as we were, patiently asking our questions and pointing out both physical items of interest and discussing issues such as possible construction methods used, material thickness, the care of the armour, how they marked the armours in the collection historically and now (this one still had an old brass Higgins tag on it which he cut off and was throwing away, which I kept as a souvenir trinket as they no longer use that method; they pull the old tags off to reduce the chance of interaction between the metal of the suit and the tags), etc.

We spent the bulk of the day on this suit, then packed it back up. Jeffrey joined us for lunch during which and also during the day, we learned a little more about his role as curator and we all talked about our interests including jousting, various living history & recreation/renactment groups we've worked with, the Higgins Sword Guild (which Jeffrey was a founding member of), historical combat, teaching (Jeffrey spends 3/4 of his time teaching at the collegiate level and 1/4 as the Higgins curator, Nick would like to teach at the collegiate level also, re: armour & related topics), armouring, Jeffrey's work with I.33 (he signed my copy of his translation), etc. We also discussed the museums 1960's collection catalogue (I have a copy I brought for anyone to view that had not seen it before) and whether an updated catalogue might ever be put out in some form.

When we returned to the museum, we went to the curatorial office and Jeffrey brought out a stunningly executed Tapulbrust breastplate from about 1540, Austrian, perhaps Innsbruck. It weighed 7 pounds (HAM 1227). THis has Bindenschild stamped just below the neck on the upper portion of the breastplate itself. It had a very pronounced medial ridge, which is apparently the defining characteristic of a Tapulbrust, I was not familiar with that term or had forgotten it. The craftsmanship was amazing, especially on the flexible angular gussets, which had exquisite roping of large size and interesting design, on the inside these were not fully closed, so you could see into the opening. We were able to spend some time looking at the hammer marks used to form the medial ridge and try to determine how the heck they did this, it appeared to be quite thick though we did not have tools to measure it. There was a deep line in running beneath the medial ridge on the underside; perhaps they used a chisel which created this while working from beneath.

When we were finished, there was time for one last piece. HAM 3127.9, a Plackart and Faulds, last quarter of the 15th century, Italian. 1 pound, 9 oz. I personally think this had to be for a child, it was so tiny. This was not in good shape, which we knew, but I wanted to see it due to its age and rarity anyway. It is also a piece I had seen pictures of if it indeed is one of Bachereau's as I think it was. Bashford Dean had described it as being from the Island of Rhodes.

The workmanship on this one appears to be crude compared to the other pieces we examined, possibly a munitions grade piece, but it also may have been modified as edges may have been cut down (I'm not convinced these faulds belong with the plackart, they had rough edges too), degraded over time, repaired, etc. and that could have contributed to that appearance.This item appears inthe AKarcheski and Richardson "The Medieval Armour From Rhodes". It also has 9 serial nicks in the left side of the interior flange on the plackart noted on the paper given to us, along with corresponding nicks on the fauld. We discussed that nicks were sometimes used to keep track of which pieces go together in a particular way. Jeffrey mentioned something that I had not thought of, that nicks were also used to keep track of which pieces belong to a particular suit if you have multiple suits of the same or similar design together (Ex 9 nicks on one suit, 8 on another). It looked to me like the faulds on this suit may not have belonged with it, I don't remember what Jeffrey said, I'll have to ask the others. This was a very simple armour, no turned edges or decorations, though of course the upper breastplate was missing and this did appear to be a child;s harness. But I am very glad I was able to view it up close.

During all of this we discussed the need/desire to be able to measure armour thicknesses at many points, including difficult to access areas such as inside of the rounded close helm from the composite suit. Dave mentioned a tool that could work for this without calipers, it might be a good investment for the A.R.S.

Jeffrey burned a CD for me that I will copy for the A.R.S. membership and send to Cet/Dave Rylak after I download it. It has information on the collection that should be quite useful.

All in all this was a great experience, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng was a terrific, engaging and informative host and I am so very glad that I joined the A.R.S.

The museum closes at 4:00 PM. We only had a few moments to hit the museum gift shop and did not really get to see the public collections as we spent so much time with Jeffrey and the reserve collection items.

Afterwords Dave, Nick, Jeff Wasson and I spent some time talking about the day and other items. This is when I realzed that Nick is actually Klaus the Red (Duh) as he was showing us one of his arming jackets with hand stitching. Jeff is making a spring steel brigandine for me, somewhat based on the Knight of Wrath in Rene D'Anjou's Book Of Love, so the buckles we saw were of particular interest to me.

What a wonderful day. I was going on about 4 hours sleep, so I hope I was lucid. Anyway, I'm sure the others can provide more info and details, either here or perhaps on the A.R.S site.

Happy you made it!

Grumpy that I did not.

Absolutely thrilled that you had that much time to study the extant examples! Let me know, via e-mail, what you liked and did not like about the day. We are working on a continuing format for this type of study experience. Trying to get the most out of each time.

Jeffrey is an excellent person! I am very glad that you had the opportunity to spend the entire day with him.