It was driven from the field by the new strategy which asked for long marches and rapid movements of armies. This century’s armour for the tilt-yard gives such protection to the champion, with its many reinforcing pieces, that unless the caged helm were used—the same which cost Henry II. of France his life—the risks of the tilt-yard must have fallen much below those of the polo-field. The horse with crinet, chafron and bards of steel was as well covered from harm.
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| From Hewitt’s Arms and Armour.
Fig. 11.—Meeting of Henry VIII. and Maximilian. |
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| Fig. 12.—Suit by Jacob Topf, nearly complete, the gorget does not belong to it. Below is the placcate. |
Before the end of the 16th century the full suit of war harness is an antique survival. Long boots take the place of greaves and steel shoes, and early in the 16th century the military pedants are heard to bewail the common laying aside of other pieces. The mounted cavalier—cuirassier or pistolier—might take the field, even as late as the Great Rebellion, armed at all points save the backs of the thighs and the legs below the knee; but a combed and brimmed cap, breast and back plate and tassets equipped the pikeman, and the musketeer would march without any metal on him save his headpiece, for it was soon found that heavily armed musketeers, after a long trudge through summer dust or winter mud, were readier to rest than to shoot. Everywhere there was revolt against the burden of plates, and as early as 1593 Sir Richard Hawkins found that his adventurers would not use even the light corslets provided by him, “esteeming a pot of wine a better defence.” Gervase Markham, in his Souldier’s Accidence of 1645, asks that at least the captain of cuirassiers should be armed “at all peeces, cap a pee,” but he would have found few such captains, and Markham is a great praiser of noble old custom. The famous figure of a pikeman of 1668 (fig. 13) in Elton’s Art Military has steel cap, corslet and tassets, but he stands for a fashion dead or dying. The last noteworthy helmet was what is now termed the lobster-tail helmet, a headpiece with round top, flat brim before, a broad articulated brim behind, cheek-pieces hanging by straps and a grate of upright bars to cover the face, some having in place of the grate a movable nose-guard to be raised or lowered at will. The close resemblance of this helmet to that worn by the Japanese, with whom the Dutch were then trading, is worth remark, although each of the two pieces seems to have had its separate origin. Thus, save for a steel cap here and a corslet there, especially to be found amongst the guards of sovereigns who must cling to something of antique tradition, armour departs out of the civilized world.
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Fig. 13.—Pikeman. |
| From The Compleat Body of the Art Military, by Lieut. Col. Elton (1668). |
When in the reign of Queen Victoria her mounted guardsmen were given back their breast and back plates, the last piece of body armour had been the tiny gilt crescent worn at the throat by officers of foot, which crescent was the shrunken symbol of that great gorget of plate that Survival of armour.came in with the 15th century. The shining plates of the Guards are parade pieces only, but a curious revival of an old defence was carried by English cavalry in the field at the end of the 19th century, when small gussets of chain mail were attached to the shoulders of certain cavalrymen as a defence against sword cuts. Through all the age of modern warfare inventors have pressed the claims of various bullet-proof breastplates, but where they have been effective against rifle fire their weight has made them too heavy an addition to the soldier’s burden. (See, however, Armour Plates, ad fin.) Last of all we may reckon those secret coats of mail which are said to be worn on occasion by modern rulers in dread of the assassin. The London detective department has such coats of fence in its armoury; and on the other side it may be remembered that the Kelly gang of bushrangers, driven to bay, were found to have forged suits of plate for themselves out of sheets of boiler-iron.
Ancient arms and armour are now eagerly sought by European and American collectors, and high prices are paid down for every noteworthy piece. The supply is assisted by the efforts of many forgers of false pieces, the most cunning of whom bring all archaeological skill to their aid, and few great Collections.national or private collections are free from some example of this industry. For the genuine pieces competition runs high. Suits of plate of the earliest period may be sought in vain, and the greatest collectors may hardly hope for such a panoply of the late Gothic period as that which is the ornament of the Wallace collection. Even this famous harness is not wholly free from suspicion of restoration. Armour of the latter half of the 16th century, however, often appears in the sale-rooms and is found in many private collections, although the “ancestral armour” which decorates so many ancient halls in England is generally the plates and pots which served the pikemen of the 17th-century militia.
It is not hard to understand this scarcity of ancient pieces. In the first place it must be remembered that the fully armed man was always a rare figure in war, and only the rich could engage in the costly follies of the later tournaments. The novelists have done much to encourage the belief that most men of gentle rank rode to the wars lance in hand, locked up in full harness of plate; but the country gentleman, serving as light horseman or mounted archer, would hold himself well armed had he a quilted jack or brigandine and a basinet or salet. Men armed cap a pee crowd the illuminations of chronicle books, the artists having the same tastes as the boy who decorates his Latin grammar with battles which are hand-to-hand conflicts of epauletted generals. Monuments and brasses also show these fully armed men, but here again we must recognize the tendency which made the last of the cheap miniaturists endow their clients lavishly with heavy watch-chains and rings. As late as the 18th century the portrait painters drew their military or naval sitters in the breastplates and pauldrons, vambraces and rerebraces of an earlier age. Ancient wills and inventories, save those of great folk or military adventurers, have scanty reference to complete harnesses. Ringed hawberks, in a damp northern climate, will not survive
