Gone Medieval - An English Knight's Armour

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

Knights in their armour is one of the most enduring images of the Middle Ages, perhaps the first thing that comes to mind and a role that many of us would have played at as children.Yet surprisingly, there are no surviving examples of English armour from this period that we know of in the world. So how do we know what armour English knights donned on the battlefield? In this episode, Matt is joined by Toby Capwell, Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection, who has used alternative sources of evidence to help reveal the lost world of Medieval English steel.Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to the Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. Knights in their armour is perhaps one of the most enduring images of the Middle Ages, the first thing that comes to mind and the role that many of us would have played at as children. Toby Capwell is curator of arms and armour at the Wallace Collection, but he's also a jouster, so a man who wears armour like all the time in my life. head at least. Toby is a historical advisor, a lecturer and an author most recently of a series

of incredible books on English medieval armour. The second of his three books has just hit the shelves and I'm delighted that Toby has agreed to chat to us today about this central aspect of the medieval world. Thank you very much for joining us Toby. Hi Matt, yes, thanks for inviting me. I know that one of the things that you struggled with with your books is that it's quite a famous fact I think, at least in the industry, that there's no surviving examples of English armour that we know of in the world. So how do you go about studying it when none of it remains? Yeah, I mean, that's the foremost problem with the work and the one that confronted me when I began it. But it's also kind of the reason why I wanted

to pursue this subject in the first place. I sort of have a natural inclination to be attracted to the black holes in history. You know, we work with the evidence that we have. We tend to favor aspects of history for which we have more evidence. And that tends to affect the way we view the past in a number of different ways. And it introduces biases and over-emphasizes certain aspects and ignores others. And with armor, I was always very struck by how the scholarship had been led by what survives physically. So we have, comparatively speaking, a fair amount of Italian armor surviving. from the 15th and 16th centuries, and we have a reasonable amount of German armor.

We also have good documentation for the Italian and German masters. We know they're marks. We have surviving examples. They're mentioned in archives. You know, there's a lot of good evidence to put together. And the last hundred years of arms and armor scholarship has been just about assembling the most straightforward evidence, really. but only a very small percentage of the armor that was actually made survives. The odds of something surviving from the 15th century are astronomical when you really start to look at it. And it became clear to me when I was a graduate student doing master's degree work that

there was a distinct English way of fighting in the 14th and 15th centuries. They had very specific, very famous tactics. They were powerful. They were rich. They had huge presence on the continent in the 14th century. And it made sense to me that they should therefore be driving and developing their own technology for fighting. And it seemed that when you look at things like representations in art, English knights look quite different from the Italians and the Germans. And I thought, hey, there's, there might be a PhD here, even though there's no actual English armor surviving, therefore it's been ignored largely by the scholarship. But if I can get more creative with using different kinds of evidence in an interdisciplinary way,

maybe I can start to shine some light into that black hole. Because there was an objective reality. These, you know, thousands of nights fighting in the Wars of the Roses were wearing something. So what was it? You know, ultimately, I'm really interested in trying to get back to the. genuine human experience of the Middle Ages, but that's difficult. So you were kind of actively seeking a problem, some hard work. I'm just fascinated by the black holes.

Why is there no evidence here? What's going on? And what can we do about it? Because, you know, new discoveries are made all the time. You know, you find a new document, and suddenly it opens up all kinds of new areas of inquiry. You find a skeleton that everyone thought had been thrown into a river. and suddenly we know more. It is possible.

You know, the death of Richard III at Bosworth was a black hole until we found more evidence. And that then motivates people to get more creative and think again on the sources that they do have. And so faced with that challenge, you've assembled what will be a series of three books on English medieval armour in the 14th and 15th centuries. How did you go about tackling that? What did you use as reference points to begin that process? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is a story that goes all the way back to the middle of the 14th century. What began as a PhD and then turned into another 15 years of work, I had to decide to just work on the 15th century.

So I start at 1400, even though that's a completely sort of arbitrary point in time. I've noticed since then that a lot of historians have started to refer to the long 14th century. And the 14th century goes into the 1420s or something. And that's sort of a more useful way of thinking about it. But I started at 1400, but very in mind that the beginnings are earlier. In the absence of any surviving armor that can be positively identified as English, we're left with looking for other visual representations. And luckily, we have a really important form of representation in England that had not really been very much studied

from the point of view of arms and armor. And that is, of course, the high-relief effigies that surmount funerary monuments of knights and noblemen in England and Wales. Actually, you know, high-relief effigies are a pan-European phenomenon. They're all over the place. It's a typical medieval knightly thing to be doing to set up a monument for yourself. But in England, there, you know, we have a small country where there are a lot of, of them, comparatively speaking, in a small-ish area. And when I started looking into the surviving

funerary monuments depicting 15th century knights in their armor, I found that there was about 230 that survive. Now, not all of them are in the greatest state of preservation, but many are good enough still to tell us quite a lot. And some are pristine and some are banged up, but they still can tell us something. So there's 230 of these things spread all over, everywhere from Kent to Cumbria and Cornwall to Northumberland and everywhere in between. And only about 10 of those are well known. You know, if you open up a book on the Wars of the Roses or you open up a book on arms and armor, there's one or two of a set of about 10 that everybody should know and that have been published a lot as the key exemplars of this is what a Wars of the Roses night looks like, or a hundred years war night

or whatever. But then there's another 220 that have never really been looked at and never really been talked about. And if they have been talked about, it's in some local historical society journal that looks at that one effigy in isolation, usually from a genealogical point of view or from a local history point of view. Even when they do pop up, nobody's talking about their equipment. So my PhD was about traveling all over the country, finding all of these visually for myself physically, you know, making a good examination of them, recording them with these newfangled technology called digital cameras in the late 90s. I wouldn't have been able to do the study without that, actually. And then really think of it comprehensively and quantitatively, get all

that evidence into a big pile and really evaluate it and analyze it specifically from the point of view of armor. What is the armor that it is showing? Where in time are we? And what is the story, the totality of this body of sculptural evidence might tell us? That was my PhD. Once my PhD was completed in 2004, I just kept working on it. And it took maybe it took another 15 years to bring it into its final published form. And I guess the answer to this question is yes. So probably I'm asking how, but were you able to demonstrate that the effigies were accurate in terms of the detail of the armour that they showed? Were there ways that you were able to be certain that this wasn't just a stylized tomb set of armour kind of thing, that this was genuine armor that that person

might well have worn in life? Yeah. I mean, that's the next. Most important question. I published the first book of this project in 2015, which covered just the first half of the 15th century. And the book is 308 pages long or something. And a number of my colleagues made fun of me for having an introduction that's over 60 pages long in a 300-page book. I was at pains to explain that it's actually an 1,100-page book. It's just that the other pages haven't been published yet. But the introduction had to spend quite a long time. laying out all of the rationale for why we can feel confident in this period that what we are looking at in the sculpture is a fair representation of what really existed, that this is representing

real armor with an impressive degree of fidelity. And there's a number of different ways we can come at this question. The first thing that occurs to me is that although my story is mostly about the domestic English style of armor design, of which no surviving examples are known. There are some effigies of the mid to late 15th century, just a few, but some, that illustrate Italian armor. And we have Italian armor surviving from those precise decades. And we can, in those cases compare the English carving to real surviving pieces. And what we find is that they are fantastically accurate. And there's an incredible attention to the finest details, even down to the character of the rivet heads, very subtle filed and engraved decoration, as well as the

construction of the plates, the form of the plates, the way it's all worn and put together. you know, that's one little calibrating test that we can make. And then we find that some of the effigies that show Italian armor aren't even really the best ones. Some of them aren't even an alabaster. And they're carved by carvers of secondary quality in terms of their skill. So that gives us quite a lot of confidence that when we look at the better quality ones showing this alien English style, that what we're looking at is reliable. And then there are other things that the English group tell us specifically. What we'd like to see is that there was a genuine physical interaction between the people

carving the monuments and real armor. We'd like to be able to show that carvers looked at armor. They had it in their workshops. They studied it. And that they had been instructed by the commissioners of the monuments, their patrons, that they needed to reproduce the qualities and details of this equipment faithfully. And I have seen that as well. For example, on lots of monuments, you see evidence of working lifetime replacements and repairs where some part of the armor was damaged or some part of it had to be replaced and it don't quite match up. So, a bit of the decoration is different, or one hinge is different, or the buckles don't match side to side, or there's one strap end on one strap that's different because that strap broke and had to be

replaced. You find that kind of stuff throughout real armor. You know, I've been fighting an armor for 25 years, and I've seen these kind of working lifetime idiosyncrasies develop on my equipment and on that of my friends. And then I see it on the monuments as well. And that's not something. something a carver would come up with on his own. There's too many iterations of that in too many variations. The only reasonable explanation for that kind of idiosyncrasy is that if the carvers had been given particular armours and told to copy them, and don't clean them up and don't change them, show them as they actually are. Because an armor with scars and repairs is a testament to an honorable life led in arms. I was going to ask, do you?

think that slavish devotion to accuracy and detail was about the person that that monument is representing defined themselves by their armour and what they did in that armour. So it was so much a part of who they were and who they wanted everybody to remember that that was what they were really, you know, more than perhaps the details of their face or anything like that. It was the armour that they were really concerned about getting right. It's clearly the case that they were. Now, we can't prove that any English effigy represents the actual armor of the subject. I think in many cases they do. Not all cases.

There are certainly cases where we can prove that it isn't. But I think that there are cases certainly, you know, the better ones where they really are. And in my book, I've documented the evidence for armor being provided by carvers, such as it is existing. and also related cases where someone wants a particular kind of hat represented on their monument, and we happen to have the documentation where the hat was provided to the carver. You know, it's fragmentary. But when you put it together, I think it's meaningful. And regardless of whether the armor was the actual one belonging to the subject represented or not,

that's less important than being able to show that it is actual armor. Whose armor it actually was is less important to me. I think there are plenty of cases where it was the subjects, though. It was such a central core of how they define themselves in life. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it's so expressive. You know, armor is an expressive work of wearable art in reality, never mind and in depiction. But when a knight appears on the battlefield, that armor is broadcasting all kinds of messages about him.

And the sort of social, cultural significance of armor goes way, way beyond the fact that it's going to stop arrows and swords and axes doing bad things to the person inside. You know, armor is this process where the armor artist is transforming his patron into a kind of living artwork. And therefore, it has all this expressive power. Therefore, any representation of it in sculpture or painting or manuscripts or whatever takes on some of that expressive power as well, kind of secondhand. But the real stuff is meant to work that way. There's nothing more significant to the status of these people than their armor because it's a proof of everything their society is founded on. These are people who are claiming to rule on earth by divine right. The knightly class is a

group of people who have been chosen by God to be more powerful, to be more preeminent, to be the wielders of special God-given powers that aren't available to the rest of us. And the armor is a physical proof that that's literally true. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast, from the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11. We reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders.

If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. At the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries. disregard of these communities, health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead.

And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion-dollar wars or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. So if we think about the armour of the 15th century, what would be the fundamental considerations when putting together a piece of armour? Obviously, we've just talked about the look of it and the projection that it portrayed on the battlefield. But maybe in terms of protection and mobility, what would a knight be looking for in a suit of armour? Yeah, that's a great question.

And the answer is it depends. It depends on a lot of different factors. You know, a knight fighting in a particular part of the world has to deal with. a particular climate. And there's the topography of the area in which he's fighting. There's the military organization of his people. There's the enemy that he's going to be facing. There is his style of fighting and the tactics and the deployment. You know, all of that is going to influence what kind of equipment is going to be best suited for the job. So for example, Italian knights generally fought as heavy cavalry on horseback.

And they very rarely got off their horses and fought on foot, although it is known that they did sometimes. But it's not their standard method of deployment. So Italian armor tends to favor protection over mobility. That's a product of fighting on horseback. You can carry more weight. The armor can be heavier if you're on a horse, because the horse is carrying most of the weight

and the horse is doing the running around, not you. If you're going to have to get off your horse, though, everything changes. You need more mobility. You can't be carrying as much weight. Fighting on foot, a knight is going to be using two-handed weapons a lot of the time, spears, the pole axe, two-handed swords. All of those weapons are favored by the English fighting on foot. And that's a symmetrical way of using your body in combat,

rather than the highly asymmetrical activity of fighting on horseback, where one hand is on the reins and you only have one hand free to use your weapons. And one side of your body is more vulnerable than the other side of the body. Whether you're on foot or on horseback is a crucial factor. And then is it a case of finding a balance between protection and mobility? So depending on how you think you're going to be fighting that day or how your cultural approach to fighting is, whether you fight more on foot or on horse, will determine whether the armor favors protection or favors mobility? Absolutely. You might look for a balance of protection and mobility, but you might actually be looking for an imbalance, depending on what you're doing.

And this is a key point about armor, the universal law of armor design. Whether you're an ancient Greek hopolite or a modern tank designer, the universal law of armor applies. And that is that protection and mobility are inversely proportion. If you increase protection, you lose on mobility. To increase protection, you have to make the plates bigger and thicker and heavier. And you have to be wearing more stuff under them and more mail and more padding and everything else. So your mobility goes down and your protection goes up. Similarly, if you want more mobility, you've got to make the plates thinner and lighter and less protective. So they impede the movement of the body less. Mobility goes up and protection goes down. And sometimes you want to balance. evenly as best you can, but sometimes you want to radically favor one or the other. Fighting on horseback, you want more protection and you're willing to pay the sacrifice in mobility. Because you can afford it.

Fighting on foot, like the English, though, they've got to have the mobility. And the English in particular actually struggle with the sacrificing protection part. They know they need that mobility. And their tactics are so heavily geared towards knights fighting. habitually on foot. They need to optimize their armor for infantry deployment to the max. But they don't want to sacrifice the protection, actually. And the story of English armor technology in the 15th century is often trying to find ways around the universal law. How can we actually get more protection without having to pay for it? Sometimes they're successful

and sometimes they're not. There's a definite effort to cheat physics and get the best of both of us. Yeah. And they do come up with some really clever, solutions, though. And there is actually one instance where they do violate the universal law. And they're quite pleased about it. And they stick with this idea for a long time. If you want to maintain free movement in your arms and shoulders for swinging hafted weapons and things, you can't have a huge amount of enveloping coverage in your arm defenses because it'll impede the forward and backward movement into the shoulder. So you have to have a smaller plate that just kind of sits on the point of the shoulder and the area immediately around the outer shoulder joint. But that leaves a lot of

inner area in the juncture between the shoulder and the chest kind of exposed. So rather than putting a big shield like, you know, enveloping plate there, the English take a small circular plate or sometimes it's actually shaped like a miniature shield. Sometimes it's a little oval plate. And they stick that right there. It's called a Bessigue, if anybody wants to look it up. And they put Bessigues on both sides to create symmetrical shoulder defenses. And the thing about Bessigues is they're not big. They're only a few inches top to bottom.

But you can make them really thick. You know, you can make that plate three or four millimeters thick. And it adds a tremendous amount of protection to a key area. But it doesn't actually had very much weight. It doesn't actually change the human experience of wearing the armor very much. So that's one example, one very rare example of how they violate the law. But usually you can't do that. I was interested last time I heard you speak about this as well, for you to pinpoint the kind of development of English armor and their military tactics to what was the catastrophic loss at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314. Can you just explain to us a little bit about how losing that battle kind of transformed England's approach to the battlefield?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I regard that as a really important moment. I don't have a feel of whether. military historians really agree with me or not. But I talked about the history of English infantry tactics a lot in the introduction to the first part of my English armor book. And it's actually interesting that the English fight on foot quite a lot in the 12th century. But then in the 13th century, they sort of fell out of it. The 13th century is the first great age of knightly cavalry. You know, and that's when you really start to see armored cavalry coming into its own. And this is also the flowering of chivalry and knightly culture, kind of on all levels. And this is when tournaments and jousting starts to become really big in the 1200s. And the English were swept away with that.

And their knights began to fight habitually on horseback, just like everybody else. And in the major battles, English battles of the 13th century, you find great cavalry charges at, you know, Lewis or evesham or any of those battles, the English knights are fighting on horseback in very large numbers. And they're using the same tactics and the same attitudes as the French and everybody else. And at Bannockburn, it's really striking that if you describe the context, the setting of that battle in generic terms to somebody and you don't tell them what battle it is and you don't tell them if it's the Scots versus the English, they might very well think it's the French getting beaten and by the English, because the English at Bannockburn fought again very much as continental knights

would of this period. They deploy in huge numbers of heavy cavalry. They depend on frontal cavalry charges, even when it's clearly not the right thing to do. And they behave like the French. And they get whooped by a smaller army made up of largely common soldiers carrying spears and a few bows, and they have some light cavalry, but not very much. The Scots had a small army, not very impressive, perhaps, but they were very well led. And they were very highly motivated at that moment. They were fighting on their ground, on their terms, and they had forced diversity. They had knights dismounted fighting on foot alongside their common soldiers. They had a plan. They had ways of trying to trick the enemy into.

attacking on their terms rather than on the enemy's own terms, you know, and Robert the Bruce played it very, very well indeed. And the English defeat was enormous, I mean, huge numbers of the most prominent nobility of the time were killed in the battle. You know, Lord Clifford, the Duke of Gloucester, etc. Edward II escaped, but didn't stop running until he got back to Yorkshire, you know. I think that defeat was really traumatic and it really made the English question who they were and what on earth they were doing. How could such a thing happen? And if we're going to continue to fight these people, how are we going to continue? And to their credit, the record seems to show that they thought very carefully about tactics and they

change the way they fought and they learned from their enemies. The so-called English way of war in the 100 years war is half Scottish. You know, it isn't all Scottish because Edward III brought a lot of new thinking to the developing tactics foremost, the addition of increasing numbers of archers. Archers were part of the Scottish way of war in the early 14th century, but not a major part. They had a supporting role, not an integral primary role, whereas Edward III introduced large numbers of archers. And those numbers get bigger and bigger and bigger as the 14th century progresses. I think it's a really interesting point to take that moment of shocking defeat and have the English kind of re-evaluate what it is that they're doing. And I guess also thinking, particularly as they

move into the Hundred Years' War and they're taking war to France, thinking these are tactics that beat the way the French fight. We know that because they beat the way that we used to fight, which was the way the French fight. So here is a tactic that we can take over there and we can shock and surprise them and hopefully do to them what the Scots did to us at Bannockburn. And I guess then that starts driving the whole military machine of weapons and armor. So your armor has to then suit that way of fighting and you get this divergent, very English style, which probably favors mobility rather than the protection, as you said. And that kind of defines where English Armour goes in the 15th century? And that's just one aspect of it. A lot had to change to alter the whole

nature of the tactics of the English armies. They had to reorganize society so that England could produce good archers in the kinds of numbers that their new tactics really demanded. And not only that, those large numbers of archers needed to be trained also to fight at close quarters with hand weapons. to work as light infantry and close combat as well. And they also needed a close bond and a close cooperative relationship between their common soldiers and their knights. Knights and their infantry needed to work closely together. And you see that developing in the way that they build their armies. They indenture retinues. A knight brings his people with him to the army. He brings his squires and his bodyguards and his group of archers. And these are all people who come from the same

area. They grew up together. They know each other. They train together. And they will fight to the death for each other. And the army is built up of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those small intimate groups. So it goes well beyond what the armor looks like. But the armor is an important aspect of it as well. How do we redesign the armor? How do we rethink it so that it's going to be optimized for what we're doing. But another key point about the English tactics, though, too, that's fundamental is that it's not just one trick. It isn't just one thing that, you know, we fortify a position, we fight defensively, we've got tons of archers, we've got a good group of knights guarding the archers and helping to make them feel confident that they're protected.

You know, that's the backbone of it. But you also need the capacity to change what you're doing, if it's not working for whatever reason. So the English still are mindful of heavy cavalry. The English knights are prepared to get on their horses when they need to. They just don't expect to be doing that as a matter of course unless there's a very good reason. But the English won Poitiers with a cavalry charge of knights led by the Black Prince, not with their archers. I was just about to say that. So it goes all the way from Poitier up to Bosworth. We can still see heavy cavalry charges of English knights when the need is there. So I guess what they develop then is not, as you said,

not one single narrow tactic that happens to work quite often, but a raft of tactics that they can adapt to the situation that they're in. Yeah, that are all kind of interlocked and are always providing options according to the scenario. But all of that is made possible by the fact that they have good force diversity. The basics of this are that knights in full-plate armor have incredible strengths. They're really good at certain things. But of course, they have weaknesses. Now, the same is true of archers. They're really good at certain things, and they have certain weaknesses.

But the strengths and weaknesses of archers and men at arms fit together perfectly. And they're really able to compensate beautifully for each other. You know, the archers can move faster. They're more lightly armored. They've got better situational awareness. They can help the knights communicate. they can help direct the knights to where they need to be on that person to person sort of level. And similarly, the knights benefit from having these incredible ranged weapons, from the capacity to injure and demoralize and tire out their opponents before they have to fight them. It's just a really good recipe to begin with. It doesn't always work.

There are plenty of examples where the English are not well led and they get defeated, but that's an isolated human error rather than a fundamentalist. mental flaw in the tactics. Paté is a good example. Or Boge. Both examples where the English are catastrophes are catastrophes. And those are also stories that don't tend to get into the English textbooks. For obvious reasons. Right. I kind of get this picture, which I know is utterly impractical and I'm completely wrong in it, but of nights on a battlefield kind of having this suitcase next to them of all the different bits of armour and thinking, right, now I'm going to get on my horse. I'm going to take that off and that off and put that on, like a mix and match sort of set

of armor, but they must have had to make a decision at the start of the day that this is what I think is going to be the most likely scenario, and I'm going to have to equip myself for that, and if there's a change, I'm just going to have to deal with it. So there is that inbuilt flexibility, but a knight, I guess, has to make some kind of decision as to which way he thinks is most likely to go. Yeah, and that's true of all aspects of a medieval battle. You are not going to be able to issue orders across your forces in the middle of a battle. Medieval battles heavily depend on pre-instruction. And you just say, okay, guys, this is what we're going to try and do. And this is what we hope is going to happen. So if that happens, do this, this and this.

If the enemy goes that way, do this. If the enemy comes up the middle, do this. We're going to try to let you know what we need with the horns and the banners. But most of this is about pre-instruction. And similarly, it's with the equipment. You set your equipment up as best you can for what you think you're getting into. But once the battle goes, you're not going to have much ability to change things. You know, the English armor in the 15th century is heavily optimized for fighting on foot. But it doesn't prevent you getting into the saddle and routing the enemy if that's suddenly the thing you need to do like that. It's just that your armor isn't ideal for fighting for long periods on horseback. But you can get the job done. All field armor is like that.

If the Italians need to, they can get off their horses and steam in. But again, their equipment isn't just going to be ideally set up for that. They're just going to have to deal with it. The Italians actually, they set their armor up so that they can jettison certain pieces if they need to and still have decent protection underneath. Generally, the English, you know, they just have an armor that will work on horseback, but it's much better on foot, really. And I think one of the real differences or clear examples of that is when you talked about

the English sabbaton said, the footwear that they would wear was very specifically designed to improve their mobility, as opposed to some continental armor, which was more kind of rigid around the ankle? Yeah, yeah. That's one of a number of technical features that I was able to identify in depictions on the effigies, where you can point to it and you can say, that's about fighting on foot. And looking at the feet is the obvious place to go, right? But, you know, when you're fighting on foot, the subtleties of mobility in the foot and the ankle are really important. You need to be able to move your ankle.

And a lot of plate armor for feet developed on the continent has like tongue plates at the front and rear of the ankle that go up inside the plates for the lower leg to maintain a good overlap. And your foot can still pitch up and down, but it can't yaw side. to side. The rotational movement of the ankle is impeded. And when you're mostly expecting to fight on horse, that doesn't matter. But on foot, it really does matter. On the continent, they might just take their sabbatons off and deal with it. But if you're going to habitually fight on foot, your feet might get stepped on. You know, a horse might step on you. Someone might stab on you. You know,

know what, you need plates on your feet, really. So they just cut out the tongue plates and they have the plate of the sabbaton cut low around the ankle. There's a gap between the foot plates and the lower leg plates. And then they put mail there. They sew mail onto the arming shoe worn underneath. And that's good enough for them. And that system endures for a hundred years. So that's proof that it was working, I think. And I suppose we can see the evidence that these tactics worked in France throughout the 14th century and into the early 15th century with the victories in the 100 years war.

But I guess that starts to wane a little bit. And maybe the French are getting wise to some of these tactics and they're learning to deal with some of those tactics. And in the second half of the 15th century, we get the military effort kind of moving back to England with the Wars of the Roses. So then I guess you've got a different situation where you're trying to fight with these tactics that have been incredibly successful against people who don't know them. but now you're fighting people who have also been taught to fight that way.

Does that affect the way that armour develops later through that century as the fight comes back to England and tactics necessarily change, maybe? Yes, indeed. This is what we encounter, my new installment of the English Armour Project. The book that's just come out starts in 1450 and moves into the whole period of the Wars of the Roses. And it's quite interesting now that the book one is really the story of the Hundred Years' War and book two is looking at the Wars of Roses. and we see very different things happening. As I was really refining the second and third books for publication,

the changing nature of English warfare in the second half of the 15th century really started to come home to me. And again, first, you know, revealing itself in the way the equipment evolves, but then that forces me to go back and think again about the battles of that period and think again about what's going on. But yeah, I mean, the French weren't stupid. they did beat the English sometimes. And throughout the late 14th and early 15th centuries,

the French knew perfectly well that dismounting your knights and fighting on foot would be a good part of the answer to how to defeat the English. And they did it. They fought on foot too. But they fought in foot in different ways. And the makeup of their armies was different.

And crucially, they tended not to have as good a command and control system as the English did. Agencourt is the great example, where the English are very strictly and skillfully led by Henry V. And there is a very clear order and system of command. Everybody knows exactly what they're meant to do and exactly why they're there and exactly who is in charge.

And they pick the ground, they decide how they're going to fight, and when they're going to fight, and that's that. Whereas the French, you know, they often have different armies coming from different places led by lots and lots of different princes of the blood who all think they should be the head of the army. And you've got 15 chefs in the kitchen. And there's no clear structure of command. There's no clear way of deciding how this army is going to deploy and fight. And at Agencourt, they had archers, but they didn't use them. And, you know, it all fell apart. So the thing that was different when we move into the wars of the roses is now it is English armies fighting other English armies.

And not only are they aware of the general principles of how to fight, they fight in precisely the same way. And they have precisely the same kinds of training. Tactically, they're now really looking in a mirror. There's no element of surprise or catching the enemy out. They all know each other's tricks, and it doesn't really work. It doesn't work well enough. Whether you win or not is kind of a role of the cosmic dice, and that's simply not good enough. You have to find ways of giving yourself a better chance of success. So the Wars of the Roses motivates the English to look for new ways of fighting or to change the emphasis of what they're doing. Does that change the development of armour as we move through the century? Does that impact the types of armour that English knights are wearing later on in the 15th century as they try to develop those tactics? It does. They first think again about what they already know.

And they realize that cavalry have a big role to play in this. Cavalry has the capacity to be that big surprise knockout punch if it's used in the right way at the right time. So, for example, at Tewksbury, Edward VIII takes a bunch of his knights. He puts them on their horses. He sticks them in some woods at the side of the battlefield. And he just says, watch how the battle progresses. When you see your moment, you just go for it. And don't wait for anybody to tell you anything else.

You know, so the Tewksbury is in full swing. When his cavalry see that the Lancasterians have advanced in front of them and the side, the flank of the army is presented to. the Yorkist cavalry, they go and they destroy the Lancasterian army. And that's one example of many where they're looking for new ways of mixing it up. And it's tricky because in a lot of the accounts that we have of Wars of the Rose's battles, they're not very clear, as you know, about numbers. And they're not very clear about who was doing what. We're not always sure who's fighting on foot and who's fighting on horseback. But there's enough reference to cavalry action

to show that it was now becoming more of part of the English repertoire. And I guess that reaches a peak at Bosworth with Richard the Third's famous charge there, which was almost a return to the French tactic of heavy cavalry charging straight. Yes, by the 1480s, what we are seeing across Europe, actually, is a revolution or a renaissance of armored cavalry tactics across the board. Michael K. Jones had a very interesting point about in his Bosworth book, there's a lot of stuff we now know he's wrong about, of course, but he had a very interesting point about Richard's possible awareness of the Battle of Toro fought between the Castilians and the Portuguese in 1475. And, you know, that's a complicated battle and the results are a bit ambiguous, but there was a general sense at the time

that the Castilians had beaten the Portuguese with a decisive cavalry charge. And I think that battle made people elsewhere in Europe sit up and pay attention. And it may have influenced Richard the Thirds thinking about how he was going to fight at Oswald. So in the space of that 150 years, the tactics have almost come full circle. And I guess the armour may well have followed and needed to come full circle if you're going to be back on a mounted horse and you kind of almost end up where we began. Yes, indeed. I mean, there are good reasons to reintroduce heavy cavalry. I mean, there were other tactics that were developing in the second half of the 15th century that made it a new environment. It wasn't that they were returning to the old environment, is that they find themselves in a new

environment where an old weapon has a new usefulness, basically. But as well as using their existing tools in new ways. In the Wars of the Roses, we also see the introduction of new troop types, light and medium infantry who are not archers, Billman, Hal Badeers, troops like that, who have more armor than an archer may be, and they also have the hafted weapon capacity that was traditionally restricted mostly to the men in arms. So they have new common troops who can take a lot of the foot combat pressure off of the knights to guard the archers and so forth, and that frees the knights up to get back on their horses if they need to. So there's a lot of interesting things going on, and the armor accommodates that.

In the second half of the 15th century, we see the English trying to make their armor designs more appropriate to fighting on horseback, even though they're not yet willing to give up the capacity to fight on foot. By the 1480s, they have given up most of the design features that had traditionally defined their armor as optimized for infantry service. And by the end of the 15th century, the English domestic armours are looking very much like continental ones in the way that they work and the way that they prioritize heavy cavalry deployment. Well, thank you so much, that's been such a fantastic survey of English armor through the 15th century. and how and why it developed the way that it did.

Where can people get hold of book two and when can we expect book three? Right, yes. You can order them directly from the publisher. Tom Delmar Limited. He runs an auction house called Olympia Auctions, and that's also his publishing house. You can follow me on Instagram. It's at Tobias Capua on Instagram.

That's one of the quickest ways to find out everything about what I'm up to. I usually try to keep links going for ordering my books there. It's also available from the Wallace College. collection shop, which you can order online or come to a museum and pick it up for yourself. And that's basically the way. Or sometimes I'm at events. I bring the books to my lectures and things. That's another way on a personal level. There are still a few copies of book one around, but it's getting rarer now. So if people aren't familiar with my work, book two is just a continuation, really, of book one. And books one, two, and three are all really a single book of

1,100 or so pages that couldn't ever have been published as one volume. And then book three is coming out around this time next year. Book three, incidentally, looks at the period 1435 to 1500. So it takes a slightly longer time frame, but again, restricted to the 15th century. But book three is dedicated to the whole question of foreign armor in England. What is the evidence for the presence and use of foreign imported armor by the English? And why does it matter? And how does it fit into the whole story? And that's where we see all the evidence of the Italian monuments. It reinforces our confidence in what we looked at in the first two books. And it also has the benefit of having a lot of real armor to talk about as well for a change. Wonderful. You have to come back and see us again next year when that books

out and we can talk more about some foreign armor. And I definitely recommend Toby's Instagram for anyone who likes pictures of arms and armor and all of that kind of things, some wonderful pictures up there almost every day. So thank you so much, Toby, for sharing your research with us. I think it's been a fascinating insight into the real world of armor. And the knights who wore it and how they really fought on the ground 600 years ago. Don't forget to join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. And don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

While I've got you, I'd like to recommend an episode of the ancients, also from history hit. In First Astronomers, Tristan is joined by Peter Swanton to talk about Australian Indigenous astronomy in what is a fascinating episode. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.