The Armourer

 As I have discussed previously, knights in the twelfth century normally wore chain mail, made of iron rings riveted or welded together to provide protection against swords and other weapons.  Although we have plenty of illustrations from the period of chain mail, actual chain mail from the twelfth century is now essentially non-existent.  It would be used until it disintegrated, and it was especially subject to rust.

When we think of armor we usually think instead of plate armor.  Here we have lots of surviving examples, the earliest from the thirteenth century but continuing up through the seventeenth century.  England's Tower of London long collected helmets and swords from the late medieval and early modern periods.  Recently these have been moved to their own museum in Leeds (Yorkshire), called (appropriately enough) the Armouries.  The entryway is seen below.

The person responsible for making all the pre-modern armor was known (again appropriately) as an armourer.  It was a highly skilled occupation, and armourers had their own late medieval guilds.  A royal court would have several armourers on staff, and they were kept busy.

Plate armor was made from steel, not iron, produced by working the charcoal from the great furnaces (used to melt iron) into the metal.  Because most medieval iron came out of mines in Germany, that region also became the center of steel making.  Armor made by German armourers might be sold all over Europe.  Plates of steel, ready to be made into armor, would also be sold, or a powerful lord might buy raw iron to be worked up locally.

The armourer was in many ways like a blacksmith, using metal, a furnace, and hammer and anvil to shape metal into protective gear.  The advantage of plate armor over chain mail was that it was designed to deflect the blow of a sword or lance, even to turn aside a bullet unless it came in on a perfectly direct course.  Late medieval helmets often took on fanciful shapes, which while certainly embracing fashion, were ultimately based on theories of the best shapes to send an incoming shot or blow skittering away.

Realistically plate armor will not do a lot against musket fire, and it's useless against cannon fire, but it was highly effective against the footsoldiers increasingly pressed into service in late medieval warfare.  A heavily armored knight on a heavily armored horse could ride down footsoldiers with impunity.

But plate armor achieved its great flourishing in post-medieval tournaments.  When the cavalry charges, for which tournaments had originally been designed to train knights, no longer served in wars fought with cannons and pikemen on foot, tournaments became very popular games for the powerful.  The above mounted knight is clearly a tournament fighter.

The heavy plate armor used for tournaments of the early modern period would have been awkward and confining in a regular battle.  But it didn't matter.  Knights would be hoisted into the saddle with cranes and aimed at each other.  Armourers really came into their own, shaping the armor to fit each individual, decorating it with scenes from epics or tales of antiuity, inventing new styles.  King Henry VIII of England loved such tournaments.  Several of his suits of armor survive, getting larger and larger around over the years as he did.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval knights, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Gemstones

 Medieval people valued gemstones.  They were widely used metaphorically, as, for example, the Heavenly Jerusalem had its walls studded with gems, or a larger-than-life hero in an epic tale would have jewels set in the hilt of his sword.  But they also used both precious and semi-precious stones to decorate everything from Bible covers to royal crowns to reliquaries to communion cups.

Although these days few churches would stud their holy objects with gems, medieval people did so regularly.  Just as crown jewels marked the high position of a king or queen, so gemstones attached to the reliquary that held the bones or other relics of a saint marked this saint as something very special.

The above image is the twelfth-century reliquary of Sainte Foy, patron saint of Conques, apparently at origin a Roman statue of a man (Foy was a woman), repurposed to hold Foy's relics and covered with gems to show her value.  Many of these gems may have come from jewels people donated to show their gratitude to Foy when she healed them (she was particularly known for healing blindness and diseases of the eye).  In the stories, if someone came to be healed but carefully left their rings at home (so Foy wouldn't claim them), their hands would swell unbearably the next time they wore the withheld rings.  A quick return visit to Conques would be needed.

Gemstones could also have what we would call magical powers.  The proper gem placed under the tongue, or dipped in liquid that one then drank, or placed on the body could supposedly heal disease, or reveal a secret (like adultery), or protect travelers, or help a mother in childbirth.  It was agreed that these gems might lose their potency with time, so there are accounts of priests blessing them or putting them on the altar or anointing them with special herbs to revive their power.

The powerful had much of what we would call their liquid wealth tied up in gemstones.  Women wore highly valuable necklaces, and rings set with jewels were frequent gifts from the wealthy to their closest associates, or gifts made in response to a special service.

Diamonds were extremely rare in the Middle Ages and highly valued; most diamonds in more modern times have come from deep African mines.  Other precious stones included rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals, and amethysts, plus pearls, which are actually not stones at all, although they are minerals.  Most of these precious jewels can now be created in the laboratory, but of course they were not then.  Medieval people also valued what were considered semi-precious stones (the distinction between precious and semi-precious went back to antiquity), like topaz, lapis lazuli, jade, beryl, and tourmaline.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024


For more on saints and kings and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback

Building in wood

We tend to think of medieval buildings as stone, and indeed that was the most common material for castles and churches, at least from the eleventh century onward.  I've blogged earlier about building in stone.  But medieval people also built in wood.  It's just that wood hasn't held up nearly as well over the intervening centuries, for obvious reasons.

Houses in towns and villages were usually wooden before the late Middle Ages.  Wood is cheaper than stone and much easier to work, as anyone who has ever tried to build a stone wall will tell you.  On some early medieval manors, part of a peasant's rent might be paid in wooden shingles (such was the case with the peasant Bodo, who has been made perhaps unduly famous as a "typical" peasant).

The danger of course is that wood will burn.  Tightly packed medieval cities could be devastated by fire, and wooden shingles are especially a problem, as flying sparks land right on them.  (Wooden shingles are forbidden in parts of the US today for that reason.)  Medieval cities tried to mandate slate or tiles for roofs, even if the houses were wattle and daub, that is made of small pieces of wood with mud plaster in between.

The small pieces of wood are the clue for why late medieval villages and towns increasingly started being built in stone, in spite of the expense.  Wood was becoming increasingly scarce, and large pieces of wood, such as one might need to build a house, were becoming increasingly expensive as a result.  Wood after all was used for all sorts of purposes, primarily fuel as well as building, and as the population grew and with it the appetite for wood, trees were not given much of a chance to grow very big.  It didn't help that an increased population meant a greater need for food, which meant clearing new fields for crops.

But even buildings constructed primarily of stone needed wood.  A house with a slate or tile roof (much less a thatched roof or one with wooden shingles) needed beams to support the roofing.  A castle would generally have wooden floors, supported by corbels in the stone walls.  Both castles and churches needed large, heavy pieces of wood for their doors.

 

A stone church with a lead roof needed roofing beams just as much as did a barn or simple house.  The beams for Notre Dame of Paris were made from tall oaks, gathered over a number of years in the twelfth century and stored in the Seine until they had enough.  When the church burned in April of 2019, the dry, 850 year old oak went up like tinder.  It's taken several years, but those rebuilding Notre Dame, trying to make it as much like what it was before the fire as possible, have managed to find enough tall oaks to reproduce the rafters.  Many had thought it impossible, but eastern Europe had more big oaks than originally thought.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval buildings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.