Tomb of Edward of Woodstock, Canterbury Cathedral
Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
This week we’re back to chainmail, but it’s a relatively small piece. In the early fourteenth century helmets came down almost to shoulder level. Previously the head had been covered with chain mail for extra protection, but a close-fitting iron cap was worn under the new style of helmet. It doesn’t sound very much more comfortable than a chainmail balaclava, but presumably provided greater protection. It did, however, leave the neck exposed, so something was needed to protect it. Something flexible like chainmail was the obvious answer and this became the aventail. It hung from the bottom of the iron cap around the neck and over the top of the shoulders. Not only did it provide necessary protection, but it allowed the knight to move his head to the left and the right, which had been quite difficult before. Eventually the outer helmet was done away with and the inner cap became a more fitted helmet.
In the photograph at the top of the post, you can see the tomb of Edward of Woodstock (otherwise known as the Black Prince), in which you can see part of his aventail very clearly.
Here you will find an example from the Wallace Collection of a helmet with an aventail attached and this is a lovely modern model in the Royal Armouries of a knight in the style of armour made at the end of the fourteenth century. The aventail covers his shoulders and part of his chest and back.
Sources: Knight – Robert Jones The Battle of Agincourt – ed. Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer (N.B. The link is to the UK store)
This week’s piece of armour is the aketon. It’s another padded jacket, this time worn under armour rather than on top of it.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that a body might need to be protected from its own armour. Just think for a moment about having nothing more than a thin linen shirt between your skin and a shirt of chain mail. Now that you’ve stopped wincing, read on.
They were made of natural fibres, so no examples have survived and there aren’t many contemporary pictures, since they were worn underneath everything else. The chap in the picture at the top of the post is wearing something under his hauberk, but it’s not clear that it’s padded. The inside and the outside are different colours, though, so perhaps that’s intended to show that it was.
Aketons are mentioned a bit in literature and chronicles and accounts of engagements. Edward III received a report that a soldier had been killed by a lance which had gone through his habergeon and his aketon before piercing his body and killing him. No armour or combination of armour was perfect.
Tombs are a good resource. In this image, which you can magnify if you put your cursor on it, you can see the various layers of early fourteenth-century armour. Sir John is wearing a surcoat (possibly a jupon) on the outside, then what looks like a long version of a brigandine, then a hauberk and then an aketon underneath it all.
It seems that although one of the purposes of the aketon was to deaden blows from weapons and to reduce the bruising arising from being hit, it wasn’t terribly good at either. I can’t be alone in thinking that if I came out of an encounter with a weapon heavy enough to bruise me through layers of padding and chain main and possibly cuir bouilli, I might not worry too much about the bruising, as I’d probably be happy enough just being alive.
I’ve written quite a bit over the last few weeks about what knights and soldiers wore over their armour and only briefly looked at what constituted that armour. We’re looking back to the thirteenth century at the moment, before metal could be made in large enough pieces to make plate armour.
We’ve seen chain mail in the form of hauberks and habergeons and we’ve seen the brigandine, the jacket with its lining of strips of metal. Before this there was cuir bouilli. If you read French, this is exactly what you think it is. If you don’t, it’s boiled leather. The leather was boiled in water and then moulded into shape. At some point it was also treated with wax, but I’m not sure which point that was. Once dry it was very hard and it could be carved to make armour, as well as other things, such as horse armour and scabbards. Since it could be both painted and embossed, it was also used for many decorative items, one of which is in the photograph above. It’s book case.
Cuir bouilli was very cheap and it was easily available. Another advantage was that a piece of leather could be very large, which meant that a single piece could be used to provide protection, rather than small pieces joined together, which would always be weak at the join. It was also light.
It was most widely used to cover the chest. This was the cuirass. The name was retained, even when it was later made of plate metal. The cuirass could be buckled together with another piece of cuir bouilli to protect the back. It could also be used to protect the legs.
It stood up well to blows from lances and swords and could also deflect them, which chain mail couldn’t. It was effective enough to be used as armour into the sixteenth century. In 1278 Edward I held a tournament at Windsor for which he had made 38 sets of cuir bouilli armour for the participants: some of his chamber knights and his closest associates.
Even Chaucer mentions cuir bouilli. In the tale told to the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales by the fictional version of Chaucer, Sir Topaz wears leg armour of cuir bouilli. His upper body is protected by a padded jacket and a habergeon.
The surcoat was, like the jupon that replaced it, an outer garment made of rich material. It was worn over armour (at this point little more than chain mail) and was usually decorated with a coat of arms. It could be very long and it is thought that, in the thirteenth century, some were padded. As you can see from the picture above, it was basically a sleeveless tunic.
Those who study these things use effigies and contemporary pictures to try to work out what medieval knights were wearing. Since the surcoat typically covered the knight from neck to well below the knee, it is very difficult to work out what was worn underneath.
It’s probable that the surcoat was copied by Crusaders from the Saracens in the twelfth century in order to keep the heat and dirt from their armour. It was also used for identifying its wearer in tournaments, which had become popular a few decades earlier, and in battle. The introduction of face-covering helmets made identification in any circumstances difficult and a surcoat that stayed on the knight was far more useful than a decorated shield which could be dropped in a battle or not even used. In the twelfth century a tournament was little more than a mini battle, so surcoats were very useful. Surcoats were still being used to identify the dead at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, although the practice of war had already turned against them.
It was eventually replaced by the much shorter and padded jupon, which was more practical for a man fighting on foot. Any English knights still wearing them at Crécy must surely have cut their surcoats short, since they were mainly on foot that day and wouldn’t want a long tunic flapping about their legs.
Today I’m offering you a BOGOF (buy one get one free), as we’re talking about hauberks and their successors, habergeons.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the hauberk was the most effective form of protection a soldier could get his hands on. It’s the rather funky armour worn by the soldiers in the Bayeux Tapestry (below). I’m sure the nuns who embroidered it were very relieved that they didn’t have to depict the hauberks more realistically.
Tapisserie de Bayeux – Scène 55 : le duc Guillaume se fait reconnaître.
The hauberk was followed by the (shorter) habergeon. The technology didn’t yet exist to make plate armour, but metal wire could be produced and metal wire could be made into rings which could be made into mail shirts. Yes, hauberks and habergeons were mail shirts. The former reached down to the knees with elbow or wrist-length sleeves and the latter covered the tops of the thighs and had short or no sleeves. I’m a knitter and to me they look like jumpers made with needles too large for the thickness of the yarn.
Mail is a series of metal rings linked with one another and rivetted with tiny rivets to keep them in place made by haubergers. They were made from iron or steel and the wire used to make the rings could be round or flat. There were even different ways to attach the rivets and all of these affected the protection offered by the mail.
One disadvantage was that they rusted easily. They could be varnished with hauberc saffré. which sounds as if it might have had some saffron in it or as if it came from the town of Saffré in Brittany. None of my books was able to offer clarity on this point. Hauberc saffré left the mail with a yellowish tint, but could be dyed with other colours. Once it had started to wear off, the mail was sanded down with, well, sand and the varnish was replaced.
Another disadvantage was that they were very heavy and, as you can see from the picture at the top, they were not very easy to get out of. They were worn over padded undergarments, which you can’t really see in the picture.
Because they’re made of metal, quite a few have survived, but they’re mostly much later than the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as mail was very easy to recycle and repurpose and didn’t go out of fashion for several centuries. Broken or damaged rings could be replaced if necessary.
Mail shirts could be adapted to a new owner by lengthening or shortening the sleeves, or bits could be removed as better outer protection was purchased, or lengths could be taken out and added to a different mail shirt entirely. Mail could have a very long life.
Even when it was possible to make plate armour, pieces of mail were still used to protect the vulnerable areas where the plates joined, such as the neck, the groin, the inner elbows and the feet.
Mail shirts were mostly used by knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but were used by soldiers who couldn’t afford plate armour for a much longer period. Habergeons were worn by English mounted archers until the end of the fourteenth century.
This is a link to a habergeon that is said to be one of the best in existence.
Jupon has at least two other spellings: gipon and (annoyingly, since I almost missed it in an index) gypon. It was a short padded and quilted garment worn over a suit of armour. The padding was usually sheep’s fleece or cotton and it was quilted to form ridges about four centimetres wide. Worn on its own, the jupon provided a fair amount of protection, but it was usually worn over something else protective. A jupon was usually decorated with a coat of arms, allowing its wearer to be identified on the battlefield. Edward III had jupons made of blue taffeta, velvet and satin, but other fabrics were also used, as we shall see.
The jupon of Edward of Woodstock, better known these days as the Black Prince, used to be displayed above his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral. It was made of red and blue velvet and decorated with gold embroidery. He died in 1376 and by the Second World War it had become so fragile that it was taken down and put into storage and very few people get to see it these days. You can see him wearing it, or one very like it, in the image at the top of the post. He’s the younger of the two men, but Edward III, his father, is also wearing one.
Back in 2017 Amber Butchart’s A Stitch in Time (shown on the BBC) commissioned a replica of the Black Prince’s jupon. It was made using the techniques that would have been used in the fourteenth century and it was quite interesting watching the seamstresses try out different methods for the padding. You can see the garment they produced here. It’s quite stunning and there would have been no mistake about who he was in a battle.
Chaucer’s knight in The Canterbury Tales wears a jupon. In his book, Chaucer’s Knight, Terry Jones makes much of its being described as dirty and made of fustian, thus having no coat of arms, to support his view that the knight is a mercenary, rather than the chivalrous knight Chaucer says he is. It’s not a view that has gained much academic support in the 45 years since he first put it forward, but it clearly made an impression on me when I read the book over 20 years ago, as the one thing that I’ve always remembered about the knight is that he has a stained jupon. It’s Chaucer who spells it gypon.
The falchion was a curved, broad blade, sharp only on the outer edge. The word comes from ‘falx’ the Latin for scythe. One of its uses was to kill a stag at the end of a hunt. Unsurprisingly, since it was a blade used for hacking at flesh, it looked a bit like an elongated meat cleaver.
Archers carried a variety of sidearms and it’s recorded that some of them used falchions at the Battle of Agincourt. It wasn’t generally considered a ‘knightly‘ weapon, but there are contemporary pictures of knights using them.
In literature and art, the falchion was usually wielded by those considered demonic, or enemies of Christendom. Many depictions of the executions of saints such as John the Baptist, James the Greater, Barbara and Catherine show them being beheaded by falchions.
In this context, it’s interesting that, from the second half of the fourteenth century, St Peter is shown using a falchion rather than a simple knife when off the ear of the servant in the garden of Gethsemane.
Somewhat bizarrely for such a vicious weapon, there is a good example of one in Durham Cathedral.
The brigandine was a piece of protective clothing developed in the second half of the fourteenth century. In England, it was mostly used by mounted archers, who dismounted to fight on foot. In the rest of Europe, it was used by men-at-arms, although, as we shall see, they were also used by much higher-ranking and wealthier soldiers.
Previously, mounted archers had worn habergeons (mail shirts), but the brigandine offered both greater protection and greater flexibility, which was quite important if you were getting off and on a horse in a battle. For those who could afford it, the brigandine was the archers’ preferred body protection by the beginning of the fifteenth century.
The brigantine was made up of small metal plates riveted to a piece of fabric (usually canvas or something similar) and covered by another piece of fabric. Its form was a bit like a jacket and all that could be seen from the outside were the rivet heads, as you can see in the picture at the top of the post. If the owner was wealthy enough, the outer fabric could be velvet or, the ultimate extravagance, cloth of gold.
The plates varied in size, but were either rectangular or trapezoidal in shape. There were two larger plates at the front to protect the chest. Sadly, very few have survived, because the fabric has rotted away. Fortunately, there’s one in the Royal Armouries which you can see here. Have a look around the site while you’re there; it’s a fascinating place.
Edward, Duke of York, who was killed at Agincourt, had many brigandines, at least two of which were made with multicoloured velvet. He left them in his will, written a few weeks earlier, to men who had served under him.
The picture above may or may not give you a clue about this week’s obscure, or not so obscure, military term. It was a device used to cripple horses in a battle or a siege, or even when an army was on the move.
A horse could do a lot of damage in a battle and a cavalry charge could be decisive. There were ways to deter horses, such as a row of spears stuck into the ground with the pointed end facing towards the horses. These might injure, kill or frighten a few horses, but their weight would usually break the spears. Once the spears were in the ground, though, they were in the ground. If the horses came from a different direction or if you advanced, they ceased to be useful. In this situation you needed something smaller and more mobile.
This was the caltrop. They could be as fancy as the ones in the picture and they could be small balls with spikes sticking out. More often they were made of two bits of metal, each end of which was sharpened to a point, twisted together so that when thrown three of the points rested securely on the ground and one was pointing upwards, ready for a horse to put its hoof onto it.
They were generally quite small, which made them both portable and difficult to see. The caltrop wasn’t a medieval invention, but had been used by the Romans. It didn’t pass out of fashion when cavalry charges became a thing of the past, gaining a new lease of life puncturing pneumatic tyres.
They were so ubiquitous, that some families included them in their coat of arms.
You know me well enough by now to know that I’m not writing about an armed engagement between two or more armies such as at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. It’s still a military word, though and means a unit of men within an army, so battles did fight in battles.
Battles could be of different sizes, although they each were made up of ten banners. A banner was a flag which identified a man, a banneret, who could take men into battle with him under his command. I’ve written about these here. The men below a banneret would include a number of knights, esquires and other men-at-arms, often mounted archers in the fourteenth century. These could number up to sixty men, making a battle potentially six hundred men.
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