Saturday, May 24, 2008

The black armour from Prague Castle

click on the images to enlarge.
above we see a detail of the sabotons. 8 lames in the soles mean this fellow would be able to walk just fine! I personally love the 4 lames at the ankles. This is a very sophisticated armour!
The knee cops are, well, competent. They are a sort of standard four lame knee cop which, like the rest of the armour, has been fire coloured black, and then gilded. I am sure the gilding added a lot to the price of this otherwise quite plain jousting armour. I am a little surprised about the thigh armour....these are articulated cuisses! Go figure! Never saw those before! Must have made the armour really comfortable to wear. The long articulated tassets are representative of that period of history. They stopped wearing the big faulds since of course, the lames were too delicate to withstand the impact of the joust lances, and the smaller tassets, in addition to being more comfortable, were less expensive to replace after tourney season.



The mitten gauntlets. I think I have made just the same sort of mitten gauntlet! This is for the rein hand, and uses straps across the palm to hold everything in place. This is a departure for this period and location since the standard was to have a leather gauntlet made with flanges onto which the gauntlet pieces were riveted. This very common mitten gauntlet works well for the left hand since it really does not need delicate fingers to hold onto the reins.







Thank you Pierre for this picture. Great stuff.


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1 comment:

STAG said...

Oh, and I hasten to point out....these are not MY pictures...they are my comments based on submitted pictures.

I suspect that they may reproductions, but I really don't know. My comments are on the armour, not on the provenance.