Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

skirt, the underlying mail chausses and the wooden saddle tree to do so. More often,
however, we hear of men being killed when blows hit unprotected parts. Thus the great
English commander Sir John Chandos was killed in a minor skirmish at Lussac in 1369,
during the Hundred Years War, when he slipped and received a lance thrust through his
open visor. John, Lord Clifford, is said to have been killed at Feriybridge on the eve
of the great Wars of the Roses battle of Towton in March of 1461, receiving an arrow
in the throat after removing his bevor. In both cases the failure is not in the armour
but in the men's failure to use it properly, and the narrators make that point quite clearly.
It is far more easy to find in the chronicles and annals comments that remark on
the quality and effectiveness of armour. Guillaume le Breton wrote how at the battle
of Bouvines in 1214 French knights could not be harmed even when unhorsed 'unless
first their bodies are dispossessed of the armour protecting them, so much has each
knight covered his members with several layers of iron'. It was noted during the First
Crusade that the crusader knights would ride out of battle looking like porcupines,
covered in the arrows of the Muslims, but otherwise unharmed. In a similar fashion,
Lodewijk van Velthem, one of the chroniclers of the battle of Courtrai between the
French and Flemish in 1302, wrote that:
... the arrows flew through the air so thickly that no one could see the sky. Still the
Flemish army did not give way, even though the neck pieces, tunics, bucklers, targes,
helmets and shields which they used to protect themselves were full of arrows. From
their heads to their feet there were arrows, in their equipment and in their clothing...
And these were militiamen, not equipped in the full armour of their knightly opponents.
Once we get past the hyperbole of the epic and romance genres it is clear that most
of our written sources agree with the sentiments of Guillaume le Breton, that armour
was important for the protection of the warrior. Orderic Vitalis tells us that at the
battle of Bremule, fought between Henry II of England and Louis VI of France in
1119, only three knights were killed out of the 900 who took part because they were
all clad in mail and spared each other out of fear of God and fellowship in arms'. There
are many examples where the failure to put on armour, in particular the helmet, was
considered very foolhardy, suggesting it was consrdered a highly effective and
necessary form of defence. The protection that was offered by a good helmet can be
seen in the History of William Marshal. After the tournament at Pleurs in 1178 it was
agreed that William should be given the prize as the knight showing the greatest
prowess in the melee, but he was nowhere to be found. After a search he was finally
seen with his head on a blacksmith's anvil as the craftsmen tried to pry his helmet's
plates apart so that he could get it off his head, so badly had it been battered.