 Thank you very much. Thank you for coming everyone and thank you to the society for inviting me. This is the first time I've actually done a public lecture for the society even though I've been a fellow for a number of years. And I thought it would make sense to talk to you today about the research project that's really been consuming the majority of my time, really for the last 15 years. This subject of the history of late medieval armor in England as explored through the funerary monuments was for me a subject that began as my PhD. But I've been busy trying to ban my PhD from any public consumption because the study then required another decade of pretty serious work. And I've only just now gotten to the point when I feel like it's ready for publication and the first part of it came out last year and the next part of it's coming out this year and it's still very much on my mind and I still work on it about 10 hours a week. So it seemed like the obvious thing to talk about. In the early stages of the project it was just an incredible adventure across the country. One of the glorious things about looking for monuments all over the country is that not only do you go to hundreds and hundreds of English churches which are all repositories of medieval and Renaissance art that can be really quite serendipitous discovery of what else you find in addition to what you're looking for is just extraordinary. And it takes you to places that you would just never think to go otherwise. I mean sometimes there are famous places like Salisbury Cathedral or whatever but there are so many other extraordinarily beguiling and chanting places in just small little out of the way places across the country. And they all have an extraordinary architectural quality and obviously a sort of spiritual environment and quite apart from the technical research and the things that I was looking for just to really start to soak up the sort of environmental spatial context that these monuments exist in was really important because as well as looking at the monuments as evidence for what I was after I had to consider to what extent could they be used as evidence. One of the conclusions or one of the impressions I had about high relief funerary effigies of the late medieval period specifically the 15th century was their initial impact as works of just unsurpassed realism in a time when we don't really associate realism with art in general. When we think of medieval art, we often think of art forms that are highly stylized, highly impressionistic symbolic. They're meant to communicate a spiritual quality or a non-material impression of one sort or another. And then you have these high relief monuments which really do have this extraordinary quality of just moving back and forth between reality and the artistic representation in a dark church that has never been wired for electricity at the right time of day. These things start to look like they might actually be real people and I think that's the overriding impression that has only sort of strengthened itself in my mind as I've worked on this is that the artists, the whole art form is about that existing on that boundary between the real and the representation. And before I launched into looking at rivets and bits of armor on the effigies and what they show us on a technical level, I had to think very deeply about what was this art form exactly and what is an effigy, why was it created? These things were phenomenally expensive. I mean, they amounted to the annual income if not more of most of the people that they represent. And it's kind of interesting actually to plot them on a map because that immediately gives you some kind of impression of a number of the crucial considerations. When we're talking just about alabaster effigies, obviously effigies are carved out of limestone and sandstone and chalk and all sorts of things. But if we just talk about the alabaster ones because artistically and technically they're usually the best. All of the alabaster carved in the late medieval period came from the Darbyshire Staffordshire border country. This area right in here, not surprisingly. And you have this quite pronounced hot spot of effigies immediately around the area where the material was quarried. And then the farther away you get from that area the less and less common they become. And that kind of makes sense because in the Middle Ages a substantial consideration in terms of the total cost is the cross country haulage fees. And it's very expensive and difficult to get teams of oxen and everything you need to move large blocks of alabaster from Darbyshire to Devon or whatever. So that's not so surprising. But for me, an important consideration again trying to think of a link between the art form and the subject that I'm interested in which is the armor and more generally the nightly equipment that these effigies show. It's interesting to note that in the immediate area around the quarries you find fine quality alabaster monuments which represent fairly low ranking members of the gentry, men at arms, squires, some knights but fairly low level ones. People that didn't have exorbitant incomes. And because they don't have to pay for the haulage they can afford a decent quality monument. But their armor and the way that they are represented on the monument is still proportional to their status. So in this area you have fine alabaster monuments that show fairly plain, simple, sometimes decorated but often not very decorated armor. And the farther away you get, the armor gets richer, more elaborate, the status of the people represented goes up on average. So there is a link between what you are seeing and what seems to have actually existed in reality. And for me, I have to be able to demonstrate that. I have to be able to demonstrate a link between all of the specifics of the representation and what might have existed in reality. Because again, I'm not talking specifically and exclusively about monuments. I'm after armor. I want to tell an armor story, a technical and artistic history. And I've always for whatever reason been attracted to areas of my subject where there's no evidence, where there's no obvious evidence. I'm interested in the whole physical reality of the past. And the most obvious forms of surviving material evidence and the documents are important but there's big black holes in different parts of the record. And for whatever reason, I've always kind of been drawn to those black holes. And in arms and armor study, it's always been led, not surprisingly, by the arms and armor that actually survives. Just as general history is led by the documents first and foremost, the arms and armor study has been led by the surviving actual equipment itself. And if it doesn't survive, we haven't generally studied it. So I want to try and fill in some of those gaps because I want the whole story. So armor of the 15th century, there is no armor, English armor, identifiable English armor surviving from the 15th century, except a few helmets, which I'm dealing with in the next book. And really, if you want to fill this black hole, you have to look at other things. And that's how I got drawn to the monuments. Initially, just looking for what other sources might give me some idea of what was actually going on. Because the traditional story of England and armor in the 15th century was that there were two main schools of armor production. There was the big Italian and German centers of armor production. They were the technological leaders and also the fashion setters. And everybody else kind of followed the lead of Italy and Germany. But that's an idea that's led by the surviving objects. There's lots of Italian armor surviving. There's lots of German armor surviving. So to some extent, I started to have this feeling that our total conception of the full historical picture was being skewed by the random survivals of the material evidence. And when I say lots of Italian armor, I mean 13 complete armors. And that sounds like a lot. That feels to me like a surplus of evidence. But when you consider that there were hundreds of thousands of full Italian armors produced only in the second half of the 15th century and 13 survive, it's not actually a very good rate of survival. So it's not surprising that there isn't any English armor left. Anyway, so I was having just on the face of it to look for other forms of evidence. And when I first encountered effigies in a serious way, I mean, I always been aware of them, but I started to encounter them in a serious way in the Royal Armory's Library which has the photo archives of Claude Blair and Nick Norman and all sorts of people in the 20th century who had been going around and looking at effigies before me for this reason. I started really to get an extraordinary sense of how many there were out there beyond the 10 or so that always get published. There's 10 that always appear in all the books but they're really about 230 of these things surviving just from the 15th century. This is just armored figures as well, I should say. And when I started looking at them, I was really struck immediately by their really tangible, lifelike qualities. I mean, these artists paid tremendous attention to the little things. How do the different materials behave in reality? You know, how do the arming points that attach to the various pieces of armor, how do they hang? How do they, how are they tied? And how much of those little copper alloy eyelets that are set into the plates, so the plates just don't cut through the laces, how much of that shows when the thing is tied up? And how do different aspects of the equipment interact? How does the spur buckle interact with the lower leg armor? Where do the straps go? How do they overlay the plates? How is the belt tied? If you look at these effigies from different, more unusual angles, and sometimes stick your head into little crannies of niches where there are spiders and mice and things, you just see an, they have an extraordinary physicality. And when you look at what an effigy is supposed to do, that physicality, that realism, becomes an obviously an absolute imperative. The whole meaning and function of this art form depends on the artist's ability to absolutely, to the best of his ability, replicate the real physical reality of the equipment. And there are a number of reasons for that. Oh, this is a good one, just to go off on that a little bit. With different artists, they all have this, all of these carvers have this imperative to blur, again, the distinctions between a sculpture and a real person. And they, different artists working in their own hands have different tricks that they employ. And they go to sometimes quite extreme lengths to achieve that illusion. This one, this is one at Canterbury, one of a specific group where he goes as far as to see if he can make the alabaster look like silk, that he has unnecessarily draped over the sword hilt. Just to give himself a pretext for creating this lifelike quality that shouldn't be there. A funerary monument shouldn't have to go to this length. The fact that he's undercut all of this and the fact that he's showing the kind of shadow of the armor underneath the silk just really speaks to how important that realism is. And that gives me, as someone looking at this as a document, as a technical document, a lot of confidence that what I'm looking at is reliable. Now, why was this realism important? I sort of realized that they were important quite early on in my study before I had any idea of why that might be. I did a lot more work on just generally trying to understand the artistic function of the monument already as I was fairly advanced in the work on a technical level. And an effigy like a lot of enduring good ideas has a number of different functions. They're often taken on face value as kind of glorified tombstone. That they simply have a kind of testimonial or nostalgic function. And while they do have that role, there's a number of more important issues that we have to take stock of and think very carefully about. The first one is that the effigy kind of takes the place of the deceased in society. It's supposed to give a continuing, enduring, eternal sense of that person's existence. And that has a number of effects. For example, if you start to have successive generations of a nightly or aristocratic family installing their effigies in a parish church or in the chapel that is associated with their manor house, then the church, they kind of take it over physically. And it kind of becomes a family mausoleum. I mean, there are a number of churches that have 14th, 15th, 16th century effigies of the same family or the extended family. And any other function of the church starts to seem rather secondary somehow. There's a kind of territorial conquest aspect of the architecture in a way. And that all plays into the need for the effigy to have a lifelike quality and body language and presence and all of the things that the armored warrior had in life. But the most important function of an effigy is as a device, as an engine almost, for intercessionary prayer. We have, again, account for the Christian belief system, that those souls are, even if they're destined for heaven, at some point, they're going to purgatory first and they're gonna burn and they're gonna suffer for thousands of years potentially, but the prayers of the living can help them get out. Rafe Green here might still be in purgatory for all we know. If his effigy was a good one, maybe he's gathered enough intercessionary prayers by now to have gotten him out, I don't know. But you really have to take this seriously and literally. There are many people that still adhere to this belief system, but we have to allow for the universal acceptance of this belief system. So the effigy motivates, it begs you for intercessionary prayer, but also in generating a really lifelike, tangible sense of that person, who they were in life, it helps focus those intercessionary prayers. It makes those intercessionary prayers have a higher likelihood of success and of impact. So this is an art form that will literally save your soul. And this is why they spent so much money on them, so much time, so much effort, and why as a sculptural art form, they really are unprecedented in their time, just about anywhere else. And for me, and my little part of all of this is to really start making the case for the phenomenal technical knowledge of the effigy carvers in terms of the armor and equipment that they were studied in the intricacies of armor. They probably had armor in the workshop frequently when they were carving these things. In some cases, the patrons or subjects will have provided their own armor for references, not all the time these effigies got carved in a lot of different ways and under a lot of different circumstances. So you can't say that they are always like that, but in many cases they were. Now we have a problem of establishing the validity of this evidence beyond the sort of conceptual theoretical discussion, which is if there isn't actually an English armor surviving to compare the effigies to, and you only have the effigies as your only primary form of three dimensional evidence, how do you know? No matter how many rivets and straps and buckles there are on these things, how can you really be sure that it isn't just a clever carver creating this impression, creating an illusion, which may or may not have anything to do with the material reality of armor in England at this time. Well, to do that, you look at the English effigies that don't show English armor. The English effigies that show imported Italian armor. There are a few of them, not too many. Italian imported armor was usually the lower end of the spectrum. You bought the Italian imports when you couldn't afford the expensive English stuff, or because the English armorers were always a bit like Savile Row, and if you needed 1,000 armors at a time, they could never handle that. They always had a low output. So if you need 1,000 armors at a time or Richard III bought 168 just after becoming King in 1483, he was expecting trouble, I guess. But he would have bought armors that looked something like this. This is a Lancastrian knight, Sir Robert Whittingham, who was killed at Tewkesbury in 1471, but he had his effigy made and completed by 1460, so he was expecting trouble too. He is characteristically not wearing an English armor. He's wearing an Italian armor that's characterized by its asymmetrical design. So his left elbow is bigger and more heavily shielded than his right. And he's been a bit inconsiderate by wearing a surcode over the rest of the armor, so it looks good for him and his heraldry, but it's bad for us because we can't see the rest of the armor. But what we can see compares extraordinarily well to surviving Italian armor of the same period. I mean, it's remarkably good. And this is not even an alabaster effigy. This is a second rate effigy, cheaper version carved in a lesser material. Chonk, I think. But still, on a technical level, it's extraordinarily good. Now here's another one. This is alabaster. This one is also wearing a surcode over his armor, but you can see that big left reinforcing plate on the shoulder and how it's got this big ridge that disappears under the surcode and it's got this standing guard, the hope piece at the top. You see that that's exactly what the surviving Italian armor looks like. Even down to the double arch flute on the upper part of the elbow, there you go. There it is. So you look at the Italian armor as a basis for establishing accuracy and you start to feel really good about this. Again, look at the right. Look at the right shoulder. The effigy's single diagonal flute compare very well with a number of the surviving, most of the surviving Italian armor. There's some left shoulders again. Artist being clever with textile, gets on my nerves, but there it is. Even things like the position of the rivets. You know, you have your articulation rivets there, the rivets that attach the reinforcing plate to the elbow there. The rivets are all in the same places and there's a very similar quality to them. And sometimes people start to glaze over a little bit when I start talking about rivets. And I'm not talking about rivets because I'm a rivet armor train spot or whatever. I'm talking about rivets because like an ancient myth or a story told around the campfire in the Stone Age, the meaning is in the details. And those little technical details, they may seem fiddly, but they're the key to really understanding what's going on in a detailed way. Some left elbows. This is actually, this is metal. This is the gilded copper alloy effigy of Sir Richard Beecham. The only, I think the only non-royal copper alloy effigy of the late Middle Ages, but this is as good as having a real armor. And not only is it phenomenally accurate, it's made out of metal so the artist has real command of the material and the details. You can see it's the same thing. You know, there's a close link between what the effigies are showing you and what the actual armor looks like. Eat when it comes to all aspects. You know, when you're interested in armor, you have to look at a number of different things. You have to look at the tiny fiddly things like the rivets and the straps, but you also have to look at the overall form and the proportion of the plates and the relative proportions of different plates within different assemblies. You look at the character of the leg armor, for example, the way the middle knee plate carries up to a point in the middle and it's kind of traveling on a shallow diagonal, but the articulation lames go straight across because they need to be able to flex and they would interfere with each other or they would start to stick out in an ungainly way if they followed the line of the middle plate. And again, you see the same thing on the real pieces. So it's not just, on the effigies, it's not just what it looks like on a superficial level. It's also about the feeling of the behavior. You know, the artists are trying to give you a sense again that this is not carved alabaster, that this is real armor. And in doing so, they have to give you a sense of how will this move if this person just decides to get up. You know, and the great effigies are the ones that really make you think, could he get up at any moment? You know, some of them feel like that. You know, the Statue of Liberty, I've always thought was really creepy that way because it looks like it will just get off of its plinth at any moment. You know, that's great sculpture, right? But the effigies do that to you again and again and again. Again, proportions of the knee plate, relationships of the different articulation lames, it's very impressive. Things like also the precise direction of overlap on the articulating plates. He's got the overlap direction going correctly for Italian armor. Interestingly, the English make their feet overlap the other way, but we feel we can trust them because we see that they pay attention to detail like that. Back to the fiddly bits, things like hinges. You know, the Italians had a massive armor manufacturing industry. A manufacturing industry just centered, just in the city of Milan. You don't have to look any further. They were, these workshops were able to produce, sing a complete armor every day in some cases. And to do that, they had to have obviously a whole kind of almost industrial process. Rivet makers, hinge makers, people that did nothing but make legs or make gauntlets or cut out the leather for the straps or whatever. So Italian hinges tend to look very uniform. There's a recognizable style of Italian armor hinge. And there they are on the effigy. There's some frame of reference. They always have pairs of rivets on each side to give the thing strength. And they usually draw them out to a little point in the middle and then they waste them around the rivets. That's pretty much exactly what you see on the effigies. The carvers were paying attention. It was important. And they weren't doing that just because they wanted to. They were doing that because their patrons demanded it and were paying for it. And were enforcing this level of realism in the work. And we know that when carvers in the 15th century didn't deliver the standard of quality that their patrons demanded, they got taken to court. They got sued. The documents survive when a carver produces work that the patron decides is not up to the level of quality they need. I started to throw in a lot of hinges in this lecture. Well, you get the point. We can breeze over that. Oh yeah, of course, the little hinges are different than the big hinges. There's a little hinge on a real armor. You know, little ones on the arms and the lower legs. All the right hinges, little ones or big ones are all in the right place on the effigies. Even things like other fiddly little bits of decoration. On surviving Italian armor, where the original leathers survive, you frequently get this nibbling decorative thing that happens on the edge. They just take their leather punches and just nibble the edges. It just gives a little bit of something to the armor. These are works of art as well as technical pieces of equipment. Let's not forget. There's the nibbling again of a detail from a portrait. And there it is on the Whittingam effigy. The more you look at this, even the little star rivets, this is a characteristic Italian style of armor strap rivet, which is basically a nail and they decorate, they decorate it with file work. There it is on the effigy. Same thing. And all of these little details are very distinct artistic choices. You know, all of this had to be included in the initial planning. They can't have the rivets on the effigy unless they've consciously left enough material in the roughing out stage to make sure that it'll all work out. This is not just artistic whimsy in the process of creation. This is a very carefully planned program. So, when we go back to the English ones or the English effigies with apparently English style armor, where the, what the effigies show is divergent from the demonstrable continental styles, we now have a lot of confidence that what we're seeing may seem weird, weird looking if we've been looking at a lot of Italian and German armor. But this is of the same, this is actually of a much higher quality than the Whittingam effigy. So we need to take this pretty seriously. They're also, what I started to notice when I started to really look at more and more of these things is that there are a number of other ways of establishing the accuracy of armor on effigies where there isn't surviving comparative material. Again, meaning is in the details. If we look at the straps, for example, the straps on this particular effigy, the effigy of Sir John Savill at Thornton in, a Thornhill, sorry, Thornhill in Yorkshire, he has these very characteristic little strap ends on all of the armor straps. And they've got this nice file decoration and then they have these little pendant rings. It's just a very characteristic thing on this effigy and a few other effigies. And they're surviving strap ends found in English archeological context. That's one in the Museum of London that are not exactly the same, but it's the same kind of thing. So all of the armor straps on this effigy have these little pendant rings. Well, almost. This one is a sort of multi-sided faceted polygon. It's not a squashed ring. It's not miscarving. It's a different shape. And then there's this random one over here that has a little triangular pendant on it. I thought that was kind of interesting. Why would the artist do this? All these nice matching rings on all the straps and then a random triangular one and a random something else one. The hexagon or whatever that is. Let's look at, this is not just, this kind of weird idiosyncrasy within a particular figure is not limited to that effigy either. Once you know that you should be looking for this kind of thing, you start to see it everywhere. It's the theory-laden nature of observation, right? You only see what you know already. You only see what you're looking for actively. You see with your brain, not with your eyes. Let's look at this one with our brain. Oh yeah, okay. So just a little bit of explanation. In this period, the English have now kind of hijacked the Italian concept of building the, let's check the time here. Building the armor in two sections. There's an upper section and a lower section so your body can move like a ball joint. And they have a central strap attaching the two sections but they also have side straps. So you've got three straps in the front, three straps in the back. And at the sides, so he's got his front straps and then he's got side straps here as well on this particular figure. At the side, you see that's the forward rear strap and that's the trailing front strap and the division of the breast and back plates goes right down the middle here. On his right side, it all matches up. Nice buckles, nice decorated strap plates, nice decorated strap ends. As you would expect, your stuff has to match. On the other side, not only do they not match each other, they don't match the ones on the other side either. This one is all big and chunky and a completely different width than the other ones. But these are actually straps that are really vulnerable to breaking. Anytime you fall down or your horse does something weird, these break. They are an idea that didn't really work very well and they evolved out of the design. They got rid of them pretty quickly. But this is something that would break a lot in reality. And these are straps therefore that might have to be replaced quite rapidly on campaign. And your campaign maintenance armor might not necessarily have all of everyone's matching straps and replacement strap ends. You get whatever he has. And I know from experience over 20 years of jousting and knowing a lot of other of the 500 or so jousters active internationally around the world that when you work in an armor over a period of years, your armor naturally develops weird idiosyncrasies like this where someone had to stick on a hinge or they had to stick on a strap play. And none of these effigies have the same idiosyncrasies. They're all different, but they all follow this theme of the kind of thing that real armors would naturally develop. But that an effigy carver would not put on his work of art unless he was told to. Unless he said, this is my father's armor. This is the armor he wore on campaign with Henry V, copy it, and don't change anything. That's the impression you get that the idiosyncrasies are part of the personality, not only of the armor, but of the armor wearer. And this is what the art form is all about. Pray for this particular person, not some random generic nightly figure. So these, all of this plays into what the art form is supposed to be doing. Not to belabor the point, but I really want to hammer this home. I'll give you another example. This is the one I'm really proud of. If you look at the legs of this one, an Aston, it's now sort of part of Grinder, Birmingham, but purists, effigy purists like to say it's a separate place, let's call it Aston. Down here, the carver has carefully shown you the hinges that join the front and rear grief plates, the lower leg plates, okay? And these hinges, they're not really that ornate, but they're characteristic, two rivets in the front, one in the back. They're an identifiable thing. There's a detail. That's what it looks like on one side. On the other side though, the hinge is completely different on the other leg. It's just a straight piece of metal that just kind of been banged in there. That's kind of interesting. The really interesting thing about this one though, if we skip across to the Italian Tirol for a moment, and the castle of Kerberg, which retains its late medieval armory, it's the only castle that really does, and we look at this particular late 15th century armor right here, we find that just like our effigy, it has grief hinges that have one rivet in the front and two in the back, and gee, on the other side, look at that. It's got one of those replacement, don't have any more decorated hinges, put this one on sort of thing. There it is on the real armor. Okay, that's all we'll say about that. So moving towards a conclusion and trying to allow desperately time for some questions and discussion, my point about the effigies after 15 years of working on it, is that essentially, if you know a bit about how armor needs to work, you can make a very direct and immediate leap from the character and detail of an effigy to a working armor. This is one of the things that I feature and discuss throughout the book, is that the effigies lead you very easily with really a minimum amount of fixing and fiddling to the blueprints essentially of an armor that you can build that will work quite well for what it was originally meant to do. And again, it's fun to look at these things in some depth as individuals, but then if you step back after having looked at all 230 of them or however many you're particularly interested in, but the sort of quantitative view is quite important, you step back from that and the effigies year by year, decade by decade, they show you the evolution of armor. And I say evolution quite purposefully because it feels like biological evolution. It's artificial selection, it's not natural selection and it happens much faster than natural selection, but there's a lot of the same dynamics, things work and endure, things don't work and disappear very quickly. And the effigies really show that decade by decade, 1410, 1415, 1440, 1450, they show you not only important changes, but also important lines of consistency where they change certain things and they keep retaining other things. This is basically my first book. This is basically a graphic representation of what I've said in 300 pages. But it's really quite remarkable that this is exactly what you would expect in the reality of real armor and this is the exactly the kind of thing that you see in Italy and in Germany and in other places, illustrated by the real surviving armor. And here you get the exact same kind of artificially selective evolution being shown on the effigies. So there's got to be a really strong link between what the carvers are showing and what actually exists. Interestingly too, if you plot it a different way, I'm a kind of visual thinker and this is what happens. If you take those different typological categories and then you actually look at the chronology, they don't ever replace each other. You don't ever suddenly have a new style of armor, boom. They always overlap. There are always the young fashionistas who have to have all the latest gear. And I've said in the book, there are documentary references to this. There are older, more conservative authors who say these young people these days, they're always inventing new pieces of armor and they're always inventing new terms for their new pieces of armor. And what they should be doing is using their old pieces of armor to go and fight in the Holy Land instead of fighting in tournaments. There are always people that have the new gear and there are always people who are happy with their older gear. You see effigies that are clearly made in the 1420s that show armor 15 years early in certain key cases where it makes sense. But there's always this overlap just like you get in any evolutionary process. Represented on the monuments, pointing this in the right direction. So to put it another way, you can see this stuff. This is all taken from the effigies. You can see these things changing into other things. And of course I should say this is where my published work has gotten to at the moment. I'm now working on the second book which is 1450 to 1500. And this process which has gotten you from the beginning of the 15th century to 1450 does continue. And it gets really complicated. The 1450 to 1500 part of my original PhD was the part that was most wrong. This is why I'm trying to stop anyone from reading it. And this is why the second book in many ways has been much, much harder than the first book. I thought it was gonna be easier because I didn't have to write a 60 page introduction for the second book. But it isn't. It's actually a lot harder. The story in the second half of the 15th century gets, it goes crazy. Stylistically, it's like the complete armor was established, this fully enclosed wearable sculpture that where the armor transforms his patron into a living artwork was established. And once that sculptural artistic form is established it stylistically proliferates. It goes in all kinds of different directions after 1450. So I'm still trying to work all of that out. And it's gonna be another year before it comes out. But there's still more to say. Thank you very much.