 Felly dd grossechwyr Ddodwch yn gallu'r maen ddiddordeb yn yng nghymru Fygofyrth, gan hyn ychydig hi fe ddiddordeb yng Nghymru, i'w wneud deser i fy modd Lester yn Fyllarmog, yn Fulama, mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r drosbwyllion rwych yn y drosbwyllion i'w Lester Côthedrwch. Mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r drosbwyllion i'r drosbwyllion i'r drosbwyllion i'w Lester Côthedrwch. Ydw i'n ddweud i'r ddweud ti oeddwn i ysgoliad nhw'n cyllideb sy'n gweithio o'r ddweud. Ydw i'r ddweudio'r ddweud ohol yn y Mark Iolwyr 1450. Rydych yn fawr i'r sgoled, rwy'n rhanig o'r Lenedd Llanysgrifenedol, My interest in this subject is really that of a small child gotten a bit out of control. Nevertheless, legacy is about memory. When we seek to build a legacy, we seek to influence or have some kind of control over the way we or something is remembered. And certainly, as we've seen already very well today, Atrochord has been remembered in quite a complicated and contradictory way. And I'm quite interested in that. I'm fascinated by how it seems that almost as soon as the fighting was over in 1415, there was a divergence between the story of what really happened and it ultimately only happened one way and what you might call the myth of Atrochord. Of course there are many myths, but let's call it one myth as a collective idea for the way we wish that it happened or the way someone wants you to think it happened, usually for their own contemporary purposes, whether it's Shakespeare at the end of the 16th century or Southy or anyone else. Most of the discussion of Atrochord has been very good to do with what really happened, at least up until the last 15 or 20 years. For me a big part of the conception of this event or the misinterpretation of it has a very physical nature. A medieval battle is a very physical situation and it's experienced physically and it is governed by physical laws and restraints and capabilities. And the equipment that these people were using and wearing has a lot to do with what could happen and what couldn't have happened, what did happen and what did not happen. And I've found looking at this subject, when you're standing here in the modern world, you're looking back to the 15th century through a number of different distorting lenses, ground in different periods, to disguise the reality of the thing and keep you from communing with the actual 15th century events. And I've always tried to cut, in my own ways, cut through that and get back to the real experience of the real people who were there. And for me it's just happened that my own personal methods have been physical ones, looking at the real arms and armor of the time, the real equipment, and by extension the real belief systems and attitudes of the people that were there. A lot of the common misconception of this battle is down to a misunderstanding of the equipment. And certainly when you take some of the common themes of the myth, the idea for example of the English archers as class warriors fighting by themselves against a horde of aristocrats, you know, you're creating something that doesn't very much resemble what actually happened. And when you want to create a situation where the French stand for the impressive tyrannical aspects of knighthood, the fact that these are people who are out of touch and unable to change with the time and unable to see the reality of the situation and the English archers and their magic sticks stand for a kind of moral and intellectual superiority as well as a military one. Then you can use something as physical as the armor and equipment of the knights and exaggerate what it was to serve your own particular purpose, which has again nothing to do with what actually happened. So so often we think of the French knights wearing all of this over-heavy cumbersome, slightly comical and strange equipment when it's really not the equipment for the job. And we forget of course that there were 1,500 knights and men and arms fighting on the English side. They were called the backbone of the English army. And without their support the English archers might have had a much harder time with it. So looking at armor of the early 15th century, it's an exciting subject because you get to look at all kinds of different sources. You have to look at all the 15th century culture very holistically. You have to of course read the documents and the profiles and inventory and the purchase accounts and all of that. You also have to look at two-dimensional art, painting, manuscript illustration, get a very good feel for the aesthetic and artistic sensibilities of people in your particular period. And then working with something with the pictorial sources for example, this is a stunning one in British Library. You can start to look at little technical details that seem to be characteristic that you are interested in. For example, let's just take randomly this fellow here. One thing that is very characteristic in art of this period is that you see a Y shaped stopper or structure on the breastplate that is very characteristic of this particular period. And what we are interested in most generally in art in Europe during this period we are fortunate to have a number of pieces surviving. So we can validate what we see in art and what we hear described in documents by good surviving material. Good Italian art survives from this period. A few German things, a few things that are probably French. It's nothing like what survives from the 16th century and later but there is a basis of real material surviving from this period that we can work from and start to understand the real capabilities of the equipment of this period. There is one slight problem when you want to work on armor learned by the English in this period which is that no English armor survives at all. Except for one helmet that we will see a bit later. There might be one other helmet but they are jousting helmets that are not war equipment and we have no war equipment at all. This subject for which there is no material evidence is what I spent 15 years writing books about. What we do have is an extraordinary corpus of surviving funerary sculptures of men in life-sized sculptures of men in armor created as part of their funerary longings. Looking specifically at the whole 15th century, there are about 230 survived specifically armored examples. There are also civilians in clergy and female effigies and so forth but the men in armor know about 230. These include some exceptionally good effigies from the actual court period specifically. Some of the best, some of the best effigies that I would consider the best on any level date for this period. It's really a golden age of the effigy carver's arms. I'd like to focus on just this small group today. Not only are they an extraordinary illustrations of the equipment of this period it will help us better understand what really did happen to some extent but they are also effigies of people who fought it as a court or who were in some way involved with that campaign and with Henry V subsequent campaigns and all the way. I think it's very important. I often feel that much as I love looking at complete armor in museum cases and I spend my professional life doing that I can never avoid this feeling in the back of my mind that it's like looking at a picture frame with no picture of it and that the person is an integral part of this thing that we must never forget that a complete armor was considered a decorative and expressive art form as well as a utilitarian piece of equipment to be used and that it is designed to broadcast all kinds of messages, reinforce ideas, build up associations. It's a very powerful art form and we have to look at that in that way as well. When an artist works with another media faithfully represents an armor he hijacks all of those capabilities and the art form stands for the real object. As I want to show today briefly, effigy carvers in the 15th century were obsessed almost with the life-like realism of their creations and finding ways to blur the distinction in the viewer's mind between what is real flesh and what is carved alabaster. So let's start with our first example. This is, I think, one of the best English effigies dating really from the first decade of the 15th century. This one is a great way of introducing the overriding style of armor that was worn by almost all of the men and arms on the English side at Action Courten and it's not absolutely stylistically distinct. There are many points when the English equipment is very closely related to what's being worn on a continent. They were very distinct in some ways and very closely related to divers. And I'll use this example just to kind of outline the basics of the equipment that we're talking about. William Willichos is an interesting character. He was never knighted. He was an esquire his entire life. But he shows how complex the English knightly class actually was, that it was a spectrum of status and responsibility and behavior. William, in 1391, was given a grant from the Exchequer which refers to him as a King's esquire. He was a sheriff of Oxford, Sheriff of Archer and he was also the chief steward of the Estates of Queen Anne, the Queen of Bridgeshire. As far as I can tell, he never really fought on any military campaign. And if you read what's known about his life and where he appears in the records, he seems to be almost exclusively a lawyer and an administrator and not really a soldier at all. But because technically he's a member of the knightly class, the armor goes with the status and that is the status that is the social position that needs to be represented on the effigy and as convincingly and in a lifelike manner as possible. The equipment stands for the man and for the status. However, both of his sons, both of William's sons were knights and they both died fighting in France. His elder sons, Sir Thomas, died of dysentery after being into the development of the Siege of Arfor when he actually died in England. You sometimes encounter the references of him being killed at Archer Court but it doesn't seem to be what happened. However, Sir John also died when he was killed in France some time in or before 1429 but we don't really know much more than that. Another just interesting point about William is his income. There were very wealthy escaliers in this period who had incomes as great or greater than many knights. When William's estates were assessed quite some time after his death when they were still held by his widow around 1445 they were worth £107 and a number of William's lands and possessions by that time had been passed to others so we can assume, I think, that his own income was somewhat greater although we can't say how much greater. Let's look a little bit more at his effigy. Having investigated the real material of Arwer and how it works practically as well as the sculptures I never stopped being struck by how precisely the effigies capture not just the appearance of the armour and the various different materials that it's made out of but also the behavior of those materials the varying textures. If you look here one very interesting detail you normally see on good effigies in this period is the mail. This is the avatail that's hung from the bottom of the bassinet, the helmet, and it hangs down on the shoulders to protect the shoulders and the neck. And avatails are invariably lined. If you look sometimes in artistic details where you can see the inside you usually get this sense of a strong, tough, upholstered material underneath the mail. The mail is not functioning on its own. If you look at the way the mail behaves on the figure it drops straight down from the chin and it has a very substantial body to it even though he's not showing it with a lining except sometimes if you look carefully right at the edges they undercut it very cleverly to show the lining as well. You can see at the bottom the mail seems to be turning under itself and that's a natural effect of a lined avatail. That the lining is stiff and when you lean forward a bit or your head leans forward as it is being pushed forward by a cushion or a helmet in the case of the effigy the mail rolls forward on the lining and it's stitched down all the way around and that's the subtle kind of behavioral thing that the effigy's captured very well and if you know what you're looking at they almost fool you when you almost, your picture of this figure almost blurs from a piece of alabaster to a real armoured man lying there before you and this effect has of course been very much more present when the figure was painted with all of its polychrome decoration and gilding and looking very much more lifelike indeed. The work that I've been doing over the last 15 years or so has really been about using the effigy's to reconstruct the precise design and mechanics of these armours and I believe that it's a testament to the quality of the work a superlative realism in an age when we don't necessarily associate realism with the art form in the way that we might do labour but you really can understand quite a lot of the mechanics of the way these things work from looking at the effigy's It was normal in this period to still wear a textile circus, a heraldic circus or coat armour over the body armour and on the one hand you would think that if they're wearing a textile coat over the body armour that would be a problem for armour researchers because there's a huge area of the most important part of the armour that's covered in obscurity, you can't see the rivets in the bubbles and all the things that we're interested in but again what I'm really struck by looking at good quality effigy's is how they're so good at showing what's underneath they take it as a challenge to show to imply textile overlaying metal or other materials so you generally see this very round almost spherical shape to the upper body which stops out at the natural waist just below the boobs you have a very strong sense of a solid breastplate underneath and then there's a very short transition where it cuts along a very well defined line and drops straight down the lower body is much slender and held in and tied in and you can get a good idea of what is meant to be under there and of course an investigation of the effigy the effigy's in the context of what other forms of evidence there are and what we know is going on elsewhere in Europe we can get a pretty good idea of the kind of thing that is being worn underneath but we need encouragement from the skill of the carpenter that what he is showing is consistent with what we are establishing elsewhere they generally spend quite a lot of time paying attention to the mechanical constructions in the plates they're very concerned to put buckles and rivets and straps and the decoration all in the places where you would expect it to be and again also suggesting the male that is worn underneath the plate armor as well as over the top of it this is actually one of the main places where the armor of the English which looks superficially identical to the armor of the French one place where it probably differs the general practice of what form of the male garments are worn under the plate armor some of you may know from the older standard literature on armor you often get chapters split up into the age of the male and the age of the male then transitions into the age of the plate as if one material is thrown out in favour of something else as if one is a newer replacement for the older and it isn't the case at all the age of the male never ended and it's still housing fish monitors in East London where lots of male to protect themselves against their very sharp fish filleting knives but anyway so we know from a number of the accounts of the battle that the French war or many of them chose to wore full coats of male like this or like that under their full plate armor and this is an interesting point it's not saying that they only wore male shirts and not full plate armor it takes it as a given that they're wearing their full plate armor and full male shirts as well while the English we know from the the inventories of the Tower of London now through a very important search by Tom Richardson at Royal Armouries that by the middle of the 14th century the English were busy as they say breaking male shirts to create sleeves of male and skirts or with voiders and gussets they were chopping up their male shirts as early as the middle of the 14th century so that they were only wearing the pieces of male that covered the gaps and they were choosing not to wear huge amounts of male under the primary areas of their plate armor and that has a weight implication what that means actually is that it taught up all the different options in this period armor that is visually superficially exactly the same can weigh as little as about 20 kilos in total and as much as 35 kilos in fact one man taking the pieces in his personal armory could configure his armor in lighter or heavier configurations depending on what he expected to be doing the same armor can be worn in different ways combining the pieces in different ways and my reading of the chronicle suggests that the French elected to wear their armors in the heavier configurations but essentially they were wearing the same equipment as the English and if you think about it that's not a stupid thing to do they knew they were facing 5,000 plus English archers who were going to be shooting a lot of arrows wearing your armor in the heavier configuration makes quite a lot of sense the fact that the ground conditions on the day didn't favor them and there were many other problems with the way they fought the day is another matter but we can't lay their defeat we can't blame it on their bad choice of outdated or irrelevant equipment it was exactly the right equipment for the day interestingly the accounts also say that the shooting once the main events began the shooting of the English became so heavy that the French were concerned that the sights and the sides of their visors would be pierced they don't say the skulls of their helmets they don't say that they were worried about their breast plates failing they were concerned about the gaps the little places where you need to breathe and you need to see it those are the places where arrows can catch gain purchase and then perhaps have a chance of getting through to the random side this is just another illustration of what the effigies appear to show they often show the buckles in the right place the straps in the right place the shoulder defenses of this period tend to be integrated into the arm defenses and in later periods they were separate pieces but predominantly in this period it's all one construction that all goes on all together and another interesting thing I should point out about the analysis of the style of armor the way it evolves that we observe looking at the effigies in isolation if we then take what we've learnt and compare it to what is described in the inventories and the special language, the special descriptions that they use in inventories and other armor related accounts the precise nature of armor at this time matches in remarkable detail with the written descriptions it's all incredibly consistent the effigies are showing you exactly what the documents are describing in quite some detail and also I said there's no English armor surviving and I guess I should say in absolute accuracy that there's almost no English armor surviving there's quite a lot of little bits and pieces the gauntlets of this period were made up of a couple of larger plates for the main structures of the hand and wrist and then lots of little plates for the hands the English were always very concerned to maintain their full dexterity in their hands in both hands they're fighting almost exclusively on foot and they need to be ambidextrous and fighting with two-handed weapons they need symmetrical designs of armor with good dexterity and there's a number of finger plates surviving a number of finger plates have been found in London by people looking at the shores of the towns and digging up various parts of old London there's more of these in the stores of the Museum of London I found quite a number actually but this is a representative sample you can see interestingly the love that many of these plates are made of gilt copper or copper alloy yellow metal of some kind and that gives you a sense of the richness that we'll encounter in a little more as we go on the leg armor of these effigies is very distinctive and very consistent again with how the English were fighting when we look at the history of armor in general terms we don't expect them to be wearing plates on the backs of their legs and we don't expect them to be wearing mail on the backs of their knees but this is the case this is what the effigies show and we haven't described in Inventories 12 they refer to closed queases fully enclosed legs upper legs as well as lower legs they refer to voiders for the quease these voiders for the backs of the legs and actually there are a few continental accounts there's an interesting Italian account that's in the book I don't remember anything anymore but the Italian account which expresses great he remarks strongly on how well armored the English knights fighting in Italy actually I was writing the late 14th century the age of Hawkely and so forth this is an Italian impressed by how much armor the English wear and how well armored they are and in some cases we find Italian knights seeking permission from their commanders to arm themselves in the English manner which is very interesting whatever you think that means although some of it we should say we have to be clear that these are not men lying there or dead in their armor these are sculptures and there are limits to them and sometimes depending on the skill of the artist or his budget sometimes they don't model they armor quite in three dimensions but sometimes they do there's enough of them to show that those the mails is really there as it has it's described in the documents another thing about the English is that they are very keen on foot plates not everybody wore plates on their feet consistently in the early 15th century the English not only wore almost universally wore complete and closed plates for their feet they also had a number of supplementary defences of different kinds they were concerned again to have voiders on their ankles to protect the gap between the grieve and the sabaton they have different configurations of plates on the back on the heels and they have reinforcing over plates that go on in this period the overriding impression is that this is armor very carefully designed and specially designed for fighting on foot it's not that you can't fight on horseback you can but it's not optimized for fighting on horseback it's optimized for fighting on foot there's a few examples one thing I must say about the FG2 after having looked at well certainly 230 a lot of 14th century ones as well they are remarkably individualistic we really have to get away from the idea that they were produced as sort of generic works and then the Duke of Norfolk will go to the Cheleston workshop and say give me a number 6 bought me a number 310 these are highly individualized custom built works of very personal art they are not primarily about they are often seen as glorified tombstones that are primarily about the remembrance of the deceased person but they have that function they do create a fantastic diagnostic statement or effect in a church that has successive generations of effigies in it but the primary function of effigies seems to have been as a strong motivator and indeed a pleading for intercessionary prayers again the belief is that a soul that might end up in heaven might still have to spend thousands and thousands of years in the kind of nothing realm of purgatory and intercessionary prayers can cut time and purgatory and speed a soul's journey to heaven and this is a very strong very literal belief so the art of the effigies really the art that will literally save your soul and this explains not only why they are so highly advanced in terms of their representation of particular individuals but why so much money was spent on them we'll talk more about that later as far as the sort of legacy and remembrance of magic or our modern conception but effigies have actually exerted a very powerful indirect effect on the way almost everyone remembers this battle whether we know it or not for example let's not forget the very profound effect that Lawrence Lumier's 1944 film has had on the way not only do we remember and conceive of the Shakespearean play but also the real historical events this is a film that actually is a very long way to utterly confuse the distinction between the play and Elizabeth of play and the real events Lawrence Lumier was fortunate to have the Curator of Arms and Arms of the Voss Collection as his historical advisor not many of you, but my predecessor had also a former director of the Voss Collection Sir James Mann who was one of the foremost experts on medieval Renaissance arms and arms in the 20th century and he's also the author of a lot of the foundation of literature for the subject that we still rely on and Mann pointed the art director of the film Roger First towards a very important book A Monumental Effigies of Great Britain by Charles Stothard some of you know it obviously and Stothard's book was used as a key design reference to Olivier's heavily annotated copy of Stothard the copy used for the production is still in the British Library they perhaps used the effigies this particular effigy is the precise form used to design Olivier's armor they used them perhaps a little too well the king's crown would not have been a glorified oral they wanted to get stay as close to the effigy as possible so they stuck a crown on the top of that that's not how we were developed but I can't fault them for their effigies also the king himself should never be worn wearing the SS collar this is a livery collar worn by the Serfans in the Monarch it is a statement of loyalty to the House of Lancaster Henry V is the House of Lancaster so he generally doesn't need to demonstrate he will have to do so as far as I know where but Olivier was not the first one to look at effigies as an inspiration for what actual court would have looked like this is another highly influential image that you will encounter in the literature if you do any work on about it it's again using effigies of this time very care for this one and certainly Henry himself figures in the background are all based on these effigies and the effigies, the interpretation of them has led to the common misperception actually that the English always fought over the face Olivier fought over the face because you needed to see that there was more to it there was no one to respond to the film if Olivier wasn't in it but as we said before the English in fact were now for being as heavily armored as the human body can possibly be and they would not then leave their faces exposed and we know from the eye of this accounts that Henry V wore a helmet with a crown and a visor, it says that and visors are clearly part of English equipment it's just on the effigies they leave them off because they need the face exposed you put the visor down and you lose all human contact and you become dehumanized and the whole point of the effigie is to keep the humanity of the person for most so there are examples of visor or helm of effigies but they're very early and very very there so this is the second effigie that I'd like to call your attention to especially this is Sir Edmund Thor unlike William Willicoot he was a soldier of very long experience in royal service as early as the 1380s he's serving in the English Navy he's present in the Ireland campaign in 1399 in 1400 he was appointed mayor of Bordeaux on the 1415 campaign he was a lieutenant of Thomas Beaufort Earl of Dorset and he probably remained with Beaufort as part of the garrison of Harfleur after the town fell in September he was there at least for a few months and then probably went back to England he was certainly not present at Atchricorp as far as we can tell and he's often in modern architects he's often shown present by under the 5th side at Atchricorp but as far as we can tell he wasn't there he was also very an active part of the 1417 campaign that you know probably much more important second invasion of Normandy the invasion where Henry V intended to stay and at the muster in Southampton in July of 1417 Sir Edmund Thor had a personal retinu of nine men and arms in 33 archers staying reasonably close to that one to three ratio that was so important In October of 1417 Thorp was at Alansong with Henry V's army and he's recorded as having been in count with his retinu before the town of Lluvie on the 9th of June 1418 when the English began their siege of that town and he apparently was dead sometime before the town surrendered on the 23rd of June we don't know whether he died or was killed or what happened but that's where he met his enemy just to inform the illustration of this effigy is one of the highlights of Charles Stothard's work he not only gives his typical line drawing schematic of the top of the tomb he also offers one of his rare watercoloured reduced studies of various details and things and this is why this particular effigy is so much better known than others of its class this is the one that Stothard favored in his work just another word about Stothard his work is rightly remembered it's quite an extraordinary thing I wish I knew how Stothard did these drawings because there's no mezzanine left or balcony that he could have been lying on looking down when he drew this but if you overlay this on top of a photograph of the real thing his proportions and everything his accuracy is really remarkable this one was taken with a boom and the camera really is floating over the top of the effigy but it's a remarkable job so Stothard is rightly still referred to he still is a reasonably reliable source although it's always best to look at the real thing the Thorpe effigy is also a great way to explore some of the very personal attributes that these effigies have a number of the hardcore-like gas trains of course are wearing the SS collar there's one surviving in the Museum of London the ones on the effigies are interesting though because they're not made in the same way as the civilian ones the civilian ones are all metal and their chains, essentially, link together the effigies show the SS as individual badges that are mounted onto a leather or textile backing and this is shown very clearly over and over again and there are a couple of effigies that wear the all-metal kind so you know that there's a difference and it's not just some kind of artistic invention and these are, I believe, the way they're worn, they're worn very tightly onto the helmet as well they don't hang about the shoulders they're a very practical variance of the idea of the livery collar if you want to fight it if you want to be on the battlefield wearing your Lancastrian regalia that's a perfect adjustment to the form and this idea of showing what is practical and what is real it's really remarkable also many of the effigies' heads rest on their helms and here is another good point of comparison because we have one surviving the helm of Henry V himself the funerary helm carried his funeral in 1422 and which will be much more discussed in much greater detail at the Westminster conference on the 28th of October later this year this is a remarkable thing and it's a very important comparison to the effigies for lots of reasons it's of the same style very closely similar style to the ones that appear right in the Agincourt period effigies specifically this style of helm could have been used in joust as early as the 1380s but they don't appear in the monuments until right around the time of Agincourt which is very interesting on the monuments you see them decorated with copper alloy or gilded borders inscribed with this very characteristic quachrofoil pattern and there's one survived and in reality there it is the effigies show exactly what really existed the thork effigie is also unique in carrying another livery badge the swam badge there's the famous dumpstable swam thorks variant this is of course a common lycastrian device he's using the swam with the spread wings which of course is still very well known the dumpstable swam I think is slightly unusual in having its wings folded rather than spread but that's the only effigie where he's wearing that badge so this is again an individual statement about his career, his loyalty and his associations another very important Agincourt bathroom of course was Richard Devere the 11th Earl of Oxford the Oxford was one of the peers who presided over the Southampton flotters he was a commander at Agincourt under Humphrey Duke of Glouster and he was nominated as a knight of garter in 1416 and he was a recognition presumably of his presence at Agincourt interestingly to Devere along with the Earl Marshall the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Cameron was one of the three official royal representatives who received the Emperor of Sigismol to England in 1416 and all three of those representatives were famous Agincourt veterans interesting to see again by this period now we're looking at some of those very well-equipped in the latest style of the period the helmet as you can see by this point for those who are interested or put afforded had become considerably more advanced rather than just the skull of the helmet reinforced with a male avontail you now have various combinations of neck plates the old bassinet with avontails an extraordinarily successful design and lasted for a very long time these are two of the best examples to buy them but it has a crucial weakness the protecting of the throat is a design problem in the whole history of armour the throat is very easily damaged you can be killed by a thrust to it whether it pierces the skin or not the esophagus can be crushed it's very very susceptible to damage but it's hard to protect with hard armour because you need to move your head and look around it's a problem but certainly by this period the problem needed to be dealt with in a different way you had the appearance of the lance rest which meant that knights on horseback could hit each other in the throat harder than ever before you're not wearing anything more than the bassinet an avontail and that's what can happen to you so it was one of a number of well-motivated advances of armour that was occurring in the time of Agil Cross and the effigies show not only the completed great bassinet as it would be called later they show all the stages in between the various experiments with different kinds of neck plates created into the existing technology experiments that you see in the art elsewhere in many places also and that's what you end up with these are two of the survivors that are contemporary of the period the great bassinet which has replaced the male with hard steel plates so now the head can move inside but the helmet tends to stay quite static on the head another interesting detail of this effigy brings up the question of heraldic display and the different ways that it could be achieved of course it was still very apparent at the time to wear the full circos or cotar that we saw on the William Wilcoats and on Thorpe but here's something else that's going on you see the Devere Star in the place where it should be but he's not got a circo on his lower body as you would expect you can see all the technical detail all the plates and the hinges and everything are visible so this is uncovered plate armor which is interesting I think he's probably wearing something like this which is sort of a partial circote it's there to display the key information but he also wants to keep his glamour as shiny plate armor as exposed as possible and that's a fashionable trend that we started observing in the Agincourt period as well the desire not to cover all this fantastic new polished steel armor the so-called all-white armor that is displayed on the very famous brass of Thomas Lord Camois another of the commanders of Agincourt Lord Camois has had again a very long career as a soldier in 1380 he was fighting in France and 90 by Thomas Woodstock 1385 he was fighting in Scotland he was always strongly loyal to Henry IV from the very beginning of the reign and in 1415 he helped plan the campaign he was another of the Southampton Plot judges he commanded the rear guard at Agincourt that was deployed on the field as the left wing and in 1416 again he was made a 9 of the garter and in recognition of the campaign we assume also interestingly his second wife who was represented here on his brass it was very important as a person in her own right historically quite important she was Elizabeth Mortimer gentle Kate of Shakespeare's Henry IV part 1 the widow of Henry Hotsburg Percy it's interesting when you really start looking at all of these effigies and their characters all of their lives interleaved all of their lives actually are the Camois brass has rightly been described as the greatest surviving brass in 15th century it's a remarkable thing and it takes a very particular stance on the way it shows the armor Camois is an old man by the time he dies he's an old veteran who would expect him to be somewhat conservative in his equipment but he isn't at all he's no longer wearing the circle at all that's displayed, his herald is displayed elsewhere again he's got that tight battlefield liffordry colour he's also no longer wearing the nightly belt and plates or what is rightly called the arsgirdle in 15th century, in late 14th and early 15th century documents he's discarded that now you get a real sense of the brass that he is a follower of the latest fashion despite his age and of course as I have mentioned there's the wonderful hand clasp hands motif which appears on this one as well this is the very extraordinary monument to Rafe Green again a squire, never knighted and his wife Catherine another very strong supporter of Henry IV in the House of Lightcaster probably a bit of an overcompensator because his father was Sir Henry he was a favourite of Richard II and he was executed for treason and Green seems to have worked very hard to establish and maintain status and reputation under the Lancasterians he was a squire of the body to Henry IV again also a sheriff for the huge annual income the interesting thing also the most interesting thing about this energy or one of the most significant things is that it's the only one that survives and is also documented we have the original contract for its creation so it's an enormously important piece of evidence for how effigies were commissioned how the process worked and how the results were achieved it's interesting for what it as much as for what it doesn't say as for what it does say there's extraordinary detail in this monument the heraldry and so forth was circulated in the contract and you get the sense that the executors or the subject himself worked very closely with the artists on a personal level to guide and influence the creation of the monument Green's heraldrys were interesting too we have to remember that squires in England men in arms who haven't been knighted had only been allowed to wear their own personal coats of arms since the 1380s since it was permitted by Richard II and this particular squire seems very very anxious to display all of those chivalric rites on his monument he interestingly got it up in a fight, a heraldic argument or legal disagreement during the 1405 campaign in Wales Green and Sir John Dowingbridge appeared before the King's tent to obtain a ruling in their personal dispute over the right to bear the arms margins across ingrailed ghouls that's it there Dowingbridge claimed that his family had carried these arms since the conquest and he demanded an immediate trial by combat to decide the issue as he said, without delay Green seemed to think that was a good idea and he deferred instead the King's personal ruling on the matter and the King however was intent to keep peace within his retainers among his retainers during the campaign so he decreed that both should continue to wear these coat of arms until the case could receive a proper hearing before the Gospel of Marshal Vela but we don't actually know what happened or at least I don't know maybe the good York Herald will tell you what happened but the effigies tell you something this is Sir John Dowingbridge's father and he's quite clearly wearing it in the 1380s and this is Sir John's own effigy slightly more dilapidated condition than Ralph Greens but you can see the ingrailing of the cross that runs right down in the middle of the effigy so he's still wearing it there he has as well on his effigy and he's wearing it with a chequie design so perhaps that's something to do with the ruling you can continue to wear it but you have to difference it from your opponent in some way an interesting question I'll move on a bit because we're running out of time finally I did want to say something about Sir William Philip the sixth Baron Bargol described as a valiant soldier in Henry V's Wars in France he was a very important courtier and one of the most powerful middlemen in my local area, East Anglia this is actually the closest actually to my house so I don't see it quite regularly so I was going to make the cut in the end he was the nephew of Sir Thomas Erpingham one of the great commanders of the Agilbord campaign Constable Norwich Castle in 1415 Sir William was contracted to serve with nine men in arms and thirty archers although it seems that only thirty six men actually embarked with him so if you got left behind for so reason the campaign for Sir William was marred by the death of his brother Sir John Philip who I am already mentioning referenced his brass who died on the 2nd of October but Sir William continued to march on with the King towards Calais and did actually fight at Agilbord and again in 1417 he raised a force of 85 men in arms and fought throughout the 2nd invasion of Normandy and he was nominated as a 9th of the Garter of the Siege of Rul in November of 1418 Captain Park Fleur of the 1420s Treasurer of Henry V household and a responsible Henry V funeral arrangements and the escorting of Henry V body back to England so another hugely important lengthastrian figure and because of this the career of this subject this effigy is one of the most commonly referred to in studies of Agilbord in particular he appears in a lot of books a lot of illustrations that he's referred to the problem is he lived for quite a long time after and didn't die until 1441 and the effigy is without exception always at the time of creation not the time of a person's heyday or whatever so this effigy was probably not made any earlier than about 1436 or 37 and possibly a couple of years after death but probably no more than that the given rule if you know the time of death is give or take 5 years is the general rule for dating effigies as far as I can tell so the armor that we see on this great veteran of the Agilbord campaign is much more advanced far more advanced than anything that you would have seen on the big battlefield of Agilbord for most the body armor has developed a lot more the biggest advance in the 1430s was the significant lengthening of the skirt so it's now moving quite close to the mid thigh even past the mid thigh towards the knees and this is a measure taken because of the weakness a major weak point in an armor man which is the groin the groin is where the Duke of Gloucester was stabbed at Agilbord and there are a number of other examples where men are instructed to stab armor men in the legs or in the groin because it's an area that's difficult to armor and I can't help wondering if that particular high profile injury or other high profile injuries like it highlighted the need and stimulated an advance in English armor design it's an interesting thing to wonder when famous people get hurt they pay more attention so this is a spectacular effigy notice here he's wearing a more courtly chain only form of liberty collar and the essence are also backwards so maybe the carman wasn't quite sure what he was doing or just got confused but otherwise the effigy is absolutely spectacular in its physical qualities and this also again getting back to the way we've remembered the battle and the images that influence our imagination the Bardolf effigy appears on the battle the imagined battlefield of Agilbord and a number of other illustrations foremost this one this is not Bardolf from his heraldry this is someone else but he's quite clearly wearing an armor that was based by the artist on this particular effigy wrongly there's no reason why he should have known this was in the Victorian period they knew much less about armor he knew this person fought at Agilbord therefore it seemed like a good reference but he's wearing futuristic armor in those circumstances so in conclusion I'd just like to stress again that it's been really possible to build up a very very detailed picture of the year by year decade by decade evolution of armor throughout the hundred years war period by looking at these effigies and in my estimation they've become only more remarkable the more that I've studied them and of course this is a study this evolution is something continued into the second half of the 15th century but that's a story for another time thank you