defences show no great peculiarity, save that the elbow cop on the sword arm is more massive than that of the left. The espallier pauldrons are most simply constructed. The gauntlets are long-cuffed with the metacarpal plates of mitten form. The leg armour, although most beautifully modelled, is reduced to the utmost simplicity, possessing, however, that hinged plate to either cuisse extending round the fascia lata muscles. The pointed plate of the knee-cop that extends over the front of the jambs is remarkably long. As in the case of nearly all Italian suits, no sollerets of plate were worn, but a defence of chain mail. Placed with the suit now, and actually belonging to it, are a curious pair of shoe-stirrups into which the mail covered feet fitted. The stirrups extend into long laminated toe-pieces à la poulaine. The whole of this superb suit is intact, and, as we have already stated, is all, save the bascinet helmet, the work of one armourer. It is in a marvellous state of preservation, though now, we are inclined to think, somewhat over-*polished.
Belonging practically to the same period and doubtless fashioned by the same hand is a most interesting suit in the Museum at Berne in which, however, the larger pauldron defences for the shoulders are made à la façon d'Italie. There are four tuilles to this suit, besides a broad tace-shaped piece hung from the back of the garde de rein (Fig. 213). The bascinet helmet upon the suit is very similar to that on the Vienna harness, and like it does not bear an Italian mark, but that of some German armourer, a clover leaf which the late Herr Wendelin Boeheim stated was used by one of the Treytz of Mülhan. The head-piece, however, was actually made to fit the suit, and is probably one which replaced another form of helmet possibly considered by the wearer a less reliable piece of defensive armour. A close analogue to this replacement of one nationality of helmet by another is to be seen in the Tower of London, where the suit (described in Chapter XXIII, vol. iii) made for King Henry VIII for fighting on foot possesses a beautiful Milanese bascinet head-piece, while the body armour itself is perhaps the work of the King's own alamaine armourers.
The past history of the Berne suit is unknown.
We have no wish to weary our readers by duplicated descriptions of suits of the same nature; but owing to the excessive rarity of a war harness that can rightfully claim a date within the early years of the second half of the XVth century, we feel ourselves bound to describe and to illustrate the only other two of the four more or less complete suits of this period with which we are personally acquainted. The third is the suit now exhibited
