Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/60

This great care in fitting armour to the person of the wearer will, to a considerable extent, explain a matter about which I have often been questioned. I have frequently been asked if existing armour does not prove that armour-wearing men were smaller than those of the present day, and the difficulty a modern man finds in getting into an ancient suit of armour is adduced in proof of this idea. Several factors have to be considered in answering the question. In the first place there is at the present day a considerable difference in the average size and build of a Spaniard or an Italian and an Englishman or German. Consequently it is not astonishing that an Italian or Spanish suit should be small for an Englishman. Next it is not usually about the shoulders, arms, or cuirass that the difficulty lies, but about the legs, especially about the greves. Now, in armour of fine make, the beauty of the outline of the steel greves is often remarkable, they seem as though the legs of the man who was to wear them had been cast in metal. They fitted quite closely to the leg from the knee to the ankle, and, as steel is absolutely unyielding, they could only be worn with comfort by the man for whom they were made. We have only to look at the delicately shaped greves of Charles V or Philip II at Madrid, the long-shanked ones of Francis I in Paris, and the great muscular but clumsier ones of Henry VIII in the Tower, to realize that the legs of each of these men had an individual form, and that no one of them could have worn the greves of the other. Amongst all the suits of armour that I have owned at different times, I only found one pair of greves that I could wear with any comfort. In modern stage armour, even the best, the greves look clumsy, for instead of being closely moulded to the legs of the wearer, they are made too large in order that they may be easy to wear. There is yet another very important factor in the question. The modern Englishman is essentially a walker, and consequently he develops large muscular legs. The men for whom complete armour was made hardly ever walked. What is the German Ritter but a rider, the French, Italian, and Spanish Chevalier, Cavalliere, and Caballero but a horseman! It is only in English that the title Knight has no connection with this idea, and merely means a strong active youth. When the knight had to go only a few hundred yards he did not walk, his mule or hack was always in waiting for him, none but the common folk went on foot. This is more easily understood when we remember the state of the streets and roads in those days. The consequence was that these men might be exceedingly broad in shoulder and strong in arm, but they developed the legs of a modern jockey or groom. And a peculiarity which I have noticed in the greves of much armour, when it is quite original and untouched, is their shortness in proportion to the height and breadth of the man. Many of the fine suits made at Greenwich in the days of Elizabeth are striking examples of this peculiarity in the build of the horseman of that day. Otherwise the English suits were made for men quite as big and powerful as the average English gentleman of the present day. I have referred to the individuality shown in the forms of certain historic