How was MEDIEVAL ARMOUR kept safe?

So medieval armour is pretty awesome and we often look at how it developed its different designs and different purposes for having different types of armour and using different types of armour. But what we often forget about is how on earth did they store this stuff? Bear in mind that we're very familiar in the modern world with museums and great big long display cabinets because we're focusing on looking at the things and exhibiting the things and studying them. But of course in the medieval and renaissance period they weren't really bothered about that, they were more bothered about how this could protect you in war and then once you got back looking after it and putting it away safely. So how on earth did medieval and renaissance people store and preserve and keep and look after their armour? Hi folks, Matt Eason here, Scholar Galiotori. Now I am only too familiar with the woes of trying to work out how to store armour efficiently when you've got, even if you've just got one plate armour, it's quite a nuisance to store it. It actually takes up quite a lot of space and most people don't think about this. They don't think about what do you do with the armour when it's not on you and there are two main concerns. One, storing it efficiently and secondly making sure that it doesn't get rusty or the leather doesn't degrade. In other words that it's looked after and it will work next time you put it on. And there are two things to further consider here. First of all the types of places that would store armour, number one, and secondly precisely how that armour, and in some cases weapons as well, were stored in those locations. And so what are those locations? Well they break down into four basic types which are state arsenals, that is the equipment storage place for the state, the country, the nation, the empire, whatever it is. Secondly, local militias, so the kind of next level down from that, so the local arsenals and the storage places for more localised forces rather than the full sort of national army as it were. The next one is private families, looking at aristocracy really, so looking at castles here. And finally, private homes of normal people like you and me, people who had weapons in their homes, and lots of people did, and in some cases were legally expected to have weapons in their homes so that they could serve in the militias or for national defence. So the state armourers or state arsenals in many cases have turned into modern museums. So some of the famous armourers that you will know and may have visited like me, I've visited all of the examples actually I'm going to use as examples in this video, I'm going to give three examples of these. So the first of them is the famous Styrian arsenal in Graz in what's now Austria. So this was essentially a relatively, a sort of state arsenal, it kind of crosses over the two between militia and state arsenal, for essentially the campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turks, and also rebellious Hungarians as well because obviously the Austrians were fighting the Hungarians quite a lot. So this essentially started out in I think the 14th century, it may go back a bit earlier than that, but what you actually see now is actually a mid-17th century building built between about 1642 and 1645. However what's contained in that building now goes back further, so there was an arsenal before that and what you now see in that armoury, in the Graz armoury or Styrian armoury, is equipment which goes well back into the 16th century. So we can see swords and pole arms and firearms and artillery pieces and armour famously, and you'll see that it's stored in racks on the ceiling, standing racks like shelves, armour on stands, in all the different ways. Now obviously today it is fundamentally a sort of museum, but it's one of the rare survivals of what's essentially a arsenal or armoury in a slightly later building, but fundamentally this looks very similar to what a late 15th or 16th century armoury would have looked like. The next example we're going to look at is the Innsbruck armoury or Innsbruck arsenal of Maximilian I. Now we actually know about a lot of the things that were contained in that thanks to this amazing manuscript which shows all sorts of munitions, arrows and cannonballs, artillery pieces, guns, handguns, early forms of arquebus, what would be later known as musket, even bows and halberds and all sorts. And this, a lot of this material ended up in what's now the Russkammer in Vienna, so what's now that museum in Vienna that you can go and visit which is absolutely incredible and I highly recommend it. A lot of that core material would have started out in the armouries, in the state arsenals of Emperor Maximilian I and these are of course the arms and armour that are providing for his guards and his main soldiers around him. There would have been more localised armouries like the one that we see in Graz and we'll get on to sort of militia armouries in a second. The next example we're going to look at is the Royal armouries, so I obviously do some work with the Royal armouries and have filmed up there and this kind of stuff, but the core of the Royal armouries, now it's up in Leeds, but it started out obviously at the Tower of London and the Tower of London, as well as being one of the seats of the English monarchy, was also a state arsenal. It was where they tested weapons, where they made weapons, for example in the Hundred Years' War, many many times we read about arrows first of all being made but also being stored importantly at the Tower of London, so Henry V for example going off to the Agincourt campaign, he was having arrows made but he was also having bows and all sorts of things made elsewhere and brought in and sort of coalesced and kept safe and looked after at the Royal armouries. So what you now know as the Royal armouries museum, its basis is a state arsenal. Now as I mentioned an offshoot to these central state arsenals are the more localised armouries or arsenals and these are obviously much much smaller and one of the great examples we actually have of a really small one and an incredibly rare survival here in England is in Norfolk at a place called Mendlesham. Now I actually only found out about this a couple of years ago and I'm amazed I'd never heard about it before, but it's essentially stored in a church, so it's a wood lined room to keep the humidity under control, bearing in mind they don't have central heating and all of the humidity control, air conditioning stuff that we have in the modern world. So it's essentially a wood lined room above an entrance portico of a church and this was a Tudor armoury, so in the 16th century, it might possibly even go back to the end of the 15th, but certainly in the 16th century because there's records surviving of it and its maintenance and the armour there, this armour was kept for the local militia. Now as well as the sort of top level forces that most states have, there are local militias and their main purpose, although they could be brought up for national service, for example if the Spanish Armada is appearing on the horizon, but the main purpose is essentially for local policing and also local defence, so for example you can raise a local force if there is an uprising in an area, later on this role would be fulfilled by militias and yeomanry, but in the medieval period this was done by local militias. Also we find in things like the Wars of the Roses, we find local militias very important, so things like the Bridport Muster Roll tell us about the arms and equipment and the raising and mustering of local militias, but also as I mentioned, if there was an invasion then you could raise the militias of the area where the invasion was. So these little small armouries are for providing for the equipment and defence of more localised areas. Right, so we've talked a lot about the state, but of course the private individual mustn't go unnoticed here as well, so first of all let's break this down into two bits, the top level of society, the aristocracy, and then the lower levels of society, the working class people essentially, and obviously there's middle class people who, let's bunch them with the working class. So the aristocracy live in large manor houses and if they're really lucky and own lots of lands then they live in a castle or later on a sort of usually a fortified manor house or something like that in the Tudor period. Very often incidentally in the 16th century we see people moving out of castles and into manor houses and in some cases knocking the castles down, that's why we don't have as many castles now as they used to be, but in either case if they owned arms and armour, and they often would both for their personal retinue if they had such, let's say in the Wars of the Roses or something like this, but even in Tudor period as well, for their servants and such like or even assisting for the local militia, but additionally for themselves if it was just the armour for the lord of the manor as it were or the lord of the castle, they would have to keep it somewhere and usually there would be a dedicated room. Now we're going to look in a second within that space how that armour would be kept more specifically, but also we're now going to mention private houses of working and middle class people as well. Now I think a lot of people overlook this because they assume that only knights and the gentry had arms and armour, but that's absolutely not the case. We know from absolutely tons of late medieval and renaissance documents that not only did private individuals own arms and armour, and we see this in their wills for example because when someone dies it lists their belongings, and you can see they've got a bassinet, a breastplate, some gauntlets, a poleaxe, a longsword, a dagger, it lists what they own and what they're passing down to their sons and daughters and whatever. But in addition to that sometimes there are surveys done. Now one of these that my friend Fabrice Coigneux told me about many years ago which is very interesting is in Dijon, in Burgundy, and in this case they were doing a survey of what arms and armour was available in private individuals' houses, potentially for the defence of the city or for military service. And bear in mind that in the medieval and renaissance world, unlike most countries except for Switzerland and a few others, in that time you were expected to have a minimum of arms and armour for national defence. And in fact, like I say, Switzerland is a sort of survival of that system. And in fact obviously the right to bear arms, known most famously in the Second Amendment from the American Constitution, goes back to the English Bill of Rights of 1689 I think it is, where it basically says that all English Protestants, it doesn't allow Catholics, but all English Protestants have to have arms for military service for national defence. And this is very much a medieval tradition. So for example in England for military service you were expected to have a bow and some arrows and a jack and a helmet. Usually it wasn't necessarily each individual, but a given area had to provide military service for one person. So they could group together enough equipment so they could equip one person to go off to the wars in front, or whatever. So private individuals did have these things in their homes and you might be surprised. It wasn't only a bow and some arrows. It was often armour. There are Bridport muster roll shows people turning up with full harnesses. In some cases, even though they're not nobility, they're just a normal person. Maybe they're a well-to-do merchant in the town, you know, a jeweller or something like this, who's got a fair amount of money, or, you know, a banker or something, and so they've got full harness. Maybe they took it in payment for something and, you know, they're like, well, I'm not going to wear it but I'll take it to the muster. So private individuals did indeed have various types of armour in their houses. And again, going back to the Dijon example, all sorts of pole arms are listed, firearms, obviously crossbows and bows and armour, and various other stuff. So hopefully that shows this arms and armour in the medieval and renaissance period can be kept at a number of state, militia, nobility, obviously castles, and then right the way down to the typical you and me, working-class people, on the street, as it were, in their homes, they would also have various types of weapons. So how did they keep it? Well, as I mentioned, there's two aspects to this. One, how do you physically store it? And secondly, how do you keep it looked after and safe? Well, we've actually got a number of written sources which describe this, and artistic sources. So in art, we can see examples of armour and weapons being hung up and being suspended from things. Now, if you think about it, bearing in mind that they don't necessarily have the damp controlling conditions at ground level that modern buildings are built with, down low on the ground is often damp. So you want to store something like a cuirass, you want to store it higher up. So very often, they would suspend these either on the wall or from the eaves of the house, something like this. But we additionally sometimes see armour stored in cabinets. Now, obviously, anybody who owns a cabinet is usually going to be slightly better off. So the two main examples I can think of in art are very high level, they're related to the Dukes of Verbino, for example, in Italy. So in some cases, armour could be hung, in some cases, it could be stored maybe on shelves, but high up off the ground. Or it could be put in cabinets or wardrobes, again, up off the ground. But another one which is mentioned a lot in text, but we wouldn't see in art, are chests. So the standard way of storing valuables in the medieval world was in a locked chest, and usually it was iron bound, and it was heavy. So we know that silver, for example, silverware, of which, you know, wealthy people owned quite a lot of plates and drinking cups and everything else made of silver, that would all go into a chest. And the reason the chest is heavy and locked, obviously, lots of people can't steal it and get into it, but heavy, so the whole chest can't easily be lifted and moved away. Usually too heavy for people to pick up and carry. So this almost certainly was a storing place for armour, and we see it written in the texts, even though we don't see it necessarily in art. So a number of places that armour and therefore also weapons, if they would fit, could be stored on the walls, hung up, or in a wardrobe, or in a chest. But how were they looked after? Well again, we have written text, so we have mentions of hay or straw packing the the armour out. We also have reference to a felt or cloth being wrapped, perhaps oiled cloth for some implication, being wrapped around things. But also the stuff that was put on the plate. So they didn't have stainless steel, most armour wasn't gilded or silver plated or anything like that, so it was obviously vulnerable to rust, and so what they would do is they would cover it in oil or tallow or fat. So various types, you can use olive oil if you've got access to it, but you can also use tallow and various other animal products. And if you put that on the plate it will protect it from rusting pretty well, for a long period of time actually. And it's also important to remember that armour isn't only made of metal, it's also of course made of leather and sometimes fabric, in case of a brigandine or the leather straps on even a full plate cuirass. So you've got leather straps on the inside that are absolutely critical. And we have Tudor records, I've actually read out some of these in previous videos so I won't do that again now, but we've got Tudor records to the maintenance of local armoury militia armour, because of course mice and other kind of little wee beasties could eat away at the leather and although the metal plate might be fine, sometimes the organic material might perish either as a result of damp or as I say creatures eating it and stuff like this, so it had to be regularly maintained. And of course people could do that themselves or they could employ their servants to do it, or in the case of the militia armourers it was actually a responsibility of designated people to look after the militia armour. And obviously in Lord's Castle they would have servants to do this and in state arsenals there would be probably a whole army of servants to do this and clean it and everything else. Anyway that's been a quick run through but I hope that gives you a pretty, I think that's a pretty all-inclusive vision of how medieval and renaissance armour was where it was stored and how it was stored, and it might give you some ideas for how to store your own armour. And clearly if you can hang it up, and my own observation is generally speaking if you put armour in boxes, especially after events where you've been sweaty, the leather here and the any kind of padding here will absorb moisture and when you put it in the box that moisture will come out, turn into condensation and turn into rust on the plate, even if you've oiled it, it's really annoying. So generally speaking what I do is I leave it open to the air so that any humidity can leave the armour. Straps, I mean these straps absorb so much sweat you wouldn't believe, especially from my sweaty head, so leaving it open to the air is a good idea and I can completely see why people did put armour hung up, strung up in high places because that would be a really good idea, especially in smoky air with open hearths and stuff to get rid of the humidity and keep that armour protected, and also the leather bits which in many cases functionally are more important to the working of the armour than the steel is sometimes. Anyway I hope that's been useful, thanks a lot for watching, I have been Matt Easton as always and I'll see you back on the channel really soon. Cheers folks. Thanks for watching, we've got extra videos on Patreon, please give our Facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already. Cheers folks!