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VIII. A Technical Note on some of the Armour of King Henry VIII and his Contemporaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2011

A. R. Williams
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Extract

Some of the most famous armours in the Tower of London Armouries are those which belonged to Henry VIII, who came to the throne in 1509. Although there had been an Armourers’ Company in London since the fourteenth century all Englishmen who could afford it bought their armour from the great continental centres of production such as Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Milan. At the commencement of his reign Henry had to obtain his fine armour from the Continent, notably from the Emperor Maximilian (emp. 1493, d. 1519) who, in 1514, presented him with three armours made in Innsbruck by Conrad Seusenhofer whom Maximilian had induced to migrate from Augsburg in 1504. The helmet with ram's-horns and grotesque mask (IV. 22) is, it has been suggested, a survival of one of these Seusenhofer armours.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 106 , 1979 , pp. 157 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1979

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References

Notes

1 Mann, J., Catalogue of an Exhibition of Armour made in the Royal Workshops at Greenwich (H.M.S.O., 1951), p. 3.Google Scholar

2 Blair, C., ‘The Emperor Maximilian's gift of armour to King Henry VIII’, Arch, xcix (1965), 1–53passim.Google Scholar

3 Gamber, O., ‘Die englische Hofplattnerei Martin van Royne und Erasmus Kirkener’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen, lix (Vienna, 1963).Google Scholar

4 J. Mann, op. cit., p. 30.

5 Campbell, W., ‘On the structure of armour, ancient and modern’, Metals and Alloys, vi (1970), 27Google Scholar; Henger, G. W., ‘The metallography of iron-base samples’, Bull. Historical Metallurgy Group, iv (1970), 45.Google Scholar

6 Woolman, J. and R. A. Mottram, ‘Properties of the En steels’ (1964) passim.Google Scholar

7 Metals Handbook, vol. VII, Atlas of photo-micrographs passim.

8 Spitzlberger, G., Landshuter Plattnerkunst (Landshut, 1975), pl. 8.Google Scholar

9 The armour in Vienna is illustrated in the catalogue by Thomas, B. and Gamber, O., Die Innsbrucker Plattnerkunst (Innsbruck, 1954)Google Scholar, pls. 58–63. The gauntlet is in Wackernagel, R., ‘Zur Neuaufstellung der Waffensammlung des Bayerischen National-museums’, Waffen- und Kostümkunde (1975), p. 50.Google Scholar

10 Theophilus, De diversis artibus (C. R. Dodwell, ed., 1961), p. 72.

11 Lang, J. and Williams, A. R., ‘The hardening of iron swords’, J. Arch. Sci. iv (1975), 199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Dickie, J., ‘Armour plate development’, Special Steel Review, i (1969), 26. Tank armour was of composition 0·3 per cent C, 1·5 per cent Cr, 0·75 per cent Ni, 0·5 per cent Mo, quenched and tempered.Google Scholar

13 The earliest written recipe which includes a separate tempering seems to be in a German treatise of 1532, translated in Smith, C. S., Sources for the History of Steel (Cambridge Mass., 1968).Google Scholar