Ralph Moffat, Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume I: The Fourteenth Century

Abstract

Within publications on historical arms and armour, Ralph Moffat, Curator of European Arms and Armour at Glasgow Museums, has repeatedly distinguished himself through transcriptions and discussions of written sources. This genre of source, popular in the 19th century, has fallen somewhat behind with the reproduction possibilities of woodcuts and photographs in the late 19th and 20th century. The introduction alone (pp. xxv-xxxiii) is unmistakable evidence of the author’s passion for the subject. In addition to scholars, he also clearly addresses the representatives of living history. With a spotlight on some useful examples, he shows what opportunities the collection of sources presented in the main section can have for both groups. With aptly selected quotations from the 15th and 16th centuries, he sets out his concern for the reader and introduces him, for example, to the pronunciation of technical terms often borrowed from French, and on p. xxix offers several useful examples. Anyone who studies arms and armour intensively in historical sources will notice that modern terminology often differs from the meaning at the time. It is therefore all the more exemplary when Ralph Moffat immediately presents a list of such terms and explains why he omits which term (such as ‘coat of plates’) or prefers a different spelling (such as ‘basinet’ instead of ‘bascinet’). It would be desirable if as many authors and re-enactors as possible followed this example in the future. The title of Part I ‘Introduction to the Source-Types’ (pp. 1-31) sounds like an introduction to working with historical sources. However, after a brief introduction to the procedure of transcribing and translating the textual sources, a material-rich evaluation of them follows. With references to the respective source texts, background information on the sources is given here. It is about the origin of the weapons, old family treasures, care instructions and much more. These pages are recommended to every reader, being the investigative focus of his book. The subsequent pages on preserved weapons and depictions on pictorial sources, on the other hand, actually introduce the methodical handling of these sources. Although preserved objects and pictorial sources are not part of the central source corpus in this book, they are represented in large numbers in its index. In Part II this book brings together 151 documents from the period 1296 to 1400 (pp. 33–215). The reviewer must admit that due to time constraints it was not possible for him to study in detail all the individual texts and their translations. However, since the work immediately makes one want to study the individual sources, some passages were examined more closely. These documents include statutes, laws, instructions, inventories, household payments, accounts, losses, wills and purchases, which are given in chronological order. If one would like to get an overview, a list of documents on pages xiii to xx is recommend. Each document is first edited in its original wording – mostly Middle French, sometimes Old English or Latin – followed by a modern English translation. The selected sources come almost exclusively from the French-British cultural sphere. Some of the documents may already be familiar to the knowledgeable reader, but everyone should find much that is new here. This section includes rare testimonies such as the will of an