The Myth of the Knight in Shining Armour | Jerm Warfare

My name is Jerm, this is Jerm Wolfe, the battle of ideas.

The thing we're going to talk about is something I've been working on for many years, quietly.

And I published on it because I was leaving the field.

And the way I phrased it was, as I sort of opened the door to leave,

before I let it close, I lobbed hand grenade in behind me and then let the door close.

And it caused one hell of a stir when I did.

My favorite kind of stew.

Unfortunately, as you alluded to last time,

this is going to disappoint a lot of damsels in distress, isn't it?

Are you telling me that there won't be a night in shining armor, Chris?

Yes.

Is that the end of the podcast now?

All right, thank you for joining me in the train.

It's been lovely. See you again.

I don't think I've ever spoken to somebody with your skill set.

So just quickly, what is your bio?

Right.

Well, I was retired now.

A master armorer.

The first master armorer in England since the 17th century to have their master ship recognised.

And an armorer isn't not in the modern sense of the world.

An armorer as in somebody who makes suits of armor or pieces of armor.

And I did that for four decades, started off by making pieces,

and then began restoring pieces and working at the highest levels.

So it always was a highly specialised craft.

This isn't something that back in the Middle Ages blacksmith did.

It was absolutely banned.

Specialised craft here in Italy of armorers and swordsmiths.

And it was so specialised, even in Germanic states, for example,

armorers had to be qualified to make individual pieces one after the other.

You couldn't just, you're qualified so you can make a whole armor.

You could be qualified to make helmets or gauntlets or breastplates and so on.

So I came to that after what you might call an interesting childhood

and something I didn't tell you before.

That is on the son of a Bletchley Park code breaker.

That was Station X.

Say that again.

What?

My father worked at somewhere known during World War II as Station X,

which was at Bletchley Park.

And that was where they broke the German enigma codes for the first computers.

What do you say Bletchley Park? Where's that?

Yeah.

It's, I think it's just the South of London.

It's a stately home.

It's now a museum.

And it was absolutely top secret during the war.

And that was where they built the first computers to crack the enigma code, which they did.

Well, without derailing the podcast, he was more than that.

He was a Royal Naval officer.

He was a lieutenant or sub-lifteinant.

I work in archives as the listeners are going to hear very shortly.

And I tried finding him in the British military archives.

And he's not there.

He's just invisible.

Oh, wow.

And...

Persona non grata.

No, it's probably what's called a denotus.

He's just been officially vanished because whatever he was doing was too sensitive.

He didn't talk about this during his lifetime.

After he died, we found out from my aunt, who's also gone now, that he was in France three days ahead of D-Day,

in the head of the invasion.

So whatever he was up to, it was secret stuff.

That is insane.

And never said, never said a word about it.

We found out a lot.

So that enigma...

The only thing I know about it is from that movie.

It's that big machine where they do basically a series of switches of ones and zeros,

until they can eventually figure out what's been communicated.

That's kind of great, isn't it?

Yeah.

One thing I do know about my father is he took one of the first enigma machines off the Germans.

himself.

He was on a ship in the Mediterranean, and they took the U-boat U571,

and that had the enigma machine on board.

Sure.

Wow.

Okay, so your father had a fascinating history, and so do you.

Well, that...

So anyway...

What's next?

What's next is, from here, I got the love of history.

And, you know, as a kid, I got into war-gaming military modeling,

all that sort of thing.

My first job was working in a shop, selling model soldiers.

And then in 1985, I graduated up to full-size ones, as I put it.

I'd always played around with metal at school and my father's workshop.

Self-taught, I have to stress.

And I just had this crazy idea in 1985 that I was going to set up a studio to actually start reconstructing armour.

And I did.

Right.

And you were saying earlier that a few centuries ago, when people made armour,

they only made certain parts of the full piece, you do the entire thing.

Yeah.

I mean, Italian armourers could do the entire thing.

The guilds had different systems in different countries.

But often, this, as I think I mentioned to you before, the specialisation of the craft at the time

was to ensure that the quality of the work would be absolutely top-notch.

So, in Borussia, in the 16th century, we know it took 12 people to make a sword.

So you had a different craft, someone was the blade Smith, who actually made the blade.

Someone else would make pieces of the hilt.

Someone else would make the scabbard.

Someone else would carry out decoration.

Someone else would engrave the blade, and on, and on, and on.

So it was incredibly specialised to work.

And you do the job of all of those people?

With regard to armour, yeah.

And I have pretty staged weapons as well.

I also, then, from the making point, and this is what's going to lead on to the subject of today,

from making armour, I then went on to restoring it.

Some, I began to pick up collectors who would bring me broken pieces of armour

and say, can you make a new piece for this to match it?

And then it happened to be the antique Steelers as well.

And then museums.

And by the end of 40 years, I was working for the top museums in the world,

top collectors in the world, working on armour that had been made for kings and emperors.

So, just incredible privilege to work on stuff at that level.

I mean, it's, you've heard of me niche.

Yes.

It's not, not something I mentioned to the school's career officer before I left school.

Not, not, not something, not something you can, you know,

it's not a career path people would normally take.

But there are other armourers and swordsmiths out there now.

You know, there are people still making.

And that is, I suppose, what leads us on to the subject of the podcast,

which is what armour actually look like,

and why the idea of the 19-shining armour is a complete myth.

Yes, but I mean, everything we're chatting about kind of creates context,

because, you know, these are the things that people don't even think about.

What you do can technically be done with machines.

Yes. And I'm sure somebody out there is trying to get a 3D printer

to produce pieces of armour, I'm sure.

But that's not how they were made originally, obviously.

And the skill that went into making them originally was quite phenomenal.

And it's worth saying now, if people have got this horrible idea from Hollywood and the TV,

the armour was heavy, and that weapons went through it,

and it was cumbersome. And of course, it wasn't.

It was protective clothing for professional warriors.

It was extremely expensive to make.

And if it didn't work and it had hindered their fighting, they wouldn't have used it.

They even, this is something that surprises a lot of people.

armour was proofed.

An armour of proof means they would complete an armour,

and then shoot at it with the most powerful ballistic weapons of the day,

which would mean bows, crossbows and firearms.

And you'll often see in museums, late 16th and 17th century,

resplates, which have got dents in them here on the sides at the top.

Nice round dent from a musket ball.

And that's because they stood it up on a dummy at 30 yards and shot it

to prove that, you know, to prove it.

So that it worked.

And I've handled pieces that have gone through what you might call really hot action.

A breastplate I worked on for a client, very dear friend now gone.

It was covered in not proof marks.

It was proof marked. It was covered in marks from bullets.

And it had been stabbed by something like a pica or a halberd,

and it had sword guts across it.

So whoever wore that was right in the thick of it.

And what if I shot my non-mull or handing rifle at it?

Ah, that's different.

Much higher.

So the bullets, so the bullets will go through, they say they will go through.

Modern high velocity stuff will go through it, yeah.

And so now we're going to lead on to another little interesting bit of context

you didn't know before either.

And that is I've made modern armor, antibolistic modern armor,

for the police in the UK.

I don't know if they ever went into production.

I sold the design to them.

And as part of that, I mean, I know you like your guns.

And you don't know that I've shot guns as well with the

Met Police Royal Protection Squad.

So I had to make a combination armor made of titanium plate and Kevlar.

And we shot, I was given a 357 magnum to shoot at it.

And a 44 magnum with magnum ammunition.

Were you able to shoot them while standing and not losing your balance?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it held a kick.

Well done.

Yes, well done.

And we were going through different designs and it has to be said a lot of the time.

The bullet went straight through the armor out the other side

and was still asking where the armor was.

You know, just straight through.

Incredibly powerful.

Well, I don't know if you can see this, but I shot this.

Oh yes, this is a, this is a 50 mil.

Yeah, 50 cal.

Wow.

It was a BMG.

So I'll bring you upon 50 cal BMG that I shot.

And he has the crazy thing, right?

So I mean, that thing is designed to take out vehicles

at a long way away.

The recoil was almost not existent.

Really?

There was a coffee cup on the table to the side of me, and it blew off the table.

Wow.

So this is what a shock wave going, naturally.

So for the longest time in history, armor was used and it was used effectively.

Yeah, it worked.

And tell me a bit about the weight, though.

I mean, so you would think right off the bat that having thick armor is better.

It depends what it's made of.

Armor was originally made of iron.

And then they moved on to making armor out of steel.

And then they began to.

Iron.

Yeah, you wouldn't be able to walk with iron.

In fact, early armor is one way you can easily spot fakes.

If you handle early pieces from the 14th and early 15th century, they're heavy.

Helmets are heavy because they were using an inferior material.

And for the listeners who don't know, the difference between iron and steel is that

steel has a carbon content.

And it's got to be above 0.3.4%.

After that, you can heat treat it to harden it below that.

Doesn't matter how many times you heat it up and quench it in oil or water,

you're not going to harden it at all.

So that's that's what they did.

They moved from an inferior material to a superior material so they were getting lighter.

And then they began to heat treat it.

And once they could do that, it could become lighter again.

Chris, you said you made armor and then you restored it.

But I just want to make sure that I'm following you absolutely correctly.

When you say you make or made armor, was it all by hand, you did it with the forge,

the whole kind of blacksmith route?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, the concessions to modernity were using power shears to cut up the sheets of metal,

as opposed to using a hammer and chisel or using massive manual shears,

which they used to have.

So I would do things like that.

But other than that, yes, it was all hammers and specialized unveils that are called states.

And you have different shapes like a sort of big mushroom shape for working a breastplate over.

A ball shape for raising up helmet skulls.

And then you would have things like half moon shapes for working the comb of a helmet in or embossed decoration in.

So I had hundreds of them.

I actually acquired a lot of originals from a company who were closing down.

Ironically, near where I lived in culturester in England.

And they had a lot and some of them came from the Royal Armories in Greenwich.

So some of the tools I was using were originals from the 16th century.

And how long would it take you?

Me on my own, months.

But that's not how it was done originally.

In the 15th century, they had a military industrial complex just like now.

And the centre of armour production in Europe through the 14th and 15th century was the city of Milan in Northern Italy.

And they had hundreds of armourers working with journeymen.

So you would be qualified as a master.

But then there was a lesser stage, which was being a journeyman.

And they were to journey from workshop to workshop to work for masters.

And then below them, you had apprentices.

So there were hundreds of armourers working in Milan.

And they were producing thousands of armourers every year.

So huge output.

Well, you even had people specialised in making buckles or hinges.

We know that from their names.

There's a fellow called Giovanni Le Fibier recorded in Milan in the 15th century.

And Fibier buckles.

So that was John who made buckles.

That was his name.

That's a career for you.

So in the medieval era, was being a blacksmith like this, a frowned upon job,

or was it a very elite position to have?

There you go using the beat.

Was it a beat?

Was it...

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Okay, hang on.

Let's create a deal with that.

Blacksmith.

There's a whole context, isn't it?

Yes.

No, I'm not.

And never was a blacksmith.

Blacksmiths make a wrought iron work.

And here's another little curveball for you.

In America in the 18th century, there were also whitesmiths.

So blacksmiths would make stuff which would be black from the hammer,

with the scale from the forge left on it, for outdoor use.

And whitesmiths would make much finer pieces which would be polished white for use inside the house.

But in my context, no, I was specifically an armorer.

And in the middle ages and the Renaissance, if blacksmiths tried producing armor,

it would have been illegal, the guilds closed them down very quickly.

Some of the guilds had what was called rights of search,

which means you could get your door kicked down in the middle of the night,

and agents of the guilds would come in and examine everything in your home,

which was because they'd normally lived over the shop.

So, you know, they were very strict about it.

So they were the equivalent to the SWAT team?

Yes, yes.

Yes, a TUDE SWAT team, yes.

If I...

Yeah, something like that, yes.

Incidentally, just to draw a few more parallels for the listeners.

The people who were using this stuff, I mentioned the military industrial complex.

And in Italy, the mercenaries were called Condocchiere.

And so you have a massive arms industry making swords,

lances, daggers, crossbows, bows, making armor,

and they're supplying professional armies, which are private.

And as a curious parallel with today, the word Condocchiere means contractor.

So in just the same way that today we have private military contractors.

That's exactly what they had in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

So nothing's changed?

No.

In fact, I deal with this in my next book.

We can perhaps mention at the end about three paintings about the Battle of San Romano.

And I demonstrate the whole setup in that book, in identifying three paintings,

which are of people in armor.

I actually demonstrate how the whole thing worked,

how the setup to produce the armor,

and have it then supplied to the troops, how the troops used it.

Because also martial arts we used here in the West as well.

It's not an oriental thing.

There are military manuals from the 15th century.

A fellow called Fiori de Libri from North Italy.

And he wrote a famous book called The Flower of Battle.

So the idea of particular poses arm locks, holds, blows with swords, blows with pole axes,

it was all codified.

So these were not to summarize.

These were not people lumbering around in really heavy armor.

You know, just swiping at each other with big heavy weapons.

These were trained killers.

And they were wearing the best protection the armorers could make for them.

And if you're going to be agile, you would need to weigh something light.

Yeah.

So they were expected to be able to turn a cartwheel in their armor without their helmet on.

And they were also expected to be able to vault into the saddle without using the stirrups.

So the idea of...

That must be tricky.

The idea of nights being cramed into the saddle is something that comes from a Victorian comic opera.

And it's also a sort of folk memory of armor as being very heavy at the end of its production.

Because by then, firearms were getting so effective in the 17th century.

Armor did have to get very, very thick.

And they'd gone back to iron by then.

And they were actually using it because it was softer than steel.

And so the steel plates of the iron plates rather would soak up the kinetic energy of the projectiles.

Almost like having a crumpled zone built into a car.

So it was better to have your armor distort and let a musket ball flatten out on it

than be rigid and let the musket ball punch straight through it.

What breaks my brain, though, is when you told me previously

that there was no shining armor.

Nights in shining armor is a myth.

Yeah, almost none.

So so little as to be vanishingly small as an amount.

And so this comes back to the heat treatment thing.

Take away as nicely from the heat treatment thing.

When they made armor in the forge, obviously you shape the thing

and it leaves you with fire scale on it.

Think think of rot iron railings.

And that would be useful as weather proofing.

Because now we come to the reality of being out in all weather's.

Fighting, marching, riding, having to set up camp.

And you do this in in all weather's at all times of the year.

And if you have a nice bright shining armor, what do you think is going to happen to it?

It's going to rot.

And we have a document from the 17th century, a guy called Jovez Markham,

who is a professional soldier.

And he helpfully lists the finishes on armor for us.

I'll just quote him briefly.

And he describes one color which is russet, another one which is sanguine,

another one which is black, and finally white or milled armor.

In other words, armor which has been polished or the surface milled off it.

And he actually says all this armor is to be rather of russet sanguine or black color

than white or milled for it will keep the longer from the rust.

So they you've immediately got a period document telling us a big reason why they would do this

because this was weather proofing.

So it didn't just rust to hell.

The other reason though is as we move on to steel, as I explained,

you heat treat the armor to improve the quality of the metal, the defensive properties.

And if you do that, you've got to heat the armor up first and then cool it down quickly.

So heat it and you quench it.

And the color that Markham describes as russet, and there are lots of documents

that talk about the russeting of armor, it's the redening.

It comes in the French word russet, russet's red.

So it, from the Latin.

So it's describing heating the armor up to a red color.

And then the Italians would just wait, say a quick, say a quick Hail Mary,

and then plunge it into a bath of oil.

And what that did was it, it was called slack quenching.

So it was a form of hardening but not too much in all one go.

They didn't then have to to re-temper it afterwards.

And it left the armor with this gray color.

So one process does two things.

One, it hardens it, but not too much.

And two, it gives it a protective coating against, you know, rain, humidity.

That's something.

And that's what most armor was called.

Yeah, but I guess I think where does this whole nighting shining armor thing come from?

Right.

Well, it comes from collecting largely.

By the time armor was going out of you, so ironically,

there are more examples of why armor.

Because what I did in the book about the colorful issues on armor.

I started with what we know because there are far more pieces of elite 16th and 17th century armor

that survive in collections.

And also lots more documents.

Because the further back you go in time,

it's a tiny proportion of what was originally made largely because a lot of early armor was cannibalized by armorers.

They were flattened, cut it up and then forge it into something new because the material was extremely expensive to make.

So we have these polished pieces.

And then later on, as these pieces pass into museums, and particularly in private collections in big stately homes in the UK,

it was all the rage to have a nice display of polished armor on the wall.

So armors that had got as far as the 17th century with their original colour finishes intact.

And in one particular case, pieces in an Italian museum made it right up into the early 20th century with their original colour finishes still intact.

And then an English antiquarian went along and said, oh, yeah, let's clean those up.

And they removed, they boiled them in oil to get rid of what was left.

And then that wrecked the colour finishes.

And when they moved into a restoration workshop in Florence in the 1970s, they finished the job off.

And those armors, which are wonderful, are in a museum now in North Italy and they're all white.

And this sort of thing went on across the board.

So originally it was the taste of antiquarians.

It even started in the 18th century with big collections like the Imperial Armory in Vienna.

We know the Empress Maria Tereza issued an edict that the armors in the armory should get cleaned up.

So they went in and started polishing them up.

And then what happens is this gets embedded in the Hollywood.

It gets embedded in romances like the Walter Scott.

Others, people then begin just romanticising it that these were nights in shining armour.

They must have, and the Victorian English painters start producing paintings of nights in shining armour as well.

And then you get TV in Hollywood and it just gets hammered home again and again and again.

But I mean, if we're honest with ourselves, shiny armour is pretty to look at.

Oh yeah, and I freely admit, hand on heart, I thought that was the case when I started making this stuff.

Because this is not some grand conspiracy theory.

There hasn't been some intergenerational plan to hide the fact that most armors never polished.

That's not the case.

It's simply just fallen out this way that people have romanticised the idea of the night in shining armour.

And it never was the case.

Now, what I did to start unpicking this whole puzzle was when I was working on armour,

I began looking at Italian art as a form of reference because paintings engraving drawings,

they can be extremely useful because artists would often show religious scenes, for example, set in the present day.

So they have Roman soldiers around the crucifixion are dressed like contemporary 14th, 15th and 16th century soldiers.

So they're great documents for us to look at armour.

And I was looking at these paintings in time.

I fell in love with the paintings for their own sake and that's what I work on now as art history.

And you see the armors in these paintings are coloured.

And a lot of people have simply interpreted this in two ways.

They say, well, either that's how the artist meant to depict polished steel.

You know, if it's blue, that's the sky reflected in the surface of the metal.

Or they say, oh, the painting's discolored.

You know, that armour that's very dark in that painting, the pigments must have changed colour.

So it was originally much brighter and now it's darker.

Now, what I did was I put my work on Italian art and European art together with what I began to find on the armors themselves when I worked on the original thing.

And when I was taking original armors apart, I began to find traces of colour absolutely everywhere.

Because if you take two plates apart that have been held together with rivets for centuries, no one's had a chance to clean between them.

So you get armors which are in a stately home or a museum now and they're polished white.

But if you get a chance to take them apart, even if you remove a rivet and you can see underneath where the rivet was, you see a little halo of the original surface finish.

And again, you find colours everywhere.

And these colours are this grey colour everywhere.

pale blue, the beautiful sky blue colour, dark blue and the real classic which is called peacock blue or sanguine and that's purple.

It's a bright livid purple colour.

So I was finding those colours which matched perfectly with the paintings.

So what I then did was I began to look at period documents and you get the descriptions of these colours.

You get descriptions of azura which means pale blue or black or sanguine or blue di Pavone, peacock blue or bronze.

And they're actually describing the colours that I was finding on the original armour and that you see in paintings.

And in the inventories, the vast majority of pieces listed are all coloured.

White pieces.

How did they create those colours?

Well, I explain russeting is by heating up and slack quenching.

If you use slightly different temperatures, if you go higher in the colour range and these are temper colours, tempering is you heat a piece of steel up fully red and quench it.

And that's what's called glass hard.

It's very hard but it's brittle.

And I tested that once I got a piece of carbon steel, quenched it to make it glass hard and then smacked it on the anvil and it shattered like a piece of glass.

So what you need to do is temper the steel.

And tempering means you clean off the surface so you can see it, it's white at this stage and then you begin to heat it up again.

And it goes through a series of colours from yellow to brown to purple to dark blue to light blue and then it goes grey and then you go into the red range.

And you then re quench when you reach the desired colour.

So for example, something like a scalpel blade or what the Americans would call a box cutter blade or a Stanley life in the UK.

It's very brittle because it's been heated up to what we call a yellow or straw temper and then it's been re quenched.

And hence the thing I mentioned before, this is why we get the expression losing your temper because you break when you lose your temper.

And so if a thing isn't well tempered, the metal could go.

Oh, I'm following.

If you want to stay on that colour, you quench it.

It freezes it.

And that's why this heat treatment could produce pale blue armour at Zorro and dark blue armour.

And if you wanted armour to be black, that was another step afterwards.

You could like quench a piece of armour, coat it in oil and then or even fully harden it.

And then you burn the oil off.

You heat it up in the forge and you burn the oil off and it blackens it.

And that's a known technique used also by Blacksmith.

That's fascinating Chris.

So what you're saying is the colour of the armour wasn't only for aesthetics, but it also indicated the strength.

Yeah.

Oh, it's like what people used to call a kite mark, you know, a certification of quality.

Because when most armour was rustic grey, a family in Augsburg called the Helmschmeats began to fully harden and temper armour.

And they left the temper colour on to demonstrate it was a superior quality.

And this was the peacock blue.

And what they would do is they would heat the armour up to red and then quench it.

So it's then very hard, but it's brittle.

And what you then do is you clean off the surface and you heat it up to go through the purple range.

So it just as it's going from purple to blue, that's when you then quench it in water.

And you've really got to arrest it firmly. So it's cold water.

Now at that point, you've got a great finish. It's this livid colour, quite blue in the water.

But the problem is the last thing you want is moisture on the surface.

Because if you leave it there, although you've given it a colour oxide finish, it will start to corrode because there is water there.

So you then transfer it to a bath of oiling water.

So you're bringing the temperature up slowly.

And then you transfer it to a bath of boiling oil.

So not for the faint heart of these processes.

And what the oil does is it drives off any remaining moisture.

And it just saturates the whole thing. And that's it. That's the end of the process.

You then take it out and you let it cool.

And you have this absolutely livid purple colour armour.

And that would be the mark of quality.

Because that's why the Helm Schmidt's new.

Somebody wearing one of their armour's, which would be a hell of a striking thing to see.

When most armour was grey, you've got somebody wandering around in this absolutely livid purple armour.

And it's not just beautiful to see.

And it could be combined with edge decoration and gilding as well.

But also, you would simply know by looking at it that that was a superior quality product.

But there's also a psychology, I mean, if an army was stampeding towards you

and they're all in the sort of dark, murky grey armour,

that would certainly be a lot more threatening than if they were all wearing a camp-pink armour.

True, true.

In fact, if they were coming at you in a camp-pink armour,

you know it's a party.

And they're most likely coming to redecorate the castle.

Yes.

Yes, they're going to check in there.

Come on, nice soft furnishings, yeah.

In fact, there's a TV show I love about what's called the Home Guard here in the UK,

which were the veteran soldiers they used as a sort of reserve force during World War II.

And it's a brilliant BBC sitcom.

And one of the expressions the commanding officer uses is Nancy Boyz.

And he just works perfectly.

He's being called Nancy Boyz.

But I can imagine if the armour was perhaps a peacock blue or some sort of sky blue,

that would look more elite.

Yeah.

I'll quote a little document.

When you look at...

Even white.

Even white would look elite.

Right, also look very prestigious.

There comes a point where we have to look at why there was some white armour,

because there was undoubtedly very small amounts early on,

and then it does seem to come in as a more general fashion as armour is going out of use.

But there was a mercenary company led by an Englishman called Sir John Hawkewood,

fighting for Florence in the 14th century.

And he was a commander of a company called The White Company.

And it was assumed for many years that this was because the Englishmen at Arms were wearing white armour.

And in fact, no.

Because the actual description of them from the time by a fellow called Vilani,

he says that every one of them had one or two pages or even more as befitted their status.

And when they'd removed their arms, and the said pages were immediately ready to keep them clean,

so that when they joined in battle, their arms seemed like mirrors,

and for this reason they were more intimidating.

So that is an example of a highly reflective armour, yes being more intimidating.

But what Vilani doesn't say is they polished it.

He says they kept it clean.

And what we see in Italian paintings in this period is this pale blue colour.

And it is very shiny because it's similar to the peacock blue.

You don't wind up with this thick grey oxide on it.

The oxide looks more like a coloured lacquer.

So the light goes through the oxide, bounces off the polished surface of the steel or iron underneath,

and comes back out again.

And then what the eye sees is the interference pattern created by the oxide layer,

which in this case is pale blue.

So yeah, they would have looked incredible.

In a period where most people had this rustic grey, they would have looked very different.

If the armour were shiny, wouldn't that have been strategically better though?

I mean, it would be off-putting to your enemy.

Makes you an excellent target as well.

Yes, of course.

Right, because the light is bouncing off you and then you can be seen.

Yes, I suppose.

Well, where we have records of white armour, there is a specific reason for it being worn.

And we see it using in combination of saints in paintings.

It seems to be a thing of purity.

Something called the...

Get it right.

The Knights of Christ.

There's a, for example, a painting by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck called the Ghent-Alterpiece.

And it shows St George, some other saints.

And they are militias Christy.

They are the Knights of Christ.

And they do have this absolutely white polished armour.

Also.

Now, an interesting thing is sometimes you can spot white armour or other differences in the colour of armour in paintings.

Because one of the giveaways in a painting is you can get soldiers wearing different, or armour with different colour finishes.

You know, grey and black or pale blue and grey.

And this is one of the things which defeats the argument that no, no, no.

It was originally white.

The painting is just discoloured.

Well, if the painting had discoloured, all of the armour would have discoloured the same way.

So that's one thing that tells us that you have different colour finishes.

But there was a document which could...

It's an Iberian document.

Spanish peninsula.

It could go back as far as the 14th century.

It certainly goes back to the 15th century.

And it's called Amades of Gaula.

And it's a very interesting, you know, snapshot.

And I'm going to have to... Here we are.

Found a document of why they wore white armour.

Because in this document it states specifically, this is Amades speaking.

And I considered it a boon and I told him I would take the horse because it was very good and the caress and the helmet.

But the other arms were to be white as is befitting for a novice knight.

These are not battle-hardened warriors.

This is like a Santa's to uniform before you go into action.

In your proper battle for teaks.

And he then repeats it.

He said, then at this hour there arrived Gandolin and the Sando,

square of Don Bronco, both wearing white armour as befitted novice knights.

So he's stating specifically that white armour is used for squares and novices,

not for experienced warriors.

We also then get a wonderful painting that what's called the double portrait of Federico de Montefeltero,

and his son Greedabaldone, 1474.

And he is shown completely in white armour.

And he at the time was setting himself up as sort of...

was like a paladin, a leader of the Christian faith.

And there was talk of a crusade, again, to a free Constantinople from the Turks.

And he said, he wrote a letter to Lorenzo de Medici, in which he said he wanted to be purer than the candle of the Virgin Mary.

And so there he is in the skin of his pure white armour, sitting in his library,

reading his books and wearing the order of the garter around his, around below his knee.

And the truth of the man is he was up to his neck in the plot to assassinate the Medici in 1478.

He was working for the Pope, and they were going to butcher the whole family,

and then he was meant to bring his mercenaries in once that had been done through the gates,

and take over the city of Florence completely in a violent coup.

So yes, the painting is a wonderful example of purity and righteousness,

and it's an example of absolute hypocrisy as well.

The man was what James Dellingpole would call a rungan.

But now, I mean, armour has been part of human history what for thousands of years.

Oh, yeah. How much has it changed?

Not a huge, well, yeah, the shapes have it have changed.

I mean, it's technology, which has largely driven that change,

because you have to be able to make large plates of iron or steel in the first place,

which you can shape, and then put them together in an armour.

If you can't do that, you have to use very small pieces of metal link together,

and that's what male is, what people will think of as chainmail.

That's a form of armour that developed because you can make a male shirt from lots of tiny pieces of iron or steel.

Then, as time went on, they could produce larger and larger pieces in the 14th century,

and you get what are called coats of plates.

So these are leather or textile garments lined with iron or steel plates.

So these are like flat jackets, but they're covered with very rich fabrics, they're very colourful.

Then, they can produce with improvements in blast furnace technology.

They can make bigger and bigger pieces until eventually you can forge a helmet out of one piece of iron or steel,

and the same for a breastplate and the same for a backplate.

And so that is what has created a lot of change in the shape.

You then get fashion as well.

You know, they were in the same way that Elizabethan doublet in the late 16th century is what's called a peace coat.

It's big belly that dips right down towards the godpiece.

Breastplates copied that shape.

And the piece of armour worn over the thumb is called a tacit,

and where the Elizabethans had what they called trunk codes, these sort of puffed out.

Again, we're strained towards Nancy boy territory,

but they have these very elaborate trunk codes,

and the tacits were flared out to fit over the top of them.

And they were fat.

And yes, yes, armour's made in Greenwich were pink.

So there you go, perfect.

So not only are we destroying the idea of the night in shining armour,

we're saying the nights there were Nancy boys.

This is really going to disappoint those damsels in distress out there.

You can't say in Nancy boys, they, it's Nancy then.

No, I don't know where that would fit on the gender spectrum.

Was armour only designated,

is designated the right way delegated to those in the military,

or was it ever used just for fashion purposes?

Yeah, both.

You had, in the military sense, you had every type of armour, you can compare it to cars.

You had everything from a clapped out second hand fear that was falling to pieces,

a fear pander, which would be the real cheap and nasty munition armour.

And also some armour, as it went out of fashion,

if it wasn't broken up reforged to make me fashionable stuff,

it would go down the social scale.

So you would find quite poor soldiers wearing what had once been quite fashionable pieces.

But then you go up the scale to a nice BMW, to a nice Ferrari,

an Aston Martin, you got very high quality armour for the people that could afford it.

So made by famous makers, four famous clients.

But also, you had armour worn in a civilian context as decoration.

The armour for the throat is called a gorget,

and there are examples of people wearing gilded gorgets,

or even a collar of silvered male,

because they would gold plate armour and silver plate armour.

And these would be worn as very elaborate forms of costume, if you like.

But also, civilian clothing was armoured inside.

We know that Lorenzo de Medici, for example, had a doublet,

the description in the infantry is specific,

lined with fine millenies' lambs.

In other words, it was meant to look like civilian clothing,

so if somebody stabbed him, it would just be stopped by the armour.

In fact, when the Patsy conspiracy took place in 1478,

and his brother Giuliano was killed,

the member of the Patsy family that came to take him from the Medici palace

down to the cathedral, where the murder took place,

he joked, he said, you've been ill,

and he said, you're putting on weight, you're getting fat,

he gave him a hug, he squeezed him.

He was checking, he wasn't wearing armour underneath his clothing.

And also, they used to lie in hats with steel.

His another expression for you, it's a secret, keep it under your hat,

because they used to wear steel skull caps underneath hats as well.

That's really interesting.

It must have been very uncomfortable.

Well, sometimes you get a lot of it in, certainly in the military context.

In the civilian context, there's another piece in the Medici infantry,

which is a barretta lined with steel plates.

So it's the sort of hats that you see in the paintings of Botticelli,

or Gila and Dio, the famous members of the Medici family,

and they appear to be wearing civilian hats and civilian clothes,

but that could be armour for all you know.

That was the whole point.

So in those days, they would have used steel condoms.

Oh, you mean, you mean a cod piece?

A thing called a briete.

Yes.

Yes.

Listen as if they get a chance to go to the Tower of London.

You ask me these questions, you've got to be ready for the answers.

If you go and see what's called the great harry armour,

which was made for him, King Henry VIII in 1540,

in the Tower of London, it's God old.

He definitely needed one.

It's a whopper, I can tell you.

It's poor wives.

Yes.

Yes.

But I mean, armour is making a great comeback now.

I mean, it's called robots.

Yes.

Up to a point, modern soldiers were...

They had what they would regard as sacrificial limbs.

They began going back to the idea of helmets and body armour

and over Kevlar flak vests.

There would be these huge heavy ceramic plates

to stop the sort of high velocity round that you could fire.

But as you say, now that soldiers are becoming redundant,

yeah, I'm sure that robots...

Well, robots and drones are being equipped with armour.

Look at the drone netting that's being deployed.

These are physical barriers to stop missiles

or the drones themselves.

Chris, I just want to circle back to something you said earlier

because I want to make sure that I don't sound stupid.

But you took issue with the term blacksmiths.

The people who made armour in medieval times, what were they called?

They were called armourers.

The Italian were...

Not blacksmiths.

Nope.

The Italian word is corret sail, a caressmaker.

But it applied to all types of armourers.

In fact...

Could an armourer be a blacksmith and could a blacksmith be an armourer?

Nope.

Nope.

The guilds were very strict.

Entirely different.

Yeah, entirely different.

They might both use a forge and hammers.

But the rest of the tooling they had would be very different.

And the guilds would just stamp down on it if they tried to do that.

They'd find their workshops closed down and they'd be fined

and thrown out the guild.

And would they have had status among armourers?

Like, for example, would people want to have gone to a particular armour

because he had a great name?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

To be a...

People used to...

People would serve apprenticeships,

which could...

They would start at about seven years.

That shows you how long they had to study to actually be proficient in what they did.

Sometimes apprenticeships could be as long as 15 years.

And you would not be paid.

The families would be absolutely chuffed to pieces that their kid would be

apprenticed to a famous maker because afterwards they know they'd have a job for life.

So, yeah, it was quite a status thing.

And were blacksmiths and armourers rivals at all,

or just basically comparing a plumber to an electrician?

Not so much, but the relationship was more that the armourers kept an eye

on what the blacksmiths would have been making.

If anyone was going to start abusing the ability to use their forge to produce something,

it would have been the blacksmiths.

And any blacksmiths listening to this podcast are now going to be gritting their teeth.

It's simply the way they thought at the time that everyone trained to carry out a certain craft

and then they were meant to stay in their lane afterwards.

And generally speaking, the guilds made sure their members are under decent living.

I think what I'm trying to get at is could a blacksmith be an armourer and vice versa?

I mean, was one a PhD and the other just a straightforward bachelor's?

Again, you're tempting me to seriously Royal any blacksmiths listening to this podcast.

Being a retired master armourer myself, I'm going to have a very biased view of that.

But blacksmiths have different skills.

Blacksmiths forge weld, which is not a thing that armourers would generally do.

Blacksmiths could produce much larger works of art than armourers.

So I'm just going to sidestep that question and say they're two different skill sets.

How about that?

I have made a grand total of one knife and took me a whole weekend and it was a huge amount of work.

I can only imagine the amount of work that it takes to create armour.

Is it just too exhausting?

Well, there is the 63 now.

When I started I was 23 and inevitably that takes a toll.

63?

Yeah, yeah.

You don't look a day over 70.

Thank you.

You're always so kind when I come on your podcast show.

It wasn't right.

When I started making this stuff, it was for the love of the material.

And it's true, it's fascinating stuff.

And you know, you'll have heard me talking about it now.

You know, what an incredibly deep subject it is.

But the principal mistake I made in my career was to go into restoration work.

And while that was good for private clients and for museums and the work I did for museums, you know, I worked on some absolutely staggering pieces.

It also brought me into contact with the antique trade and whilst that can pay very well, the problem with that is

a bag of rusty plates that were once an armour are worth to be blunt, bugger all.

If you can put those plates back together, you clean them up.

You replace any missing plates.

You give them a lovely surface finish and then you mount that armour on a mannequin.

And it looks absolutely fabulous.

It's worth a lot of money.

Sometimes a very, very great deal of money.

And that means the incentive on the part of the dealers is to not say the pieces have been restored.

And that, on the one hand, when I first began doing work like that, there is a sense of pride because you think, wow, look at, you know,

because you are being challenged by the people that made the stuff originally.

Your work has to be as good as the original, always, or it's going to look terrible.

So you learn, even you even learn to work in the styles of lots of different armors and in different periods, in different materials.

So this is a great sense of pride in it.

But equally, you know, there's no getting away from it, someone somewhere at the end of the line, who could be buying that.

Not knowing it's been restored at all and he's thinking, wow, look at this fantastic, they're getting screwed.

And so this did begin to take the shine off it.

And it also, unfortunately in that world, you meet some extremely unpleasant people because of the amounts of money involved.

And it was when I decided to step back from certain clients, who I was being very well paid by, that treated like a slave, that really kicked off some nasty reactions.

And because these people wanted me back in the field.

And it's a thing which causes me problems to this day.

But what happened was it, and this is going to lead on to a much bigger subject that bear with me.

This did me a huge favor because these were some of my first faltering steps down the rabbit hole.

Because I began to see how the world actually works.

And specifically with regard to what free masonry is about and the power they can wield.

And that really was a massive wake up call for me.

So actually, because I moved to Italy by this stage and because the scales were falling from my eyes, the people who were trying to make my life absolutely hell to force me back.

Just block any other work I was doing to force me back into their service.

They're not going to like what I'm going to say now.

They did me a massive favor on two fronts.

One, they drove me away from what's pretty toxic.

If you want to live your life and be honest and just be around normal people, instead of people who are trying to setting out con people the whole time.

It's a much healthier thing, but the thing which is really going to make them grind their teeth is this falling down the rabbit hole led me to avoid the vaccines.

So thanks guys, you did me a huge favor.

What's the Masonic link?

Lot of Masons in the antique trade.

Lot of dealers and Masons.

And just in case that is that just coincidence?

No, money and power.

They will go where the money and powers.

And the people I've had the most trouble with actually control the antique arms in our market.

It's after a certain level, it's pretty much runs a ring.

So the idea that it's all free competition.

And you know, you can buy stuff from one dealer who's in competition against another.

No, a lot of them work together.

And they've even gone so far as to colonize.

It works online.

That's how they've come after me.

But if you go into things like arms and armor chat rooms, Facebook groups, what a lot of the people in those groups don't realize is members of those groups.

Are agents placed there by people in the antique trade as runners.

They're on the lookout for people who turn up original bits of armor.

So even in chat groups, you have people working away quietly.

And the people in those groups don't realize they've been infiltrated by the market.

They're also doing their best to infiltrate museums as well.

Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is like a snapshot of just about everything else.

Yeah.

What I've seen, what I've experienced, unfortunately, first hand in the arms and armor world, is a microcosm of what's going on out there in the world.

It's the same thing.

And yes, I got, now I'm politically speaking, I'm what you might call it, the dissident spectrum.

I'm a nobody. I'm not giving any governments any grief.

I'm not making anti vaccine podcasts. I'm not doing any of that.

But what I did was say no to some people who are connected to some extremely wealthy collectors.

And that meant I was saying no to the collectors as well.

And the upshot of that was you could call me the Mike Yeden of the arms and armor world, because I got cancelled the same way he did.

And that means being direct by Google.

It means all sorts of fun and games with having my the servers with my websites attacked my webmail compromised.

I've had the lot.

So when I've seen all sorts of guests in alternative media, cropping up on podcasts like yours, like James Dellingpole, stories on UK column, I began thinking this is all horribly familiar.

So you know, all I all I did was I came tumbling down this rabbit hole because of that.

So again, if you like to to finalize the answer, it's some.

What I think about that market now is it carries the stench of death with it.

That's how I articulated it because there are people that love these things because they're about war and they're about killing.

They absolutely love possessing something assault.

A Japanese sword, for example, would be signed by the maker on the tang.

It would also be signed by the tester.

So Japanese swords could be tested on condemned criminals.

And we have specified number of cuts, types of cuts, those are chiseled into the tanks.

And there are people who get off on owning those weapons.

And I don't want to be part of that world anymore.

But I mean, if you're looking at an armor in a museum, how do you know that it's the real thing?

I do.

This is the whole point.

I know from the shape.

I know from the construction.

I know from corrosion patterns.

I know how metal should.

After a certain stage begin to delaminate because these were handmade metals and they actually come apart.

In layers.

And there are metallography studies done under the microscope of the crystalline structure of.

What real armor is actually like?

So you can also carry out scientific analysis.

Someone I know in the UK is the leading guy in the field.

So I know everything there is to take apart a fake.

Which also makes me a deeply inconvenient to the arms and armor world.

I used to do consultancy work for an auction house here in Italy.

I'll be no more specific than that.

And I was shown the door when they handed me a helmet and said catalog that for us.

Would you and I just handed it straight back and said, I can't that was made yesterday.

I'm not Catholic.

I'm not put my name to that.

And that's what they wanted me for.

They wanted me to be say that, yeah, this is genuine helmet German mid-16th century.

And I just said, no, no way.

So that was it.

Bye.

So it's organized crime.

Oh, there you get.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, they are a mafia.

That's that he's absolutely true.

Yeah.

One of one of the few people I knew back in England.

I mean, I have no no contact.

Sorry, I have no contact with anyone in the field now.

He used to describe the all the dealers that turned up to the the fares he organized as the brethren.

And yeah, that's that's an app name for them.

How can I find out more?

Right.

Well, I know we've gone over time.

But what I'd like people to do instead of remembering me as that that bloke that used to work on armour until the Freemasons caught up with him,

is I now work on art history and I publish books on art history.

And if you go to my website, that's Chris dobson dot it Chris dobson all one word dot it.

You'll find the books I produce there.

You'll find the podcasts are now producing.

I've written three books about the art and history of Florence to date.

And there's a new one coming out that one about the paintings about the Battle of San Romano that I mentioned earlier.

That's coming out around Easter.

It would be lovely if people would hop over to my website and they can find out all about me there.

They can also find my podcasts on YouTube, Brighton, BitShoot, Odyssey, you know, the usual suspects and they can find me on Substack as well.

Chris dobson, thank you for joining me in the trenches.