Armour & Weapons
Charles Ffoulkes, in addition to being the first full time curator of the Royal Armouries, wrote many articles and books. The most well-known of these is The Armourer and his Craft which has been a valuable resource for the research and reproduction of armour. One can therefore expect similar quality of writing from the recently reprinted Armour & Weapons. Ffoulkes does not disappoint in the quality of work in Armour & Weapons, though it is a brief work. Armour & Weapons is a slim volume of only 112 pages. With the index, preface, and eleven plates, the text itself runs less than one hundred pages. These pages are densely packed with information and the book does provide useful information.
The work is organized into seven chapters, six focusing on various periods in the development of armour and a final chapter on weapons. These chapters follow a logical progression of early armour to the late periods and what Ffoulkes refers to as the Decadence of Armour.
The first chapter focuses on the early period of armour. However this focus is Anglo-centric and begins in 1066 with the armour in use by the Norman invaders under William. While this does provide a valuable and useful collection of information, it ignores the earlier periods of development and even the well documented Roman armours. Ffoulkes does acknowledge that mail had been around for centuries prior to the Middle Ages, without actually going into them in any detail.
The next chapter focuses on the transition period of armour. Here Ffoulkes brings in many illustrations and plates to illustrate his points. These illustrations are mainly line drawings with a few photo plates added in when available. This alone makes the book useful as quality illustrations of armour can be hard to find. Ffoulkes covers many of the expected information here, describing the practice of placing plates over mail as increased protection.
There are other chapters that shift the focus away from the development of the armour. These chapters are perhaps the most useful of the book. In particular Ffoulkes goes into great detail naming and describing individual pieces of armour. For an example of this one can see on page 48 an illustration of a full suit of plate with each plate being identified. This information when combined with information about the design, construction and wearing of armour makes Armour & Weapons valuable for students and scholars working on topics on armour and armourers.
The only thing that seems curious and out of place is Ffoulkes reaction to later parade armours. Ffoulkes animosity toward the ornate armour is surprising. Rather than celebrating the skill that went into creating the delicate folds of steel he derides the armourers for creating an armour that would be useless in battle. Aside from this disdain for ornamental armour Ffoulkes is able to keep his judgments out of his work, no small feat for a history written in 1909.
In general Armour & Weapons doesn’t provide any information that can’t be found elsewhere and very little that most scholars won’t already know. The value of this work is there for a more general audience or specialists, most others will find the information that they need elsewhere. In particular Ffoulkes later work The Armourer and his Craft has much of the same information including the illustrations but in a more comprehensive and expansive form.