De Re Militari | Book Reviews

Alan Williams

The Kinght and the Blast Furnace:

A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period

History of Warfare, 12. (Leiden: Brill, 2003) xii+954 pp. ISBN 90-04-12498-5. €239/US$323.

Only rarely does a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, get published in its entirety and not subject to the vagaries of the publisher or the marketing department. The Knight and the Blast Furnace is one such book. At more than 950 pages in length and over 3kg in weight, it is the summation of the work carried out by its author on the analysis and technology of armour. Travelling with his microscope and test equipment over the past 30 years, Alan Williams has been a constant visitor to arms and armour museums all over the world. His invariant theme has been the analysis and identification of the metal from which armour was made and the elucidation of the manufacturing processes to which it was subjected. His concern is with the quality of not only the material itself -- whether it is iron or steel -- but in the way it has been subsequently treated by the armourer to improve its hardness and toughness. These he sees as indicative of the quality of the industry, its technological prowess and its striving to produce better products.

This book brings together the fruits of this Herculean labour - the metallography of over 600 pieces of armour, arranged by where they were made and by date. For each piece we are given the details of the armour itself, a photograph of the piece and of the microstructures of the metal. There is then a short note of what the micrographs tell about the piece and what the treatment would have been. With over 600 pieces of armour listed in this way the result is an enormous body of data on medieval and early modern armour making. As such this work cannot be rivalled. The sheer quantity of information contained within its covers is truly phenomenal. It presents us with the largest single body of data on medieval and early modern metallurgy of armour and as such is a unique achievement.

Drawn from published works, a synopsis of the history of the making of armour and the various workshops in each geographical area precedes each section,. There then follows a summary of the results of the analyses and what this means for the quality of the armour produced as well as the level of ability, technology and working practices of the workshops in which each armour was made. Also included are sections on such areas as guns and gunpowder, bows and, most important, the quality and effectiveness of armour.

In many respects this work is an incredible achievement, bringing together the results of the analysis of several hundred pieces of armour. The sheer quantity of information provides not just the foundation of the subject but the basis from which future researchers can both build and develop further research. It provides, too, one of the most spectacular collections of micrographs of late medieval and early modern iron and steel – a collection that will serve as a reference in other areas of ferrous metallurgy. It poses, as well as answers, questions on areas of research which could hardly be dreamt of in the past. In short we have here a work which will serve for future generations.

However it is not without its problems. Williams draws conclusions from the analysis of one tiny area on a piece of armour and then takes this as indicative of both the whole piece of armour and, occasionally, for a whole suit or garniture of armour. Here we have an example of technological synecdoche: the implied assumption is that the results obtained from that one piece are characteristic of the whole. In an attempt to address this issue Williams does offer examples of some armours for which he has been able to analyse several pieces, in which all the various elements are made from broadly similar materials and have broadly similar heat treatments and from this he concludes that the analysis from a small sample is indicative of all armour production. Whether this is true writ large, though, cannot be proved. Medieval and early modern materials in general, and iron and steels in particular, are notoriously heterogeneous. Indeed, detailed work by this reviewer [1] has shown that the surface hardness of a single breastplate can vary very widely over its entire surface. Another problem is the way that the data gathered is used to interpret the wider use and effectiveness of armour. While he presents data on the attack of armour by swords and guns, a very technological analysis, there is no attempt at any integrated arguments for the changing face of battle or warfare to include changes in organisation, state formation, social factors or the myriad of factors which must have added to the way that wars and fighting changed through the three centuries or so under discussion.

There are also some peculiarities in the production of the book itself. For such a lavish and expensive book, the way that the information for each piece of armour is presented is somewhat haphazard – it is not always in the same order nor is all the same information given. Especially irritating is that there is no differentiation in typeface or format for such things as headings and titles within the main section of analyses. Coupled to this is the way that tables are formatted and arranged. Frequently these run over at least one page, sometimes as many as three, and there is no running heading. Though these seem trivial points they make using the book often difficult and, occasionally, confusing. And this brings on to the other strange facet of the book – the amount of wasted space. The book is a reasonably large format overall but the amount of space used per page is often very small with the result that there is a great deal of blank paper. While on the one hand this gives the whole an uncluttered appearance it means that many of the photographs are very small, making details difficult to discern. Finally, bibliographic details are given at the end of each section but there is no general bibliography making finding details of the cited works sometimes difficult.

That this is a wonderful achievement must be stated emphatically, but one wonders at whom is this volume aimed. The student of the history of technology and the armour scholar no doubt, but beyond that it is difficult to see. Having all this data together in one volume is quite simply astounding but it is an expensive volume and one which is often difficult to use. Having said that, though, and realising that it is all too easy to criticise, this work, whatever its minor faults, will stand as a monument to the ceaseless work of its author. Although others will continue to add data and illumine various aspects of this work, it will be a solid foundation on which to build.

References

[1] Robert D. Smith, “”.