Henry VIII founded the Royal ‘Almain’ Armoury at Greenwich in 1515 in order to build quality armour primarily for himself and occasionally for his allies, armour to match notable harnesses made for his princely contemporaries and rivals in famous workshops on the Continent. But in order to do this, he was forced to recruit skilled craftsmen from abroad, where there was a strong tradition of armour manufacture going back centuries, particularly in Italy, the German lands and the Low Countries. Following the King’s commands, his envoys and agents searched various workshops in Europe in order to recruit gifted men for the job, men willing to come and work in England. This venture finally resulted in the foundation of a distinctive workshop of armourers at the Royal Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, known as the ‘Almain’ Armoury, a name given because of the north European languages and dialects the men spoke. And this Greenwich ‘Almain’ Armoury, with its ‘Master Workmen’, became one of the best in its field for one hundred years.

One has to wonder where all the armour from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that is no longer preserved might have gone. The article presents some forms of repurposing discarded pieces of armour. The focus is on two helms of the fourteenth century, which were secondarily used in a fire hood. The new finds not only tell an interesting story, they are also rare representatives of a once widespread type.

The aim of this article is to examine in detail a Swiss baselard in the Royal Armouries collection, IX.3482. The original catalogue entry for the object described it as a 14th or early fifteenth century English baselard. However, by comparing IX.3482 with similar examples held in Swiss institutions, monumental effigies and contemporaneous artistic depictions, this article will seek to establish a more accurate identification, reinforced by careful analysis of previous scholarship. In addition, the article will also seek to further explore the broader typology of baselards, focussing specifically on the Swiss sub-types and how we might clarify both the typology, and the terminology currently applied to them.

Literature and popular media in the past decade have served to introduce the broader public to the infra-red night vision developments of the Second World War, yet focus has primarily fallen upon those devices made and used by Germany and the USA. Through archival research this paper explores the British perspective, detailing the history and design of an infra-red weapon sight produced experimentally before the war’s end, as well as the organisations and companies involved in the process. This is followed by an assessment of Britain’s immediate post-war efforts in the field, showing why it was instead American equipment which was used in Britain’s first martial deployments of infra-red weapon sights in the early 1950s.

This study presents the interpretation and contextualisation of apotropaic imagery and inscriptions found on two fifteenth century hammers for use on foot. One of them resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Acc. No. 14.25.1336). The other, its counterpart known only from archival sources, is missing from the collection of the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe (Acc. No. G43). The nearly identical form of both hammers and the character of the decoration engraved on their shafts suggests they were produced in the same workshop, perhaps even created by the same hand. Evidence described below supports the argument that the weapons may have been designed for judicial combat.

This eagerly anticipated and invaluable publication is the product of more than forty years of meticulous research by husband and wife team and founder members of the of the International Society f...

Few firearms have attracted as much attention, curiosity, and mythical attributes as the blunderbuss. Indeed, it often seems that fiction has overwhelmed the facts. To add to the mystery, the literature is conflicting with regard to defining exactly what a blunderbuss is, what it was used for, and how it performed. What is the difference between a blunderbuss and a musketoon? Is the blunderbuss really designed as a weapon of defence using whatever ammunition one might find in the garden? What was the real purpose of the flared bell mouth of the blunderbuss? Despite the extraordinary interest, the many extant examples of blunderbusses found in public and private collections, and the numerous related publications over centuries, it appears that virtually no properly controlled scientific studies have been carried out to address blunderbuss ballistics. Unfortunately, it was not possible for the author to carry out the carefully designed comprehensive experiments required for such a study. Thus, this article is a modest attempt to combine what information is available from some published blunderbuss ‘tests’, together with the results from more scientific forensic studies of the performance of sawn-off shotguns, and the addition some ballistic science and suggested scaling laws, to improve our understanding of blunderbuss ballistics.