. A history of the art of war, the middle ages from the fourth to the fourteenth century . T OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES [1230 plate armour. In the battle-piece from the celebrated Lives ofthe tzio Offas^ in the British Museum (Plate XX.), KingOffa himself wears defences for his knees and greaves of platestrapped above his chain-mail hose. One of the defeatedenemies, who is receiving a spear-thrust in the throat, has avizor of plate curiously fitted on to the front of his chain-mailcoif—a composite head-dress much less common than eitherthe plain coif or the massive pot-helm. The o.^gy of Willia
. A history of the art of war, the middle ages from the fourth to the fourteenth century . T OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES [1230 plate armour. In the battle-piece from the celebrated Lives ofthe tzio Offas^ in the British Museum (Plate XX.), KingOffa himself wears defences for his knees and greaves of platestrapped above his chain-mail hose. One of the defeatedenemies, who is receiving a spear-thrust in the throat, has avizor of plate curiously fitted on to the front of his chain-mailcoif—a composite head-dress much less common than eitherthe plain coif or the massive pot-helm. The o.^gy of Williamde Balneis, from the cloisters of the Annunziata at Florence(1289) (Plate XIX. B), gives decidedly more plate than therepresentation of King Offa. He is protected to the thigh, andnot merely to the knee, by highly-ornamented plates girt onabove his mail. It will be noticed that his mail gloves havefingers, and not merely the mitten-like divisions betweenthumb and fingers shown by Offa and his knights as well asby the figures of the early part of the thirteenth century. 1 Nero. D. > h en D 2 H 2 * a cfl u < X b. h O CO O & U H H < Ci) U X u h I b. h O €f^ CHAPTER VII FORTIFICATION AND SIEGECRAFT (11OO-I3OO) IN the third, fourth, and sixth chapters of our Third Bookwe indicated the causes which led to the rehabiHtationof miHtary architecture in the West after nearly five centuriesof neglect. Under the stress of the concentric attack fromViking, Magyar, and Saracen, which was at its worst between850 and 950, all the peoples of Latin Christendom had beencompelled to avail themselves, to the best of their power, of theresources of fortification. Hence came the patching up ofcountless Roman walls in every region between England andApulia; hence, too, the erection of the palisaded burhs andburgs of Edward the Elder and Henry the Fowler, and thefencing in of the innumerable private strongholds of the feudalaristocracy of Europe. Down to the eleventh century it is not
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade189, booksubjectmilitaryartandscience
