What kind of armour would an English man-at-arms have worn about the time of the first battle of St. Albans in 1455? While question may sound simple and straight forward, the answer took more than 3 years to fully realize. The greatest obstacle was the fact that almost no armour of verifiably English manufacture has survived from the fifteenth century. Who better to ask than the foremost experts on the subject: Dr. Tobias Capwell, curator of arms and armour at the Wallace Collection? Dr. Capwell has spent years studying ...
Last month I joined scores of other medieval re-enactors at the Oak Grove War Memorial Walking Trail, site of this year's The Days of Knights event. The mile-long trail weaves in and around a wooded park that serves as a frisbee golf course. The encampment was laid out chronologically along the trail like a visual timeline of European history from the Vikings to the early Renaissance. It was also my first opportunity to meet a number of well-known personalities from Facebook and YouTube. Among them were Ian LaSpina of Knyght Errant, ...
Several months ago I made a fairly important resolution for 2017. This was not one of those half-hearted pledges to give up some enjoyably bad habit most people make on New Year’s Day only to succumb to temptation a few hours later. To be fair, like more than a few other resolutions I have previously made, there was not exactly a considerable amount of critical thinking involved. Nevertheless, it would require a major personal commitment to accomplish: I was going to the Days of Knights this year. Several months ago I made a decision ...
The decision to commission a new harness was finally made real in January 2015. It was important that it be as historically accurate as possible without having to pawn all of the wife’s heirlooms. It was also hoped to reproduce a complete harness rather than a composite one that had been assembled from multiple decades. That greatly reduced the number of options available. In the end, the best choice was the harness once owned by Friedrich I, Kurfürst von der Pfalz, often referred to as Frederick the Victorious ...