there are few books extant which serve as a guide to the student, although there are many which deal with the subject. The great works of Meyrick, with Skelton his illustrator, are standard only in a sense that it is necessary to be thoroughly acquainted with the subject in order to guard against the many errors embodied in them. Grose is hopelessly antiquated, while Fosbroke, Stothard, Strutt, Shaw, Planché, Cotman, and others who flourished before or about the sixties, only deal pictorially or casually with the subject. The Rev. Charles Boutell by his translation of Lacombe did much to foster the study, but it was from a French point of view, and his epitome of English armour and arms, though excellent in its way, is only superficial, and a digest of his great works on Monumental Brasses. In the latter he probably did more to further the study than any preceding author; he was the first to rationally systematise the arrangement of armour in periods in consonance with the salient features it possessed, thus breaking through the previous methods of classifying it by reigns, which was obviously absurd, or by centuries, which was equally ridiculous. I have followed his method with but little variation in the pages of this book, inasmuch as no better arrangement is extant. It is a matter for great pride to myself that such standard works should have emanated from a former Hon. Secretary of the St. Albans and Herts Architectural and Archæological Society, and if the present volume should in any degree further the good work of my predecessor it will have achieved the height of my ambition. Hewitt is delightful reading, but his arrangement is unsystematic and involved; to the advanced student, however, he is invaluable. The later works of Demmin, Clephan, Gardner, &c., are masterly monographs upon the subject, but hopelessly out of place in the hands of a beginner.

It is with a view to rectifying this obvious requirement that the following pages have been compiled, and it is confidently anticipated that a careful reading and digest of each separate period of armour, supplemented with the study of local brasses, effigies, museums, private collections, &c., will enable the average student to attack the more advanced works upon the subject with equal profit and pleasure. It is perhaps necessary to caution the student of brasses against many existing cases where the armour shown is not essentially that of the period when the person died, inasmuch as many warriors in their old age requested that the armour delineated upon their monumental slabs should be that in which they achieved renown in youth or manhood. In other examples the brass was not executed until some time after the person represented had deceased, and details had undergone change in the interim; while cases are not unknown where the brass of one person has been taken to record the demise of another, perhaps many years later. A flagrant example of this may be cited in the brass of Peter Rede, d. 1577, in St. Peter’s, Mancroft, Norwich, who is represented in complete plate of the years 1460 or 1470, with visored salade, &c. Occasionally we find the artist exercising his powers of recollection with startling results, as in the case of the Wodehouse brass in Kimberley Church, Norfolk, 1465, but probably executed sixty years later. The knight delineated has a skirt of mail of 1490 with three fluted tuilles, very high pike-guards, a camail of 1405 or earlier, sabbatons of 1500, and a breastplate with placcate of 1470. Fortunately such vagaries are so apparent that the observer is placed upon his guard at once.

The average Englishman is probably more unacquainted with arms and armour than any other technical subject. Beyond a general idea that the Crusaders fought in mail, and the Wars of the Roses were waged by warriors clad in plate, his knowledge does not extend, and he consequently witnesses many startling