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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2022
Alonso, Bishop of Burgos (d. 1456) was highly critical of those who revelled in
having many arms or in changing the conformation of them and devoting one's energy to discovering new pieces of armour and giving them new names so that if our ancestors arose from the dead they would not understand them.
en tener muchas armas ni en mudar el tajo de ellas y poner su trabajo en hallar nuevas formas de armaduras y poner nombres nuevos, que si nuestros antecesores se levantasen no los entenderían.
Descendants, as well as ancestors, find themselves in this same predicament. With obsolescence comes obscurity. An anonymous Scottish Lowlander's account of 1678 is telling. A large force of Highland soldiers, he relates, have equipment ‘of the most odde and anticque forme’. He definitely recognizes the names found in the national arming acts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but is uncertain of their meaning.
And truely I doubt not but a man, curious in our antiquities, might in this host finde explications of the strange pieces of armour mentioned in our old lawes, such as bosnet, iron hat, gorget, pesane, wambrassers and reerbrassers, panns, legsplents, and the like, above what any occasion in the lowlands would have afforded for several hundereds of yeers.
As a young novice setting out on a journey to understand the bewildering world of medieval arms and armour, I wrestled with a great deal of vocabulary. On approaching my generous and kind masters with a difficult or obscure term, this apprentice was often met with a ‘Don't know’, ‘Absolutely no idea’, and – most frequently – ‘Why don't you find out for yourself!’ A gauntlet thrown down in this manner had to be taken up.
Nomenclature and esoteric specialized vocabulary is a constant hindrance to the understanding of arms and armour. There is not space in this volume for a detailed analysis of etymological origins and development, including such phenomena as loanwords, nicknames, puns, homophones, and zoomorphisms. It is clearly a period of rapidly evolving terminology – there are fossil words from Classical Latin (galea, lorica, cirotheca), new vernaculars in French and English, and a peppering of words from further afield, for instance aketon, jazerant, and sparth.
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