The armourer and his craft from the XIth to the XVIth century

Five centuries of smiths who turned steel into second skins. This is a book about the forgotten artisans who dressed medieval Europe for war, tracing their craft from the crude leather cuir-bouilli of the 11th century to the devastatingly beautiful plate armor of the Renaissance. Ffoulkes draws on archival records, surviving artifacts, and contemporary accounts to reconstruct a world where armor-making was neither mere craft nor mere industry but a high art responsive to the demands of warfare, fashion, and aristocratic status. We learn how plates were fitted and 'proofed' against weapons, how guilds regulated apprenticeship and quality, how markets from Milan to Innsbruck spread styles across the continent. But above all, this is a human story: the workshop hierarchies, the family dynasties, the economics of a trade that required extraordinary skill and commanded enormous prestige. For anyone who has ever stood before a suit of armor in a museum and wondered about the hands that made it, this remains an essential window into a vanished world.