He became an apparently impregnable tower of steel, immovably fixed in a huge saddle. The student of armour must carefully discriminate between these tilting suits and actual war harness; the former were never used upon the field of battle, although at times we know that certain of the tilt defences were borrowed in order to reinforce the usual harness. The fifteenth century witnessed the inception and almost the culmination of the idea, and a few of the tilting suits of the latter part of that era are still extant. Fig. 310 represents the upper portion of a suit of tilting armour from the collection in the Museum in Vienna; it dates from 1480, and is eminently typical of the period. The half-suit, No. 21 (Fig. 418) in the Wallace Collection, is very similar to the suit illustrated. The great tilting heaume is composed of three plates of varying thickness, ranging from nearly half an inch in the principal portions of the front to an eighth of an inch in the back. A comb, convex in section, runs down the centre of the crown, and radiating flutings are seen to ornament the back. The neck of the heaume is firmly fixed to the backplate, and three screws serve the same purpose in front for the breastplate. The occularium, formed by the aperture between the crown plate and the front, appears somewhat large when seen in this position, but remembering that the lance is held considerably lower than the heaume it is possible that an opening half an inch or even less would be presented to it. It was quite possible to have comparative freedom of movement for the head inside the heaume, which was invariably furnished with a quilted lining. [Illustration: PLATE XXI* War Armour, early Seventeenth Century, Milanese make Armour of Prince Philip II., German make, 1549 _A. F. Calvert_] [Illustration: FIG. 311.--Queue. (Wallace Collection.)] [Illustration: FIG. 312.--Queue, vamplate, and lance. (Tower of London.)] [Illustration: FIG. 313.--Polder mitten. (Tower of London.)] [Illustration: FIG. 314.--Garde-de-bras. (Wallace Collection.)]