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.