6. _English from the Norman Conquest._--It is unnecessary here to trace in detail the history of European armour in the middle ages and after, but its use and fashion in England may illustrate the broad lines of the gradual perfection and the hurried abandonment of the ancient war-harness. Each country gave its armour something of the national character, the Spanish harness being touched with the Moorish taste, the Italian with the classical note borrowed from the monuments of old time, and the German with the Teutonic feeling for the grotesque. [FIG. 4.--From the Bayeux Tapestry.] 11th-century Bayeux tapestry. To understand the development of English arms and armour it is well for us to consider carefully the fashion of these things at the time of that landmark of history, the Norman Conquest. Poets, chroniclers and law-makers give us material for their description, and in the great embroidery of Bayeux, with its more than six hundred lively figures, we have pictured all the circumstances of war. We find that weapons and war gear have advanced little or nothing beyond the age which saw the Dacian warrior armed from crown to foot. A knight is reckoned fully armed if he have helmet, hawberk and shield; his weapons are sword and lance, although he sometimes carries axe or mace and, more rarely, a bow. The coat of fence, which the Norman called _hawberk_ and the English _byrnie_, hangs from neck to knee, the sleeves loose and covering the elbow only, the skirt slit before and behind for ease in the saddle. The Bayeux artists (see fig. 4) commonly show these skirts as though they were short breeches, the hawberk taking the fashion at first sight of a man's swimming dress, but other authorities set us right, and towards the end of the tapestry we see men stripping hawberks from the slain by pulling them over the head. Back and front are so much alike that he who armed Duke William for the fight slipped on the armour hind side before, an omen that he should change his state of a duke for that of a king. The hawberk might be mail of woven rings, of rings sewn upon leather or cotton, of overlapping scales of leather, horn or iron, of that jazerant work which was formed of little plates sewn to canvas or linen, or of thick cotton and old linen padded and quilted in lozenges, squares or lines. There are indications that the hawberk was sometimes reinforced at the breast probably by a small oblong plate fastened underneath. Its weight is shown in the scene where William's men carry arms to the ships, each hawberk being borne between two men upon a pole thrust through the sleeves.