Such harness, ever growing more beautiful in its rich details, serves our champions until the beginning of the 15th century, when the fashion begins to turn. The scanty surcoat tends to disappear. It may be that during the bitter feuds and fierce slaughters of the Wars of the Roses men were unwilling to display on their breasts the bearings by which their mortal foe might know them afar. The horseman's shield went with the surcoat, its disuse hastened by the perfection of armour, and the banners of leaders remained as the only armorial signs commonly seen in war. But at jousts and tourneys, where personal distinction was eagerly sought, the loose tabard, which, after the middle of the century, bore the arms of the wearer on back, front and both sleeves, was still to be seen, with the crest of parchment or leather towering above a helm whose mantle, from the ribbon-like strip of the early 13th century, had grown into a fluttering cloak with wildly slittered edge streaming out behind the charging knight. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--Brass of Sir John Lisle at Thruxton.] When a score of years of this 15th century had run we find the knight closed in with plates, no edge of chain mail remaining in sight. The surcoat being gone we see him armed in breast and back plate, his loins covered by a skirt of "tonlets," as the defence of overlapping horizontal bands comes to be named (fig. 8). The chain camail has gone out of fashion, the basinet continuing itself with a chin and cheek plate which joins a gorget of plate covering the collar-bone, a movable viser shutting in the whole head with steel. The gussets of chain mail sewn into the leathern or fustian doublet worn below the body armour are unseen even at the gap at the hollow of the arm where the plates must be allowed to move freely, for a little plate, round, oval or oblong, is tagged to each side to fence the weak point. These plates often differ in size and shape one from the other, the sword-arm side carrying the smaller one. [Illustration: FIG. 9.--Gothic Style of Armour. Monument of Count Otto IV. of Henneberg.]