Towards the end of that century the armour of the man of war had reached perfection. Every kind of shield had now been given up as useless; plate armour furnished every necessary defence, for it was only when the armour was weak that any additional protection was necessary. Thus the Norman coat of mail, as worn by William’s invading army, presented in its species of trellis-work enormous gaps, and for his complete defence the horseman protected himself with a long shield in the form of a heart, which in action covered the whole of his left side--the side he presented to the foe. As the armour becomes more effective the necessity for a shield diminishes, and, after getting smaller and smaller, it at last disappears. The Artillery Museum contains a suit of armour by Turenne, which shows what plate armour had become at the end of the seventeenth century. It was abandoned altogether at the beginning of Louis XIV.’s reign; the last helmets worn in France and England belonging to the time when this head-gear formed part of the armour of Cromwell’s Ironsides. Among the innumerable specimens of arms preserved in the Museum of Artillery, portable arms are classed apart from those which strike at a distance, the latter including spears, javelins, bows and arrows, cannon, and every kind of fire-arm. The bow was the arm of the English, the crossbow that of the French. With the former the archer could fire more quickly, and it was easier to preserve the string from getting wet; of which the advantage was experienced on the English side during the battle of Crécy. The English retained the use of the bow long after the French had abandoned that of the crossbow; and, according to the director of the Musée d’Artillerie, English bowmen were seen in action as late as 1627, at the siege of Rochelle. Companies of archers disappeared from the French army under Louis XII., about the year 1514. The last time, however, that bows and arrows were seen in European warfare was at the battles of Eylau and Friedland, in 1806, when, according to M. Thiers (“History of the Consulate and Empire”), some of the Tartar troops in the Russian army appeared armed with these antique, and for the most part obsolete, engines of war.