The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of mediæval accoutrement. From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected the armed man, and our word _mail_ is French for links, and nothing else. In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman Conquest. But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side. We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great blazonry. The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and in their dependants the appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers. But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends. Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that shields, even the horses' armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.