Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages: Third EditionCutts, Edward Lewes
History
Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages: Third Edition
Cutts, Edward Lewes
Civilization, Medieval; Middle Ages -- Social life and customs
Next we come to the rather large and important series of quilted defences.
We find the names of the _gambeson_, _hacqueton_, and _pourpoint_, and
sometimes the _jacke_. It is a little difficult to distinguish one from
the other in the descriptions; and in fact they appear to have greatly
resembled one another, and the names seem often to have been used
interchangeably. The gambeson was a sleeved tunic of stout coarse linen,
stuffed with flax and other common material, and sewn longitudinally. The
hacqueton was a similar garment, only made of buckram, and stuffed with
cotton; stiff from its material, but not so thick and clumsy as the
gambeson. The pourpoint was very like the hacqueton, only that it was made
of finer material, faced with silk, and stitched in ornamental patterns.
The gambeson and hacqueton were worn under the armour, partly to relieve
its pressure upon the body, partly to afford an additional defence.
Sometimes they were worn, especially by the common soldiers, without any
other armour. The pourpoint was worn over the hauberk, but sometimes it
was worn alone, the hauberk being omitted for the sake of lightness. The
jacke, or jacque, was a tunic of stuffed leather, and was usually worn by
the common soldiers without other armour, but sometimes as light armour by
knights.
In the first wood-cut on the next page, from the Romance of King
Meliadus, we have a figure which appears to be habited in one of these
quilted armours, perhaps the hacqueton. There is another figure in the
same group, in a similar dress, with this difference--in the first the
skirt seems to fall loose and light, in the second the skirt seems to be
stuffed and quilted like the body of the garment. At folio 214 of the same
Romance is a squire, attendant upon a knight-errant, who is habited in a
similar hacqueton to that we have represented; the squires throughout the
MS. are usually quite unarmed. In the monumental effigy of Sir Robert
Shurland, who was made a knight-banneret in 1300, we seem to have a
curious and probably unique effigy of a knight in the gameson. We give a
woodcut of it, reduced from Stothard's engraving. The smaller figure of
the man placed at the feet of the effigy is in the same costume, and
affords us an additional example. Stothard conjectures that the garment in
the effigy of John of Eltham (1334 A.D.), whose vandyked border appears
beneath his hauberk, is the buckram of the hacqueton left unstuffed, and
ornamentally scalloped round the border. In the MS. of King Meliadus, at
f. 21, and again on the other side of the leaf, is a knight, whose red
jupon, slit up at the sides, is thrown open by his attitude, so that we
see the skirt of mail beneath, which is silvered to represent metal; and
beneath that is a scalloped border of an under habit, which is left white,
and, if Stothard's conjecture be correct, is another example of the
hacqueton under the hauberk. But the best representation which we have met
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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