Froissart throws some light on the military equipment and peculiarities of the Castilians of his day. From more than one passage in the _Chronicles_ it is evident that the sling, a weapon long discarded by other Western nations, was still esteemed in Spain, where the javelin also was a favourite weapon. We read, “‘By my faith,’ said the Duke of Lancaster, ‘of all the arms the Castilians and your countrymen make and use, I love the dart best, and love to see it used; they are very expert at it; and I tell you, whoever they hit with it, he must be indeed strongly armed, if he be not pierced through and through.’ ‘You say truly,’ replied the squire, ‘for I saw more bodies transfixed at these assaults than ever I saw before in all my life. We lost one whom we much regretted, Senhor Joao Lourenço da Cunha, who was struck with a dart that pierced through his plates and his coat of mail and a gambeson stuffed with silk, and his whole body, so that he fell to the ground.’” The address of the Castilians with the dart or javelin is again referred to at the attack on Vilha Lobos in 1386; while, at the battle of Najara, “the Spaniards and Castilians had slings, from which they hurled stones and crushed heaulmes and bascinets; in which manner they wounded many.” In another passage we are told that the troops were armed according “to the usage of Castile, with darts and _archegayes_ (assegais) and throwing stones from slings.” There is a tendency among certain historians to exaggerate the influence exercised by the Moors on the applied arts in Spain. So far as armour was concerned, it is clear that the Christians of the Peninsula, where they did not originate fashions, followed those of Italy, or in later times of France. They certainly did not look to Granada for a lead. And if the Spanish Moors had been such skilful armourers as some would have us believe, it is hardly likely that their kinsmen and neighbours, the Moors of Barbary, would have gone so poorly equipped as they seem to have gone in Froissart’s time. “For,” says Messire Froissart, “they are not so well nor so strongly armed as the Christians; for they have not the art nor the method nor the workmen to forge armour as the Christians do. Neither is the material, that is, iron and steel, common with them. Their armour is usually of leather, and at their necks they carry very light shields, covered with cuir-bouilli of Cappadocia, which, if the leather has not been overheated, no weapon can penetrate.”