particular suit or suits ascribed to a great ancestor, but this is nearly always romance. It is an uncommon advantage to find a harness dated with the year, as some few are. There is a suit of this kind in the National Museum, Munich, with the date 1597 inscribed, and others at Nuremberg and Berlin. The more that is seen of armour, 1560–1600, the greater is the difficulty in many cases of fixing any approximate date, or arriving at any standard for suits covered by the period. Many suits were restored again and again, and this naturally gives rise to great perplexity. With this period closes the pre-eminence in the field of the knightly order, as such. [Illustration: Fig. 26.--Suit by Peter von Speyer of Annaberg, dated 1560.] The decline of armour may be said to have already commenced contemporaneously with the period of its greatest elaboration, in the sense that half-armour began to be freely worn early in the second half of the sixteenth century, indeed, a figure of a Swiss halbardier, given in Holbein’s “Costumes Suisses,” of the first half of the century wears merely a light sallad, with cuirass and taces; and the rank and file of pikemen, billmen, and harquebusiers generally bore a similar equipment. Even the “Allecret” description, which is half-armour, was greatly used by the leaders of companies and mercenaries generally; while what might constitute a battalion or combined body of troops was often under the command of a captain belonging to the knightly order, still armed cap-à-pie. The fact is, that full armour could not be constantly worn during a long campaign as then conducted without injury to health, and its use became more and more restricted to the knightly order and men-at-arms, who were not generally exposed to the same hardships as the common soldier. The man-at-arms of the sixteenth century became the pistolier and cuirassier of the seventeenth, and then wore half-armour. The example of demi-armour (Fig. 27), sometimes called “Allecret,” dates from late in Queen Elizabeth’s reign; but a demi-harness, with other details, was worn much earlier, and notably by the German Landsknecht and the Swiss. The main features of this suit are that there are elbow gauntlets, a fashion adopted from the Asiatics; and that the gorget and épaulières are riveted together. The specimen under discussion is probably of English make. A shirt of mail was possibly worn beneath it, but this defence was generally dispensed with by the end of the sixteenth century. The “Triumph of Maximilian” shows leaders of footmen wearing half-armour. Black and white demi-armour was very common at this time, and an interesting example of this description is given in Fig. 28. Its general characteristics are as follows:--The burgonet is open, and the gorget, which is riveted to the épaulières, has two laminations at the neck, around the highest of which is a corded rim. The breastplate is short, with a projection over the navel.