“Authorised Guide” to the Tower and its contents, I am indebted for much of the following information. [Illustration: _Horse and Foot Armour (XVIᵗʰ. Century)_] Although not to compare in extent or importance with the great collections of Madrid, Vienna, or Turin, the armour in the White Tower must be, to an Englishman, of great interest, for, although none of the suits of armour date further back than the fifteenth century, and but very few single pieces are of an earlier epoch, there are among the former, suits of great beauty and of high historic value, and it is the only national collection of armour that England possesses. As far back as the year 1213 arms and military stores were kept in the White Tower. In that year Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, was commanded to surrender with the fortress “the arms and other stores within”; in the second year of Henry the Third’s reign, a mandate was issued to the Archdeacon of Durham to send to the Tower “twenty-six suits of armour, five iron cuirasses, one iron collar, three pair of iron fetters, and nine iron helmets.” In the reign of Edward II. we find that a certain “John de Flete, Keeper of the Wardrobe in the Tower,” was ordered to deliver up all the armour therein to John de Montgomery. This armour had belonged to Montgomery’s father. Various documents are extant relating to armour in the Tower during the reign of Richard II., and in those of the fourth, fifth, and sixth Henrys. There is, in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, an inventory in MSS. of the arms and ammunition kept in different castles in the kingdom, written in the first year of the reign of Edward the Sixth. In this work particular mention is made of some “brigandines” in the Tower. These were military jackets. Other offensive and defensive weapons are enumerated, such as targets, pole-axes, “great holy water sprinklers” (a kind of stave with a cylindrical-shaped end, “and with a spear-point at the top,” according to Meyrick). In the reign of Elizabeth, we hear of cross-bows and arrows in the Tower, of “bow-stones” and of “slurbowes,” as well as half-a-dozen different kinds of armour.