Ebook: Medieval Military Costume: Europa Militaria Special No. 8

Historians differ in their reckoning, but for the purposes of this book the period we call medieval is taken to run from 1000 AD until 1500. After a necessarily brief introduction to post-Norman Conquest subjects we try in these pages to reconstruct the appearance of the ordinary European soldiers during the last 300 years of that period, and (again briefly) that of the women who followed them to war. We look at the everyday dress of the warrior classes rather than high fashion, at the common soldier rather than the mounted knight, at armour of the less expensive kinds rather than the magnificent harness of the nobleman. It goes without saying that this vast subject deserves a much larger book than this.