The Lost King: Richard III's Armor @ The Wallace Collection, with Dr. Capwell

[Music] hi folks Matt Easton here scholar gladiatora and Dr Tobias capwell of the Wallace collection now at the moment there's a very special exhibition about Richard III and his armor um here at the Wallace collection which you can visit right now and totally free to visit and I highly recommend you do so tell us a bit about the exhibition how did this come about why is it on at the moment and we'll talk about the Armor after that yeah well basically in 2021 I was approached by the production company preparing a new film a new feature film called The Lost King and this is a a Whimsical dramatization of the events surrounding and leading up to the discovery of Richard III's grave and remains uh and it's the story of Philip belangway you know who led that effort and really promoted it and and was really the force behind it and it's her personal view of it in some ways although it's interpreted very much by the authors of the film Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope um and anyway I was brought in as the historical advisor for this project primarily because at some part of the film not to spoiler for people too much at some point in the film Richard III uh there's a view of Richard III as a knight as a leader at the Battle of Bosworth he he appears in different parts of the film in different guises but there's one moment when he appears with his Knights and his armor on Horseback and it's important for the way the film works that that glimpse of the warrior king Richard is is right it has to the The Producers really felt that it had to be an authentic image or as authentic as possible and you know about this kind of business you know how rare it is that a production company cares at all about such things most of the time feature films don't have historical advisor or if they do they don't necessarily have any intention of listening but here I was presented with this and they said look no this is really important to us and I said well it's going to cost you a lot more money than you were expecting to spend and they said it's important to us you know tell us what it's going to take so I said well the first thing is all the Armor's got to be real I am not going on to this with polyurethane and plastic I understand the virtue of the use of those materials in certain contexts but not as primary action not as foreground not for the central characters in The Forefront of the action a lot of producers directors you know directors of Photography they seem now to belabor themselves they're laboring under the misapprehension that polyurethane painted silver looks just like metal and it really doesn't yeah exactly so I thought if I'm going to do this this has also got to be a moment for me to put a different kind of armor image on screen at that point there's an interesting because one of your predecessors in many ways similar James Madison uh had it had a similar um experience with the movie industry do you want to for anybody who doesn't know explain a bit about that yes yes well as I was getting once I was on the project and as I was getting into the research by thinking okay what do I think Richard III actually wore at Bosworth you know when you do a reconstruction you suddenly have to make decisions you can't just say like a historian well it might have been this it might have been that we don't really know if you're going to build something you've got to make choices about all the nitty-gritty not just the style of the armor not just the heraldry but what does the Belt look like what do the shoes look like there might be no evidence of that but I had to choose all of that so there was this research process happening and I remember thinking this is turning into something a little more interesting than just costume work for a film and then I realized that actually there's a there's a longer story here actually the Wallace collection has this fascinating relationship with Richard III not with the historical Ridge of the third but with the myths and reimagined uh I I kind of I I kind of uh iconic image of Richard III yeah you know that the legend that we well there's but even if you know it's an imaginative process yeah when you look at history just one degree or another and we're always reimagining these people according to our own time according to the information that we have available and politics with Richard III as well right of course so the LA and interestingly the last time that there was an attempt made to put a historically legitimate view of Richard III on screen was in Lawrence Olivier's 1955 film of the Shakespeare play now you can see how people get confused with myth and reality right Shakespeare's play is the is the foremost Exemplar of the myth of Richard III very much demonizing him and you know accentuating one side of something written for the Tudor dynasty to tell of this terrible usurper from right yeah I mean wasn't writing history Shakespeare was writing popular fiction and he needed to sell tickets it's it's wrong by that point to call him propaganda or anything like that this is just a salacious fabulous Sensational story and what do writers of a fiction like that do when they're dealing with Mythic figures that have a historical basis what do they do the first thing they do is say what if it's all true right what if everything's true what if he killed everybody you know and what if what if he is the worst that you could possibly imagine right that's what Shakespeare does but Olivier is is is filming the Shakespeare play but in his whole production design he's trying to as Faithfully as he can recreate and evoke the 15th century the historical context of the real Richard III so you can see how people got confused or they have been confused more recently Olivier's film you know got millions of viewers when it was shown on television in America in the 1950s and that's that's more than the total number of stage audiences all the way back to the 16th century I mean the Olivier the impact of the Olivier film can't really be overstated right and it was a Wallace collection curator who worked on that film not me but Sir James Mann who was one of the 20th Century's great experts in European arms and armor he was the director of the walls collection he was the master of the tower armories uh yeah they worked for the Royal collection he's a towering figure at arms and armor but he was also Olivia's historical advisor on two films first on Henry V in 1944 and then on Richard III in 1955. so the Wallace at key points throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries has has had an influence A continuing influence on the way we imagine Richard III and of course those two movies you just mentioned the fifth and Richard the third are notable for their relatively speaking historical accuracy of the armor shown you know better than okay some of it was not necessarily made of uh steel or even metal in some cases but the overall shape and form and the the look of it um was better than countless movies in subsequent decades still is yeah still is I mean when people ask me where what's a good armor movie where they actually did it right it's Henry V every time Henry in Henry V most of the armor was methyl it was okay uh in the 1955 driver to the third film they made one big mistake which was to make the armor all of it out of rubber okay and even people who worked on the production when they were filming I found the accounts of you know filming the battle scene in Spain there are people on production who said this rubber armor is such a mistake it's such a nightmare it looks terrible it's bending all over the place and you know look at pictures of Olivier you can see that their patterns were right they were copying Wallace collection armor yeah um but it's Rubber and it looks it doesn't look good it doesn't move right I appreciate I can still see that they've done the homework and I can see what they're trying to do and I appreciate that but the rubber was a mistake and Olivier experienced that mistake in a very physical first-hand way uh when a stunt went wrong on the first day of filming there was a stunt where an Archer needs to shoot and kill Olivier's horse okay the horse dies falls down reaches the third jumps off and then it's a horse a horse you know they have to explain why he then has to deliver that speech so they had a big they had a big protective plate underneath the horse's comparison and they had a stunt man who was going to shoot a shoot an arrow into this protective plate you know Arrow sticks in the horse stunt horse balls over you're done uh except the stunt man shot Olivier straight through the leg shot him straight through the calf muscle oh my God and and so that's why you shouldn't make your armor out of rubber and if he'd been wearing the Henry V Armor he'd probably be all right well they sound like interestingly that scene the battle scene was the first part of the film they shot before they went back to London to Pinewood or else tree or wherever they were to shoot the interiors and the set scenes but you know Olivier all the way through that thing let me watch the film he's limping and he's limping not because it's a character effect but because he's actually limping because he's just been shot okay so moving forwards in time to uh 2021 I think you started on this um so tell us a bit about how this came to be okay well I'm the first thing I have to think about is what do what are we aiming for what is my best guess at that moment uh in regard to what Richard III would have worn at Bosworth and what he would have looked like what evidence is there what other decisions do we make and why do we make them and once we've established our goal then we have to work within the constraints of the production the main constraints being we got two months and that's it and we've got a limited amount of money um they've already they already upped the budget for this armor considerably but there's a limit to what can be done it isn't unlimited and making armor takes time it's not something you can just well not good armor anyway for any amount of money there's a Time factor and uh you know in the 1970s when they made lots of really fabulous historical epics they had like three years production pre-production time to just design and research and build now you're lucky if you get you know six or eight months and in this case I had two months so if a casual viewers who aren't necessarily armor experts if you're watching this video I think it's um also important to mention that for Richard III we don't have a surviving armor unlike Henry VII where we've got numerous or several harnesses uh and you know sketchbooks and paintings and representations we know what he was wearing at different times we know his body shape changed and how the armor had to change to accommodate that we just don't know this for richer than third do we so or for anybody yeah in the Middle Ages exactly so how do you come at this you know you're starting with nothing almost how do you come at it what's the first thing you do to try and decide what was Richard III wearing in 1485. well the first first do is think is there any direct evidence at all of any kind is there anything we know reasonably for certain and there is there is an eyewitness account of the battle of Bosworth uh written at second hand but still originating with a mercenary Captain Juan Salazar who worked for the habsburgs and then you know it was Spanish ended up in the yeah yeah um ended up in the service of Richard III and he was there as balls at Bosworth as a military advisor and his eyewitness report of the battle made its way back to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile slightly later okay and Juan Salazar is interesting because he advised Richard III to flee the battlefield when they could see that the Duke of norfolk's uh Vanguard was disintegrating he said look you got you gotta leave now yeah and Richard III famously said no I will stay as a king or die right um but Salazar also says that Richard III wore the Royal Arms on his coat what they call coat armor which is the as it's not armor it's an embroidered Circo that is for heraldic display yeah he wore that and he wore a crown on his helmet that's and the so whatever you do next your reconstruction has to agree with that those key primary description so the crown on the helmet is something we find you know that's mentioned in Henry V Asian cool kind of um context as well so we it seems to have been conventional for a monarch to wear a crown on the helmet for obvious reasons it's absolutely the long established medieval and probably pre-medieval precedent for kings and War leaders to make their presence on the battlefield as obvious as possible it's a Well understood medieval tenet of warfare that an army that has its king presence will win against an army that does not yeah the King has a huge huge personal effect on the battlefield uh he's he's the he's the candle that people follow in the dark and and and a lot of modern people say yeah but isn't he a Target well they didn't have long range sniper rifles in the 15th century even if you know where your enemy King is chances are there's not a lot that you could immediately and they're surrounded by the hardest toughest people that they can get with the best armor and the best horses and the good ones are trained Warriors themselves who are perfectly capable like defending themselves yes so the and regardless whatever the the disadvantages of a of a a leader being seen to be present might be the advantage is vastly outweigh it vastly yeah and and Richard III you know is a a special case where this was necessary he suffered from from problems of legitimacy there were always there were yorkists bleeding away from his household in 1484. people you know moving to the other side people questioning whether he had the right to be where he was so at Bosworth he needed to appear as God's anointed king on the battlefield and he needed to sweep down on his illegitimate rabble of an enemy um like like Saint Michael coming down out of Heaven yeah so that kind of imagery was especially important to him but not limited to him by any means yeah and in terms of the circuit which might by some people referred to by maybe tabard other names that might come up that you see there's all bandied around the terminology for these are garments is very messy yeah and the the medieval Richard III would have called that a coat armor yeah okay and that's the sermon I've published that in my book and I've talked about the sources for that the problem with that as a modern a term for modern usage is that it's not armor yeah you say coat armor and people rightly think of a protective garment but that's not what it is so I have fallen back on the habit of just calling it a Circo now you know etymologists will argue with that and think I'm wrong but I I just want to be understood that's the main thing yeah I just adopt a term that works for what I'm doing and the words arms and armorial also have the confusing because they relate to heraldry as well the College of arms and you know armorial bearings and these things we want to use historical terminology as much as we can but it's it's a Minefield and we also need to be understood so we know that then the next big question with building this armor is what style luckily in this case we know the period it's 14.85 right we know that but what style you know those your viewers who know something about armor already will know how quickly armor as technology but armor as fashion as well as wearable works of art it evolved very rapidly it evolved because of technical pressures and and Technical improvements but also because Fashions were changing the things people liked and wanted changed and I think this is something which is not necessarily widely known uh or clear to Casual viewers or people have a casual interest in the Middle Ages is that much like cars today you know we look at a certain car and we think okay that's that probably dates 15 years ago that dates 10 years ago that dates 30 years ago we know just by looking at the car and it would have been very very similar in the 15th century because you know armor in the 1450s looks distinctive from the 60s the 70s to the 80s and they're changing the whole time much like pretty much at a similar rate to cars today I'd say actually isn't it so if you put yourself in that mindset of you can look at a car and sort of instinctively you know just background knowledge you know roughly oh that's 15 years old it would have been similar for armor then yeah and there still would have been in 1485 there still would have been armors on the battlefield from the 1460s and 70s of course but not being worn by but not by the king yes because the king would have been had the brand new like with cars today would have had the brand new up-to-date thing not the the old one from 20 years ago when when he appeared at Bosworth everything about his image had to be a spectacular and Rich and luxurious and Splendid as possible Splendor and Glory are you know key words here um now we know I found there's a document it's in my next book that that shows us that late in 1483 not long after Rich III came to the throne he bought from Italian and Flemish Merchants 168 complete Italian armors that's a lot yes that each individual armor was relatively inexpensive but the bill still totaled up to 560 pounds which is a vast amount of money in the 15th century and this is not for him personally of course he doesn't need 160 so this is for his closest yes he's basically gearing up uh his household Knights and retainers and bodyguards to a standard that may exceed what they themselves were capable of affording out of their own means he's forming a very large fully armored bodyguard he was expecting trouble right and so we know that hey at Bosworth at least his people are fitted out with Italian and italianate armors and that's very interesting because Richard III at Bosworth departed quite dramatically from the traditional way of fighting by the English the English way of War for 150 years the English had emphasized the habit of taking their fully armed Knights off the horses and fighting on foot with their archers and and other infantry that was the Standard English way of doing it with specialized fighting weapons like polaxes and gloves the English were famous for their for their proficiency their love of the Polacks and the two-ended sword and there's probably a lot of Spears in there as well let's not forget the garden variety spear so that's what they've been doing they were capable of getting onto their horses when they needed to but it wasn't their standard method of deployment and at Bosworth it's really notable that Richard III chose to reserve himself with a body of heavy Cavalry his Knights and bodyguards and closest retainers the people he could count on we don't know how many he had it could have been about 150 it could have been as many as maybe 300 it's hard to be absolutely sure and people say oh well 300 is not very many 300 fully armed nights is impressive I guarantee you and it can still if it's applied properly it can still have a decisive effect on the battlefield and in later in the 16th century Tudor chroniclers who by later 16th century had some distance from the events in question they started to characterize Richard III's Cavalry action at Bosworth as an impetuous spur of the moment impulsive maybe ill-advised path yeah in the face of defeat at the end of the battle then going down in flames but that's not how heavy Cavalry action works no you can't do that you have to you have to plan it you have to set it up you can't just rustle up a Cavalry force and the cavalry charge your Knights don't have radios told and if what's going to happen and what they need to do when and the preparation for a fully armored Knight and their horse you know and all their hangers on all of their uh retainers that if you can get them there let's say you do have 300 fully armed Knights just go to the maximum that means you need like a thousand people at least involved in the prep just to get them there and you need to be on the right ground you need to have areas that you can reliably charge through to to achieve the effect and we know for a fact that Richard III got to the area of Bosworth the day before the battle he chose his ground the ground that we've now discovered through the archeology it's not up on a hill he's down on a plane he's at the top of a gently dropping rise it's perfect yeah he set the whole thing up yeah it was just a matter of when in the battle do we go when in the battle do we shoot off this horsepowered cruise missile right so the armor and equipment that they are choosing to aware has to be informed by that intention and that is invariably not the English style of the time but rather Italian or italianate armor French armor Flemish armor West Continental armor under Italian technological influence so just for a small tangent for a second before we come back to the armor for anyone who doesn't know Richard III was vastly experienced at Battlefield fighting wasn't he he was yeah I mean he'd fought he'd fought through the wars alongside his brother and fought all over the country as I understand it he had quite a good book collection of treatises as well he had um yeah and I think you know vegettias and things like that um so he was he was a basically a career Soldier wasn't he he wasn't just some Monarch and he hadn't been a monarch for very long uh but he wasn't just some Monarch who sort of left all of that stuff up to their commanders he was a soldier and even the most negatively biased chroniclers they the ones who have the worst things to say about him in the early 16th century they all agree that he was a great warrior and they all have a begrudging respect for the fact that he stayed on the battlefield and went down in flames yeah um you know not many kings do that in history the last one yeah in England so so back to the armor so um you came across a record talking about him purchasing these Italian and Flemish arms is it is it Flemish style armor made in Italy is or is it some Italian armor some Flemish armor what's that what's the detail of that well this whole project couldn't help but be informed by the final stages of my work on my armor of the English night project and the third book which is coming out soon is all about entirely the presence of Continental armor in England the degree to which the English used foreign equipment and when and why and of what different styles the third book which is all about this is longer than either of the other two right and it has the virtue of having some actual armor in it yeah but but that but but a piece of that work showed me that in the 1480s Flemish armor in particular typical of what was being made in Bruges for example the great armor-making city of Bruges was becoming the peak of fashion during Richard III's Reign I mean we we it's generally known that the yorkists were heavily influenced by the burgundians and they had a close uh they helped close family and diplomatic relations with the burgundians you know Edward IV and Richard III sister was married to The Burgundian Duke Charles absolutely yeah and in 1470 when Edward IV and Richard III had to leave England with the clothes on their back because of a lancastrian Resurgence under the Earl of Warwick they sheltered and Bruges Bruges is the major Center of armor production and it was also the home of Hans memling who leaves behind an extraordinary Corpus of the best most gloriously painted depictions of armor of that moment and we also have key English Effigy sources dating from the 1480s that show that as well okay so at that moment that is what's going on in Rich III's court and therefore I felt that we were right to make a Flemish style armor for him the Flemish armor of the 1480s is vaguely italianate but it's very distinctive in its own way and they do things a little bit differently and we've put those references on this armor okay I think so when when you were first telling me about this and lots of um sort of light bulbs are going off in my head I thought that makes so much sense of this manuscript commonly known as the beach and pageant manuscript in the British Library which you can view online actually in full glorious resolution um it makes so much sense of what we see in there and that does date too this sort of 1483-85-ish period that's not exactly this it may it there's a good case to be made for the patron of that work being rich the third's queen right who is a member of The Beacham family right okay yeah so Richard beecham was her grandfather so visually so visually that manuscript is sort of a prime bit of source material isn't it for this it's remarkable for showing uh everybody in that in that manuscript is wearing Flemish anglo-flemish armor of this period so we need I I felt as well as using my other Flemish sources we need to make this guy look like the beach and pageant so loads of people out in the world for decades I think have thought oh 15th century there's there's Italian armor and there's German armor and everyone wears either Italian armor or German armor because this is what people are used to seeing in museums because so much Italian armor and so much German Amazon what a lot of people don't realize is some other there's some Flemish almond there's lots of salads and things like that that come from Flanders burgundy um that's not the case is it as you've shown with your books there is an English style of armor there's definitely a Spanish Iberian style of armor um even within Italy there's some variation isn't there in North and in North and South um equally we see Italian armors made for export to Germany Italian armors made for export to England and France and so on so forth so it's actually way more complex I think um what do you see as the defining features of Flemish armor in this period so when we talk about Flemish armor suddenly becoming hugely popular in England how does it look different to English armor yeah okay well if we're putting ourselves at Bosworth and we're talking about Flemish armor at that moment in England uh the first thing is from a decorative first effect kind of point of view it has basically no fluting and that's already a huge contrast to the English armor of this period in Broad Strokes technically it's generally italianate they use they tend to use asymmetric pauldrons with a bigger more shield-like cauldron on the left and a lighter more mobile one on the right that's pretty typical which is quite a Cavalry setup really isn't it yeah absolutely so often for polax fighting we see even in Italy you see people switch to smaller symmetrical spoilers for just Chuck the plates all together yeah when the male sleeps yeah so traditionally okay in England we have had large puldrons we have had asymmetry but there was perhaps a slight tendency towards smaller or more mobile shoulders children that are more symmetrical yeah if they if English bulldrons have an asymmetry it's much less pronounced it might be just a small small Shield shaped it's going to be a little bit of a cut out in case your Lance ends up there but really we're fighting with that but the overall silhouette is quite symmetrical whereas you look at a something like the Advent harness in Glasgow it's sort of typical you know what 14th or 30s 40s um Milanese or Italian harness incredibly asymmetrical every bit of the arm harness almost is you know even down to the gauntlets and the the coated counters and the the poultry is all yeah so it has a broadly Italian silhouette but uh the Flemish armor is tend now to have symmetrical elbows okay that are usually of the three piece Type rear brace counter van buries so again for people who don't necessarily know so they're not necessary really directly articulated to each other no they're separate pieces that are all kind of are just attached Independence sometimes known as floating and that does arguably give you a bit less protection to solid impacts but it gives you more mobility and also from a modern sort of reenactor or Hema context it also gives you a bit more flexibility of size as well so it's more forgiving if you get a second hand armor it's easier to fit it to you with a hugely important point we have to think about the long-term wider practicality of the designs and and and and the the design being as good as it can be for as many people fighting in as many ways as possible and even if something's made to fit you send off your costs to Milan or brush or wherever and they make some armor for you and it comes back and it's a bit oh it's chafing a bit here it's more likely to be forgiving with these floating arm defenses so so then there are some other little divergences in the 40 1980s the Flemish armors were some of the first to introduce a solid one-piece breastplate we no longer have the lower plaque card and the upper breastplate strapped down in the center and kind of moving independently to something to some degree now they just say nope solid one piece breastplate is the new way to go it gives you a pure cleaner a simpler silhouette and it's aesthetically pleasing but it you know they're also able to do that reliably the skirt they do concede certain things to Western and possibly English taste they do sometimes make the skirts a bit longer uh they do sometimes still fully enclose the thigh you do see that on Flemish armor sometimes but not as really as consistently as on the English armor okay um there's there's a number of of little little details here and there I've gone into it in exhaustive detail in the book but that's all what we're trying to evoke with the rich of the third armor with helmets as well as some Tendencies with Flemish armor I think as well we sort of see strange I mean you've dealt with this in your second book actually some of these odd uh almost early close helmets I suppose yeah but some of them are a weird hybrid between a salad and a Armature all sort of mished and mashed together in different ways aren't they with unusual solutions for the visor and the neck defense those early close helmets as I think I showed in my book are distinctively a Flemish yeah Innovation um now some people might then look at him and say okay tell me well why isn't your richer the third wearing a Flemish clothes helmet you might ask uh well this is again where we encounter decisions that have to be made for a number of different reasons I made the decision to put our Rich the third in a salad uh for a couple of different reasons there are good historical reasons and there are filmmaking reasons the filmmaking reasons are that the actor has to deliver lines we don't have the budget to make a Flemish clothes helmet and we don't have the time to make a Flemish clothes helmet it's not as much of a priority as getting leg armor that fits because he's going to have to ride a horse so if I have the option to borrow a really nice Flemish style salad of the right period That's what I'm going to go with yeah so there's those reasons but there's actually another perhaps more important reason you know we now have the remains of Richard III his skeleton has been studied in you know exhaustive detail and you know the wounds that killed him were delivered to the skull without a helmet he was partially or entirely immobilized someone took his helmet off and cut off the back of his skull and stabbed him straight through the skull and that is but that that slicing action especially cannot have occurred with a helmet so they had to have gotten his helmet off and then there are these funny scratches on this side of his jaw and they're just kind of weird and yeah that maybe there could have been a number of things that led to that but um if he was wearing a Flemish clothes helmet with a plate right here scratching his jaw at least while the helmet was on was not a was not a possibility no but it is a possibility if someone's got a big dagger and just get trying to get it under there while he's struggling around to cut the chin strap yeah if you pause it that these scratches are evidence that he's wearing a a helmet with a chin strap that needs to be cut that's not a Flemish clothes helmet either because those don't have chin straps they um yeah okay yeah it's the closure and the fit of the neck plates that keeps it off yeah so again chin strap uh we also chose not to put a beverage on him I think Richard III when he's charging into the battle he had a bever yeah um but that's not what was going on in the film yeah he's just there armed on the battlefield waiting doing things and delivering lines and again money and time and actor needing to be able to deliver lines I gave him his nice English style standard also completely historical historically plausible because the first thing that comes off when you wear a salad and bever is the bever because it's easy to take off and it's just a nuisance it's nice to get it out of the way and I've documented in my work previously that there's many examples of bevers being jettisoned or just falling off accidentally in the course of battle and a number of pretty prominent noblemen are known to have been injured or killed as a direct result of losing their beverage yeah absolutely so that's all I think I I'm it's a tightrope act we're doing here we're walking this tightrope between maintaining the highest possible standards of authenticity and plausibility as we can but while working in constraints of budget and time and demands of the production so finally you decided what you wanted the arm to look like but you had certain constraints of what was available and you needed to get some of it made so what happened then well we couldn't we just didn't have the time or the budget to make the whole thing from scratch we had to be very clever about where we spent our budget where we spent our time and how we brought it all together there were some things that just had to be custom made you know Royal you know sir coats embroidered in gold with the lilies and leopards of England um don't you can't hire that we had to make that and it's important for it to look yeah right we also needed a you know a good arming doublet you're not going to get a good armor fitting right without a good arming doublet so the the arming doublet and the embroidered circoat were made by Ninja Michaela famous of the the Tudor Taylor um and who I've worked with a lot on a lot of different projects the hosen on his legs were made by Black Swan designs Gwen mauric in America yeah the shoes were made by NP historical Footwear who you know makes arming shoes for me and all my jouster friends um and I made the mail I knew that you know we're not going to have a beverage you know he's going to get a close-up whatever male he's got in his neck has got to be as good as it can be so I made that it's a six in one weave collar that's a pattern of one in the Wallace collection uh the six in one weave we find out a number of of English male callers as I've documented elsewhere in my book okay so I did that you know and um though we knew we needed to make the leg armor from scratch leg armor you know the subtle curves of the Greaves and the location of the knee you know the length of people's legs can vary a lot in different ways and this is an actor who's going to have to ride a horse and good on it the leg armor had to be right so I knew that a good amount of budget rightly went on the Lego armor similarly with the arms we needed good fitting arms that were of the right Flemish style you can see with the sir coat the shoulders and the kiras are covered but you know we've got to really pay attention to the exposed elements and the elbows are one of these Flemish things we talked about having these you know so-called floating elbows that's a reference I wanted in there to really anchor it stylistically so the the legs the tacits and the arms were all made by Fred rile in Liverpool and the lead actor uh Harry Lloyd previously seen on Game of Thrones and lots of other things he came down and had several fittings with us in Liverpool stood on stood on Fred's work bench wildly sculpted the Lego armor onto it um and then the rest of it was completed by hiring hiring pieces we got some pieces the the helmet and the shoulders and the body armor and the weapons from Griffin historical Mark Griffin yeah uh you know produces a lot of jousts and different historical events in in the UK and we hired the gauntlets from the Royal armories all right they actually the Royal armories hired us quite a few things we needed armored Saddles we needed more salads most of my jouster friends use clothes helmets and Helms and they didn't have salads we needed more salads so Royal armories really helped us out a lot and they have quite a big stock of because they do reconstructions and demonstrations they've got yeah so uh so that's kind of how it all came together and um and Fred Fred rile also made the crown uh you know crowns are tricky you know because they can look very kind of generic and sort of burger king-ish you know and I I wanted it was my stab at what does a helmet Crown a battle Crown actually look like yeah and I went back to the sources I looked at a lot of depictions in manuscripts of the period of crowns being worn on helmets and also just the treatment of the crosses and the lilies okay you know and I wanted I wanted it to look like a medieval person's take on the crosses not generic modern ones and and so that's very much our there's some examples in the beach and pageant I think aren't they yeah it depends on on helmets so yeah that's fantastic and and yes as you said you made the decision to leave the Beva off uh but for anyone again who doesn't necessarily know if you were in a cavalry charge wearing this get up you would normally have a bever which takes the lower half of your face you'd normally put your visor down but then in close combat uh all bets are off you might lift the visor up you might take the bever off and again in the film nobody says that Richard III is doing anything in particular he is he appears as a kind of vision yeah out of someone's imagination and he talks to the lead character and he's saying goodbye in all of his finery we can we can we can imagine that he's going off to Bosworth but it's not said in the film this just had to be Richard III appearing in his military guys so you know for a lot of reasons that are perfectly legitimate the bever the bever goes yeah so you know another thing that I was thinking during this day so within the UK there's a enormous community of people doing walls of the Roses reenactment getting a kit just right takes a long time but then of course you're doing a number of different battles at different dates it's problematic because if you're representing the high status individual you might have owned three harnesses in that you know between Tewksbury and Bosworth you might have three or four harnesses um but it would be good to see more people within this sort of English was the Roses reenactment sphere looking at Flemish armors wouldn't it because I think they've been neglected we see we see some people in sort of Gothic German which as far as we know there was none of in the wars of the Roses we see some people in Italian which is fine some people in English which is fine but it would be nice to see more of this sort of Flemish twist I think wouldn't it because there's some really interesting features on the Flemish armor yeah but you know people you know at any given moment are working with the sources that they have yeah and uh you know my you know the third and final part of my English armor project lays all of this out in a way that hasn't been available before yeah so I'm hoping to give people who are interested in this kind of thing more sources and more reference materials to make these kind of decisions if they mainly do Towson and that period this is the way you can think about going Bosworth there should be a lot more italianate French and Flemish armor on the field and particularly on the Tudor side there should of course be French armors shouldn't they because there was a huge amount of French support So this kind of Burgundian support on one side and friendship I should say that in my English English third part of the English night project I really um I started out even then even at that point with old misconceptions rolling around in my head and when I set out on this it was originally a 12-page appendix in my PhD yeah it was just Italian armor this is all all the Continental stuff in England is Italian I know there's no evidence basically at all for German armor in England it's probably all Italian I I did that yeah and then even when I'm preparing the final published version of that I'm still calling things Italian export Italian export Italian export and then I'm looking at certain individual things like The Beacham Effigy and Warwick for example yeah and I'm thinking that's probably not Italian at all right and actually this isn't Italian I'll start calling things italianate because they have a broad Italian hedge your bets I know for a fact that I'm I don't know it for a fact but I strongly suspect that I'm actually dealing with a lot of French materially yeah French armor made under Italian influence Italian armors had very close relations with the French court all the way through the 15th century there's a lot of French stuff going on this Flemish stuff here so quite late in the process I was frantically rewriting big parts of my book because I realized it wasn't as accurate as it needed to be yeah I think it is now but that's that's all you get now it's done so before we wrap up actually we should mention the book and obviously I'll put um a link below so where do we where do we stand at the moment with the book and what do people need to do okay where can they find it after nearly 25 years of work the English the armor of the English night project is finished uh people a lot of your viewers probably already know that book one was published in 2015 book two was published last year 2021 and book three is now on the runway on deck for printing um it's not printing yet because this is again a kind of unorthodox exercise and gorilla publishing the only way I could have total creative control over this production the only way it could be the way I wanted it to be in every respect was to circumvent standard normal publishing practices and not get involved with a big publisher but do this you know with Thomas Del Mar in London uh you know I've been collaborating with for years we do this it's a very tight operation Tom is the publisher me as the author designer printer that's what you get but to to pair that all down we really really repent on pre-orders just to fund the basic printing costs nothing else every cent that goes into uh from pre-orders goes into binding Printing and binding basically and that now in 2022 is phenomenally expensive eat a lot more expensive even than just last year so now at the very very last moment of this project I I've got a challenge here I don't have enough pre-orders yet lots of people have weighed in just in the last couple of weeks and it's been amazing but we still need like 50 more that may not sound like a lot but for our operation it's absolutely decisive yeah so we we've got to have those pre-orders before we can print the book every prior we get makes it come a little bit faster so basically check out the link below and pre-order the book if you can if you're intending to buy it at some point anyway then why not just pre-order it now because it will really help the book happen so cheaper yeah and it's cheaper as well so you get my internal gratitude and you'll get it quick quicker as well so you'll get it quicker and cheaper so you might as well order right now so um thanks so much Toby um I will be talking to you also um about um some other things but thank you so much um for this and everyone come and visit the uh exhibition obviously visit Wallace collection it's an amazing unrivaled collection in the center of London um and free and it's incredible um so check out the links below thanks a lot to Dr capwell and we'll see you again soon cheers folks bye everybody

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 157,897

Keywords: Tobias Capwell, The Lost King, Richard III, medieval armor, knight armor, Wars of the Roses, Matt Easton, Wallace Collection, scholagladiatoria

Id: K_aYeutZiyQ

Length: 51min 24sec (3084 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022