Basic Information
Plate armour is, unsurprisingly, armour made from metal plate - discrete, rigid elements cast, forged or cut from metal. Individual pieces can be replicated in boiled leather or even wood, but this entry applies primarily to metal.
Plate armour begins with the earliest industrial use of metals, reaches its achme in the Full plate armour of the late middle ages and early renaissance and lived on into the twentieth century as munition plate. The terminology of plate may yet be revived for power armour and might occasionally be used by those than understand it for modern harnesses such as riot armour.
The following elements of plate armour are generally accepted to have existed:
- Helmet
- Gorget (neck protection)
- Breastplate/backplate or
- Cuirass
- Plackart - a seperate belly plate.
- Faulds or tassets/culet, "skirts" of articulated plate depending from the breastplate or cuirass.
- Ailette - early form of shoulder protection, ancestor of the pauldron.
- Pauldron or spaulder protecting the shoulder.
- Besagew or roundel protecting the joint between pauldron and breastplate.
- Bracer or vambrace - sometimes divided into upper and lower canons or vambrace and rerebrace - protecting the arm.
- Gardbrace - a type of over-pauldron, sometimes fitted as an alternative to the besagew.
- Cowter - a piece of plate protecting the outside of the elbow, sometimes called a cop.
- Gauntlet - an armoured glove, frequently not made of plate.
- Cuisse - covering the upper leg.
- Greave or schynbald - covering the lower leg.
- Poleyn - essentially an armoured kneepad, sometimes called a knee-cop.
- Sabaton or solleret - a plate armoured shoe.
…although not all of them will necessarily appear in any given suit. Note that these are primarily anglo-french names for them (as befits an English speaking wiki) - other cultures will tend to have more or less the same pieces under different names. Many of the smaller pieces will only tend to appear as part of a suit of plate, with the exception of the ailette, which was pretty much only seen worn over a coat of mail and had been superseded by the pauldron by the time plate became widespread.
Pieces of plate armour may be - and traditionally were - worn over pretty much any kind of flexible armour and even fully articulated suits filled gaps between plates with patches of mail and/or soft leather.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Note that making larger pieces of plate requires significant metallurgical skills - iron and steel, in particular require significant advances before plate becomes viable - typically the sort of large metal ingots that can be cast by a blast furnace. Whilst it is possible to forge weld an iron breastplate from the iron nuggets produced by a bloomery, it is not quick, easy nor as effective. This means that any setting where iron or steel breastplates are commonplace must have access to the blast furnace or equivalent technology.
- Frankly, even casting a bronze breastplate is a non-trivial piece of metalworking by the standards of its time.