Search our website
Key in a search term below to search our website.
Key in a search term below to search our website.
Closed helmet: Worn by knights from the later medieval period onwards. Steel, Italian, 16th century.
The combatants sat opposite to each other, face to face, with couched lance and closed visor, the human form so completely enclosed, that they looked more like statues of molten-iron, than beings of flesh and blood.
War mace: For close combat against armour. Steel, German, 16th century.
‘False Norman churl!’ said Gwenwyn, swinging around his head a mace of prodigious weight, and already clottered with blood, ‘thy iron headpiece shall ill protect thy lying tongue, with which I will this day feed the ravens’.
Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe’s combat with Templar Brian de Bois Guilbert. By artist and computer games illustrator Gary Burley, using 19th-century etching techniques. Artwork © Gary Burley
When the field became thin by the numbers vanquished, the Templar and the Disinherited Knight at length encountered hand to hand, with all the fury that mortal animosity, joined to rivalry of honour, could inspire.