The medieval inventories of the Tower armouries 1320–1410

This research project arose from the need to provide an edition of the manuscript inventories of the privy wardrobe at the Tower. Though these are an important source for the study of arms and armour during the first half of the Hundred Years War only small parts of them, mainly the sections connected with the development of the first firearms in England, have been edited and published. Core to the project is the edition of two examples of the documents, selected from the whole corpus: one account and an example of an indenture between keepers.
The arms and armour found in the edited texts are analysed in the main body of the work, which draws on the other privy wardrobe documents in The National Archives and the much wider study of arms and armour of the fourteenth century to place them in the context of the development both of arms and armour and of the role of the privy wardrobe during the period. The study resolves a recent debate by showing that an armoury in which stocks of weapons were kept on a long-term basis was established at the Tower in the later 1330s. It reveals a profusion of hitherto unnoticed detail about the armour and arms of the fourteenth century, resolving a number of debates and providing substantial evidence for the further study of others.