A arm harness
 

Buying old armour is a risky business and things are seldom as innocent as we might like them to be. The spiraled knop on the cop is attractive and reassuringly gothicy . The four articulated lames with crenelated borders that make up the elbow are nicely articulated. This together with the neatly unexpressed turn and outwardly roped borders to the lower cannon might I would have thought argue a date of 1520 to 30?

The problem is the couter. You would expect the cop and the couter to be one and the same,. Not the couter hinged to the cop with a rather dubious nut and bolt. Also as this is a right arm the couter is currently fixed to the wrong side and it certainly fits a lot better on the correct side. The second less obvious issue is the top half of the lower arm defence. The three decorative borders to wrist encourage the idea that they belong together but the inwardly turned borders show that this is an addition of a later date. However the hinges are well worn, and at least one appears undisturbed . The style and execution roughly matches that of the couter. A neatly executed intarsia patch shows where the original hinge was which is surely something a Victorian assembler wouldn’t have bothered to do.

So the questions are, does anybody think these later parts constitute a repair and re use of an earlier armour or one more recently composed? Their are admittedly some replaced rivets. Secondly, how was the elbow of the original arm closed? It is difficult to imagine it didn’t have some form of couter but there is no obvious evidence of it having been cut away.