Crying over spilt Castlemilk: The Tale of Sir William and the Silver Sallet Part 4

This fourth, and the following piece, of this six-part essay examines the evidence available to provide an explanation as to where such equipment as Sir William Stewart of Castlemilk’s silver sallet may have come from: purchase and plunder.

Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s Silver Banner

Glasgow’s Mitchell Library holds an exceptionally rare document. It is a later copy of the now-lost original will made by Sir Robert Maxwell of Calderwood at Angers in 1420. Calderwood Castle (now demolished) was just seven miles south of Sir William’s at Castlemilk. The arms of the Maxwell kindreds are variations of argent (silver), a saltire sable.^[1]

Sir Robert bequeaths one armour (‘vna’ armatura’’), one Milanese-made hauberk (‘vnam lauricam de milam [sic]’), and ‘totam Integram armatura’ meam factam apud poictiers’.^[2] His ‘complete armour made at Poitiers’ is an enigma. There is, as yet, no information on armour production in this city. It must be borne in mind that there were places of production other than such celebrated urban centres as Milan. As the Baron de Cosson sagely advises in reference to one of the largest of the city’s family firms: ‘we must not get Missaglias on the brain’.^[3]

Indeed, A. V. B. Norman has convincingly argued that a pauldron (plate shoulder defence) in Glasgow Museums’ collection has a mark that is most likely that of a Milanese craftsman who had set up in Tours.^[4]

Pierre Terjanian has discovered that a sallet in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection was made by a previously-unknown craftsman in Basel.^[5] There are bound to be many more just waiting to be identified.

This bequest is evidence that Sir Robert had commissioned bespoke armour. Four of the harnesses (complete plate armours) purchased from our Tours-based Milanese – as identified in the second essay – were made to measure (‘harnoiz faiz à mesure’).

Not Scot-Free

Another glimpse of the goings-on in France is an entry in an inventory of an armourer’s workshop at Tours compiled in 1512. There is ‘one pair of gauntlets worth 2 écus, made for a Scot’ (‘une paire de gantheletz prisés deux escuz, fait pour ung Escossoys’).^[6] As with the makers and urban centres there must be much more documentary evidence of this nature in libraries and archives.

Armour and weapons might be acquired in the most unusual of circumstances. A good example is the extraordinary phenomenon of merchants being granted permission to purchase armour in London for a Scottish earl at exactly the same time as this formidable warrior was waging war against his English foe in the Borders.^[7] That Sir William may have paid for the silver sallet himself is a strong possibility. Yet there is another – a grim scenario that will be dealt with in the next installment.

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^[1] Those of Calderwood (‘de quarehut’) are recorded in Berry Herald’s Armorial on fol. 160r, as are other Maxwells on fol. 158r and fol. 161v. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b85285803/f327.item

^[2] Glasgow, Mitchell Library, T-PM99/1.

^[3] C. A. de Cosson, ‘Milanese Armourers’ Marks’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 36 (March 1920), 149-53 (p. 153). For more on the wide popularity of Lombard and South German products see R. Moffat, ‘Armour’, in A Companion to Chivalry, ed. by Robert W. Jones and Peter Coss (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), pp. 159-85.

^[4] A. V. B. Norman, ‘A Pauldron in the Scott Collection’, Scottish Art Review, 7 (1960) 8-11.

^[5] Pierre Terjanian, ‘Armor Made in Basel: A Fifteenth-Century Sallet Attributed to Hans Blarer the Younger’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 36 (2001), 155-59.

^[6] J.-B. Giraud, Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’armement au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, 2 vols (Lyon: Giraud, 1895-1904), I, 174, citing Tours, Archives d’Indre-et-Loire, minutes Foussedouaire, t. IX. These are almost certainly the minutes of Jacques Foussedouaire, notaire royal (1495-1532): cote 3E1.

^[7] R. Moffat, ‘“A hard harnest man”: The Armour of George Dunbar, 9th Earl of March’, Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian & Field Naturists’ Society, 30 (2015), 21-37.

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