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book. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm Matt Lewis.

Knights in their armour is perhaps one of the most enduring images of the Middle Ages,

the first thing that comes to mind and the role that many of us would have played at as children.

Toby Capwell is curator of arms and armour at the Wallace Collection, but he's also a jouster,

so a man who wears armour like all the time in my head at least.

Toby is a historical advisor, a lecturer and an author, most recently of a series of incredible

books on English Medieval armour. The second of his three books has just hit the shelves,

and I'm delighted that Toby has agreed to chat to us today about this central aspect of the Medieval

world. Thank you very much for joining us Toby. I know that one of the things that you struggled with

with your books is that it's quite a famous fact, I think, at least in the industry, that there's

no surviving examples of English armour that we know of in the world. So how do you go about studying

it when none of it remains? Yeah, I mean that's the foremost problem with the work and the one that

confronted me when I began it, but it's also kind of the reason why I wanted to pursue this

subject in the first place. I sort of have a natural inclination to be attracted to the black holes

in history. You know, we work with the evidence that we have, we tend to favor aspects of history

for which we have more evidence, and that tends to affect the way we view the past in a number of

different ways, and it introduces biases and over-emphasizes certain aspects and ignores others,

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