Was there a French style plate armour?

by presidentenfuncio

I was wondering if the French did develop their own type of armour like the Germans did with the Gothic and the English with the Greenwich, but I can't seem to find any, which seems strange with France being the land of chivalry and all that.
Edit: I somehow confused Greenwich with Cambridge.

TheGreenReaper7

I've never heard of a Cambridge style of armour (so I would be interested in knowing what led you to that association). Plate was used chiefly to reinforce sections of mail armour and it was only in the the fourteenth-century when the Italians began producing full suits of plate armour. Due to the nature of full plate these suits of armour needed to be mouled to the body of the wearer and thus were highly expensive, and less mobile, than mail armour. The thing that marked Italian armour from its competitors was the quality of the metallurgy and the processes of hardening the metal. This meant Italian armour, and armourers, were highly valued and imported into England, France, Germany, and Iberia. It would be more difficult, perhaps, to differentiate French, German, or English armour before 1450.

With regard to 'Gothic' armour, this seems more to be a catch-all for northern and some Western European armours up to the introduction of armourers' marks c.1500 among German armourers, which is also where my interest in the topic tails off. If you're interested in the development of different national styles or 'brands' of armour then you might want to hunt down the series of articles produced in the 1920s-1930s by Sir James Mann or, if you don't have access to a library but do have lots of disposable income, you could purchase A. Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace, (Leiden, 2003). This is a highly comprehensive analysis of the development of metallurgy and armour across the later Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern period.