Platenerdammerung Part 1

This is a great question! I apologize for not answering earlier - this is a really interesting topic that requires a bit of time to explain, and I just now have the time to write the answer and consult my sources.In order to explain the decline of the armour industry we should talk a bit about the armour industry in the late middle ages and early modern period in general: The different markets for armour, the different types of armouring centers and the organization of armourers. I talk about this more extensively in these podcast episodes. To summarize, there are different markets for armour and different sizes of armour producion center (IE, a city that makes armour).Broadly, there are three levels of armour quality in the later Middle Ages and earliest modern period: low quality/mass produced ‘munition’ armour for infantry, medium quality ‘off the rack’ armour for fully armoured men at arms, and high-quality custom armour for the wealthier nobility. Generally, low quality armour consisted of a non-solid body armour like mail or a brigandine, until the second half of the 15th century, when breastplates for infantry became more common. These were cheaper and had a cruder finish. Probably the most important thing about munition armours, though, is that they cover less of the body and so have fewer pieces. Thefor they take a lot less time to make. I talk about them here. The next level were full armours that were mass produced and sold from stock in general sizes, as opposed to being custom made for a single person. Armourer divided their labor to work more efficiently, in different ways in different places - in Milan, wealthy armourer-capitalists would subcontract with other armourers that specialized in making individual parts of armour - for instance - one armourer and his helpers would make the helmet, one the guantlets etc. On a different note, the armourers of Nuremberg, who were legally forbidden from having more than 3 or four apprentices and journeyman, generally specialized in single types of armour and collaborated to create full armours. In other cases (including some workshops in Milan but also in Cologne and other less regulated German centers) you have larger workshops in one roof where specialists in different parts of armour are working under one roof under one master. In all of these systems, creating even a single harness (suit of armour) could take a couple dozen people or more. Working together using the Milanese system, armourers could create a full armour in a single day, and one assumes divisions of labor would allow similar if lesser efficiency in Nuremberg and large workshops elsewhere. Since there were so many fully armoured men at arms to equip and since every single armour employed so many people, this ‘midrange’ of armour was the bread and butter of armourers in many of the biggest and most prosperous centers, based on the volume produced. Finally, there was the high end - custom-created pieces for the nobility, which would be bespoke for the individual’s body, practical preferences, sense of fashion, and personal heraldly/symbols. This is the glorious, finely crafted armour that is most often preserved in museums today. I talk about it here.

Armouring centers could be described a local centers (doing small amount of work for the surrounding area - like a local armourer in a small city), regional centers (which supplied a large region or an entire kingdom but weren’t major exporters - this would include places like Lyon, Catalyud, London and others) and export/continental centers (which exported outside of their own region). These could range from places like low country centers or North German centers which mostly exported to another, adjacent region (England and France from the low countries, Scandinavia from Northern German Lands) to large centers that exported over a wide area like Nuremberg, Brescia or Cologne. Milan, the greatest armouring center of all, is a special case, exporting armour to nearly the whole of Europe. These different production centers did not provide equal parts of the armour market. The real heavy hitters - Cologne, Nuremberg, Brescia and above all Milan - made up a disproportionate amount of the armour trade and supplied a great deal of Europe’s armour, especially compared to their size. Regional centers would pick up the slack, while local armourers would do repair work and make armours for local customers - but big or high profile orders would probably be exported from abroad. The market is different in different places - England really has only one armouring center of note, London, and even it provides ‘niche’ armours for the very wealthy as well as producing mass-produced armours like Brigandines. Much of the actual demand for armour at the mid-level or among the mass of common soldiers was met by imports from Milan and the low countries. Other places, like Scandinavia or Scotland, seem to have little domestic plate armour industry and rely even more on imports, while some places, like Germany, have a lot of little armouring centers that were supplying their local markets. Regardless, across the continent, even in the late Middle Ages armour was a big and fairly centralized business where large production centers provided much of the supply. This is amplified during wartime when outfitting large numbers of soldiers requires making large order with merchants that supply armours from the bigger production centers. Local armourers, by contrast, don’t seem to have supplied as much. When you read a document like the Howard accounts, merchants with foreign names and locations in the capital of London are the main sources of armour.

Why does this matter? Because as we talk about the gradual decline of armouring, the effects of that decline depend upon the continental market for armour and upon what role local armourers played in that market - what niches they filled.