I recently visited the Higgins Armory Museum (Worcester, MA), which has one of the best collections of armor in the country. Included in the collection are several elaborate full-body suits of plate armor, obviously made for either very short men, or boys? My question; did boys accompany men into battles? One would think that (given the great importance of having a male heir) risking the life of a crown prince in battle , would be a very foolish thing to do! Were these suits made for ceremonial wear? (Like getting knighted, marching in parades, etc.? I cannot imagine that any sane king would risk his son’s life in battle, after going through many wives/concubines, to produce an heir! :o
Well, little princie would have to learn how to wear armour, and how to fight, at some point. These might quite possibly have been training suits.
Alternatively, even child princes might need to be on the battlefield as figureheads or to accompany daddy, in which case they would need the appropriate outfit to look suitably noble. And the age at which people took part in their first wedding/battle/drunken feast/tournament etc. was a lot younger in the bad old days. The Black Prince was commanding at the battle of Crecy when he was 16.
Finally, during periods of poor nutrition, sanitation and healt, even nobles were somewhat stunted by today’s standards. They might indeed have been for small adults - how big were they?
But if you produce an heir who’s a known sissy, he’s not going to hang on to the kingdom for very long after he inherits it, is he? Got to establish their warry reputation as soon as possible to discourage challengers.
My Dad and I were surprised by how small men’s army uniforms were in a display of British Army uniforms from the 1700s and 1800s. We surmised that either the entire collection was sourced from very short men or the people of the British Isles had grown substantially since then 
People were substantially smaller when food resources were more scarce, but what always puzzled me about the small adult solider = tiny armor relationship was that assumedly (just by the cost of it) the armor was for the equivalent of the upper classes, and these are unlikely to have been food deprived. Witness Thomas Jefferson & George Washington. Both relatively tall, and yet it was a hand to mouth existence for many colonial families in the US colonies. Why weren’t he European fighting elites bigger?
Or was the average US colonist better fed than I imagine?
My sister once gave me a brass rubbing of a knight in armor—the original was on the knight’s tomb in a churchyard. My sister swore the person in charge of the churchyard said the original was life size. I was very surprised at how small the person was–if it was indeed life size.
For what it’s worth, when I lived in South Dakota I had occasion to visit several farm houses that dated from the early 1800s. The door knobs were all very low compared to today’s doors. I suppose that might be evidence that the average person back then was smaller than today.
Dern it, “early 1800s” should be “mid 1800s.”
They had a beautifully engraved and chased full suit, from ca 1400 (I think it was italian made). clearly, this suit was made for a boy; I’d estimate the boy to be about 120 lbs. I mean, its nice to accompany daddy-but would you want your son exposed to arrows, lances, etc.? One lucky shot, and your heir is bleeding to death-or worse, you consign him to the “surgeons”-who have to extract a barbed-headed arrow from screaming, frightened child? Not very romantic!
Some armor was made simply for “show” – the Crown Prince, the heir to an Earldom, etc., might ride forth in a tournament in armor as the symbol that he was a worthy heir to a fighting throne, etc., without actually engaging in combat, or in the ritualized sparring combat of the tourneys.
But it’s also worth noting that adolescents were deemed suitable for adult roles much younger in medieval times than today. Henry VI’s son was sitting in judgment at post-battle capital trials at age 16 (Wars of the Roses); a century earlier, Richard II rode forth in armor at the head of a troop of knights to cope with a peasant insurrection (which he brilliantly subdued by vowing to be the guarantor of the peasants’ rights, and their leader, then telling them, essentially, to go home). He was, I think, 14 at the time.
The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa took place in 1212. Ooooon my right, the Christian kings of Spain. Oooooon my left, the Muslim kings of Spain.
Kings of Navarra were notoriously bad about keeping chronicles (plus a lot of them got burned in several wars), so most of the information about the Navarrese troops intervention in that battle comes from everybody else who was there. Historians (starting with Carlos, Príncipe de Viana in the XVth century) have long assumed that a lot of that information was… exagerations. D. Carlos specifically states that much of what he is recording is “wives tales and may or may not be as they tell it.”
Something included in these wives tales and in chronicles from Castilla:
Plate had replaced chainmail relatively recently; pieces of plate had been in use for quite a while but, by the time of this battle, armor for high nobility was mostly-plate instead of mostly-chain. The Castillians had heard from the Aragonese that this was not so for the Navarrese but figured this was an exaggeration.
When they saw the Navarrese troops arrived, the Castillians were stumped to see that, indeed, they wore chainmail. They were completely open mouthed when the Navarrese king descended from his enormous horse - he was as tall off the horse as on it. There was no freaking way a horse would have been able to carry a plated knight that tall plus the horse’s own plate, hence chain for both - and, because a knight would not have worn better armor than his King, the chain for the rest of the Navarrese troops.
In recent years, the historians have teamed up with forensic specialists and established that:
- King Sancho VII was, indeed, 7’ tall and healthy (no thyroid problems, no gigantism - he looked sort of like Fats Barkley, only white).
- The rest of the Navarrese knights were, indeed, on the tall side for Spain at the time; heights of 5’10" or 5’11" were not uncommon.
- The average height for males in Spain at the time was 5’4".
Those “kiddie” armors are real all right.
Exactly. At the Battle of Crecy, the Black Prince’s division of the English army came under attack, and his father’s advisors suggested sending reinforcements to protect the Prince. King Edward refused to do so, reportedly saying that “the boy has to earn his spurs.” Leading troops in battle was the main function of a king at that time, and the prince had to learn how to do so.
Of course, Edward III took “father of his country” literally – I believe that 600 years later, it would be harder to find someone with any English ancestry whatever from the relevant period who is not descended from him, than those who are. So risking the #1 heir was not a major problem – he had several spares.
Sometimes they ran out of spares. Henry VIII (whose father Henry VII led an army into battle to defeat and kill the previous king Richard III) did run out of legitimate heirs eventually (even if none of his heirs actually died in battle, partly because two of them were women).
And Henry V, while Prince of Wales, aged 16, was nearly killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury, and probably only survived because as heir to the throne he got better medical care than most.
But Poly’s point about Edward III’s fertility is well-taken - instead of the minimalist “heir and a spare” approach of the current House of Windsor, he fathered seven sons: Edward the Black Prince, Prince of Wales; William of Hatfield (died young); John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; Edmund Langley, Duke of York; Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester; and William of Windsor (died young). (Source: Ribner Kiteridge Works of Shakespeare). So if the Black Prince had bit the dust, Edward had a few others in store.
Sure, people in the olden days were shorter, and took on adult rolld earlier, but I have seen armor in Europe that was certainly made for a little kid. I’m talking three feet tall here. As a recall, all the small suits were decorated to a high degree and very elaborate, often made by Italian smiths. I can’t recall if the kid would actually wear the armor for ceremonies or if it was just something for rich people to have around. Not for battle, however, if my memory serves.
Hmmm. How would 120lbs compare to the expected weight of a teenager in about 1400?
And the whole barbed-arrow thing is pretty much what a suit of expensive milanese plate is supposed to prevent, I’d have thought.
Probably yes. Lots and lots of virgin territory to subsist off, plenty of prime farmland for anyone who wanted to clear it. If crops didn’t work out, multiple square miles of wilderness per person to forage in. Much easier than in the UK, where they were resorting to enclosing commons and the like because land was getting scarce.
I don’t know about armor, but in terms of clothing, often we see small sets of clothing because larger ones would have been cut down and reused, but short Uncle Larry’s suit couldn’t be cut down for any grownup. So that can be an issue as well.
I was always under the impression (but I’m not really qualified to have an impression) that 5’4" at 120lbs would be right about the right for a 16 year old in battle at the time. When I was 12 I went to a Russian museum and the chain mails , war clothes and other armor they had there from adult soldiers would definitely not fit (Of course I didn’t try but it was tiny, there was no question about it) on the 12 year old me based on height/shoe size alone, yet I was about median height in my class.
I remember thinking the same thing when I was in the British Army Museum in London (near Chelsea Hospital, IIRC). They had displays with real uniforms in them, and until about 1880 or shortly afterward, the uniforms were significantly smaller than what modern men would wear, to the point of me thinking that only teenagers would be able to wear those uniforms these days- they were sized mostly for scrawny 5’5" or so men. Your usual 5’10"/180 lb man would be hugely bigger than many of these uniforms.
However, they were still considerably larger than the “child” armor that you see in places like the French military museum at Les Invalides and/or the Tower of London. Those are about the size of what a 9 year old boy would wear these days.
5’10" 180 lb is the low end of overweight. 150 lb is around the middle of normal weight.
IMNAH(istorian) but I read somewhere that lots of those very small armor suits were made by craftsman to show their skills at metal working. Sort of like the tiny dresses put on fashion dolls in the 1700-1800s. Easier to move around, weren’t going to get beat up in battle, you could do lots of fancy stuff to impress buyers. Makes a certain amount of sense to me.
Also, I read somewhere else that our perception of earlier humans being much, much smaller is not wholly correct. During periods when many people were moving to very tight quarters in cities—as during the Industrial Revolution—nutrition became terrible because people weren’t eating fresh fruit, vegetables, meats and breads as during flush times on farm lands. So they weren’t growing as big overall due to borderline starvation and poor nutrition. No cite. But again, makes some sense to me.