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Figurę 79. A "Grant Espee" par excellence, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Yicnna. BL: 101.2cm.

were also of great mystical as well as practical significance. The artists who included arms in their work were familiar with them, owned and used them, but at the same time had absolutely no idea of "Historical Costume." They were totally ignorant of the way in which Saul or David or the Hasmonean warrior kings of the Old Testament were dressed and armed in the nine cen-turies before Christ, nor how AJexander and his captains were arrayed. Yet they were continually called upon to illustrate them; so they just clad their biblical or classical char-acters in the current fashions of their own time and place. Thus we have splendid pictures of Saul and his Israelites fighting the Philistines at Gilboa or Alexander in conflict with the Persians at Issus, wherein Israelites, Philistines, Greeks, and Persians are all represented in the fashionable, upmarket accouterments of the artist's own day. The 20th cen-

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tury researcher into armour and arms is also fortunate that the Christian Bibie (the most frequent source of all medieval illustration, either in two dimensions or three) abounds in vivid scenes of war, bloodshed, and mayhem. If we had only illustrations of New Testament events to go on, a great source of information would have been denied us.

Most of these pictures and sculptures were madę by competent artists, but a good many are not. Some are very crude, many are child-like in their execution, and because this is so, it would be easy to dismiss all medieval works of art as unreliable sources. However, there are cnough of superlative representational quality (such as the two MS illustrations I showed in Chapters 7 and 9) which can be rclied upon confi-dently to provide information upon any item of military hardware from tent-pegs to siege-engines and upon equipment of the foot slogging infantryman as well as the expensively accoutered knight. Usefi.il -invaluable - as these two-dimensional pictures are, in the beautiful sculptured decorative figures of heroes and warrior saints which in extreme three-dimensional realism decorate the great churches of 12th and 13th century Europę, we find a wealth of information about