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about 1330

From Stothard's "Monumental Effigies"

about 1325

From Stothard's "Monumental Effigies"

neck. The defence is similar, and in some cases remarkably so, to those plates found on Japanese armour and known as the sode. In the Church of Awans, a few miles from Liège, is a monument to Humbier Corbeare, erected about 1299, on which the ailettes are of the same size as the Japanese sode, and appear apparently worn in a precisely similar fashion (Fig. 180). The ailettes seem to have taken various forms: sometimes they were circular, at other times shield-shaped, hexagonal, or even cruciform. By the comparison of various effigies we may conclude that their adoption upon the continent was more universal, and generally of larger proportions. They were sometimes blazoned with the armorial bearings of the wearer when their form allowed it. In the latter part of the XVth century and in the XVIth