Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 5).djvu/137

 excellent and most deceptive armour and weapons, forgeries which are interesting because they showed originality and were made with much care and thought. But in England at a rather earlier period in the XIXth century originated a most peculiar school of forgery, which can only be accounted for by the demand of the time; for immediately a taste for any particular class of objets d'art or of curiosity is developed and rare specimens begin to command high prices, spurious examples will at once appear. As soon, therefore, as the Earl of Londesborough, the Earl of Warwick, the Lord Zouche, and in a far lesser degree the Tower of London authorities, began to show discrimination in their collecting of armour and weapons, and strove to get XIVth and even XIIIth century examples of our ancestors' military equipments, one London fabricator in particular at once commenced supplying their forged equivalents. Only on this hypothesis can we explain to some extent how it came about that England, a country in which the Civil Wars had swept away almost all XIVth, XVth, and even XVIth century armour of insular production, should suddenly have yielded that perfect harvest of helms of early date, and that equally heavy crop of fragments of XVth century armour which, gradually exported from this country, found their way at last to the private and even to the public collections of the Continent. Indeed we feel sure we shall be excused if we quote from one of the most erudite books of its kind known, namely, "The Cyclopædia of Costume," published by Mr. J. C. Planché in 1876, to show the solemn belief in these poor English forgeries which was entertained even at so late a date as the fourth quarter of the XIXth century. On page 280 of this work Mr. Planché refers to a miserable fake of a nasal-guard helm in the Musée d'Artillerie, and goes on to say: "It was discovered in a church at Faversham, and, as I stated in a communication to the British Archæological Association, there is some probability that it may have belonged to King Stephen, or to his son Eustace, both of whom were buried in the abbey there It will scarcely be believed that this most interesting and, at present, unique relic of ancient English armour was coldly rejected by the authorities at the Tower, and allowed to go to Paris, where it now enriches the Musée d'Artillerie"! (Fig. 1529 b). Mr. Planché continues: "If any doubt existed of its authenticity, it would be dissipated by an examination of another which, strange to say, is in our national armoury" (Fig. 1529 a). If then such an accomplished authority as the late Mr. Planché took these poor fakes seriously, and was impressed by their supposed histories, little wonder is it that they crept into many of the collections of armour and weapons that were