Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 5).djvu/139



Showing places where the applied composition resembling rust has peeled off, exposing the unrusted metal

first thing that strikes the eye is the impossibility of its actual use. Most of the plates of which it is constructed appear to have been made out of pieces of worn-out stove piping or from rolled sheet iron, in which latter case the peculiar markings left by the rollers on the surface are distinctly traceable. In nearly every instance the metal has never been highly polished, with the result that the remains of the black oxide appears in specks all over it. The workmanship, too, is of the poorest: the pieces are clumsily fashioned, wretchedly constructed, and executed with the least possible trouble. The rivets are often not more than roundheaded nails; the edges of the plates seem to have been cut with shears; while such attempts at decoration as are found might have been made by a savage from Central Africa. Moreover, a puerile effort was made to disguise the carelessness of manufacture and to imitate the ravages of time by means of fire and of chemical processes. In the case of the interiors a plentiful coating of oil mixed with earth has been applied, which after some time scaled off,