Bulot wrote:My question will probably sounds silly, and has little to do with the main topic, but, is there a reason why english language uses the french words "cuir bouilli" (which litterally means "boiled leather") ?
The main reason is that we don't really know how it was made (we know how it could have been made, but not how it certainly was made). Therefore, rather than giving it a name, not knowing what it really was, we use the name used in the original sources - and our original sources for the 13th/14thC are usually written either in Latin or French. By the 15thC, when English becomes more common in documents,
leather armour is rarely referred to anymore, and there is no contemporary English term to describe what
cuir boulli may have been, as far as I know.
BD, in short, yes. There is pictoral, effigy and documentary evidence that
leather breast and back plates were in use from the last quater of the 12thC to the mid-13thC. The word 'cuirass' of course originally referred to an item made of cuir -
leather. Limb defences do not appear with any frequency until the mid/late 13thC, when the coat of plates/pair of plates, made of iron plates attached to a waistcoat-like garment became more common. The coat of plates had started to appear in the early 13thC and probably superceeded the cuir boulli or
leather body defence. The earliest English medieval referrence to an iron chest protector that I have seen related to Richard I in around 1190, but was described as an unusual thing at that time.