First edition. The historian of arms and armour Charles ffoulkes (1868-1947) was educated at the Dragon School, Radley College, and Shrewsbury School, before entering St John’s College, Oxford, which he left without graduating in 1889. After studying at the Académie Julien in Paris, ffoulkes exhibited his works at the Royal Academy and in France, but he ‘abandoned painting for metalwork and the difficulties presented by this medium aroused in him something more than an aesthetic interest in arms and armour. About this time he met Harold Arthur Lee-Dillon, the seventeenth Viscount Dillon; a close friendship developed and Dillon, who was curator of the Tower armouries, and a former president of the Society of Antiquaries, influenced the direction of ffoulkes’s scholarly interests’ (ODNB). ffoulkes wrote a number of papers on arms and armour, and also lectured on the subject at Oxford, where he enrolled for a second time at St John’s College, in order to study for a BLitt degree, and published a facsimile edition of Louys de Gaya’s 1678 work Traité des armes, with a preface by Dillon, in 1911. This was followed by The Armourer and his Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century, which ‘embodied his thesis and was his most original work’ (op. cit.) and was dedicated to Dillon, and later in 1912 ffoulkes also published his catalogue of European Arms and Armour in the University of Oxford (Principally in the Ashmolean and Pitt-Rivers Museums).

A contemporary review of The Armourer and his Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century opened with the words ‘[t]he author is to be congratulated on an excellent piece of work’, and praised the book for concentrating on the manufacture of arms and armour, and for its clarity of expression: ‘[t]he inevitable overlay of technical nomenclature applicable to the various parts of defensive armour is reduced to a minimum, and explanatory notes are furnished which banish any obscurity’ (The Athenaeum, no. 4439 (23 November 1912), p. 632). The work is extensively illustrated, frequently drawing upon historical iconography, and the main text – which includes chapters titled ‘Lists of European Armourers’, ‘Short Biographies of Notable Armourers’, ‘Lists of Armourers’ Marks’, and ‘Polyglot Glossary of Words Dealing with Armour and Weapons’ – is followed by thirteen appendices reprinting primary sources from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

This copy is from the library of the schoolmaster R.S. Bridge, who was educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Oxford, before embarking on a career as a schoolmaster at Bristol Grammar School as Senior Geography Master and at Nottingham High School as Senior History Master. Bridge, who bequeathed this and a number of other books to Nottingham High School, was also the author of The Geography of Commerce & Industry (London, 1920) and Man and Commerce (London, 1921). One of his former students, the novelist, playwright, and children’s writer Geoffrey Trease recalled Bridge as a teacher whose ‘method was in essence that of a university lecturer’, which ‘made it easy to like history’ (A Whiff of Burnt Boats (London, 1971), p. 47; Trease also dedicated his 1967 book The Grand Tour to the ‘memory of R.S. Bridge’).

Royal Historical Society, Writings on British History 1901-1933, I, 359.

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