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Plate Armour
The Agincourt Harness
£2,850 GBP
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In the summer of 1998, Margaret Blackwood set up her forge in a converted barn on the East Sussex Downs with two hammers, a century-old stake plate, and the singular conviction that the finest armour of the medieval period could be faithfully recreated using the same techniques that first produced it. Twenty-seven years later, that conviction has been borne out by five hundred pieces, forty countries, and a clutch of museum commissions that would have seemed fanciful to the young armourer who lit her first fire that August morning.
Margaret trained first as a silversmith, then spent three years as an apprentice to master armourer Dieter Hofmann in Landshut, Bavaria — the city synonymous with the finest plate of the fifteenth century. She returned to England with a thorough grounding in German and Italian harness traditions, a fluency in historical metallurgy, and the beginnings of an archive that now runs to several thousand technical drawings, each traced from museum pieces, illuminated manuscripts, and original workshop records.
"Every piece of steel remembers the fire that shaped it. That is not poetic language — it is metallurgy. And it is why each harness we make is entirely unrepeatable."— Margaret Blackwood, Master Armourer
Today, Margaret works with a small team of two apprentices and a fellow journeyman armourer. Pieces take between six and thirty-two weeks depending on their complexity. Every commission begins with a conversation — about period, function, budget, and the story the commissioner wants their armour to tell. Every piece ends with the same promise: that in a hundred years, it will be indistinguishable from the originals that inspired it.
