Higgins Armory Collection

Check out this 3D model on our Sketchfab page! This poleyn — a knee guard from a suit of armor — shows how brilliant armor design could be. Its overlapping plates slide over each other so the wearer can bend the knee freely without exposing it to danger. And that heart-shaped extension? It helps protect the vulnerable back of the knee, one of the trickiest spots to cover in plate armor.
The interior of joints like the knee and elbow, and parts of the body that pressed against a rider's horse couldn’t be fully plated, so they relied on smart engineering like this — often with mail underneath for backup protection.

Poleyn for the right knee with extension plate. Probably Italian, about 1400–1420. Steel. The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection, 2014.909
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The last of the series featuring the students work from Prof. Stella Wang’s Romance & Conquest in British Literature at Emmanuel College! In this video, Bella St. Martin connects an axehead from the Higgins Collection to the axe used in the beheading game (!) at the center of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This axehead has just gone on view as one of the nearly 1000 objects in the Open Storage section of our newly opened Arms and Armor Galleries--if you’re looking, you can find it at the very bottom of zone 9!

Head of a "Bearded" Axe, possibly English. 1000–1350. Iron. The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection, 2014.675

Last summer, local professor Stella Wang volunteered as part of the Higgins team to help with the gallery project and learn more about the collection. This semester, students in her course Romance & Conquest in British Literature at Emmanuel College produced short videos making connections between the arms and armor of the Higgins Collection and the medieval literature they studied. Over the next two weeks, we'll be sharing a few highlights.

In this video, Althea McHugh connects our early medieval umbo (a metal fitting from the center of a wooden shield, serving to protect the hand) to the dragon fight in Beowulf. You can see the umbo on view in our Medieval Galleries!

Umbo (shield boss), possibly German. About 500s. Iron with brass discs. The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection, 2014.690