My name is Quita Mould and I look at archaeological leather coming up from excavations,
and I found that I was forever looking at a book by John Walter called ‘Leather and the Warrior’
and I flick through it on a regular basis trying to find out some of my little scraps and work out what they're from
and I realised that it was written maybe 2 generations ago and I thought to myself well I know that we’ve
made all sorts of interesting discoveries since then and it would be lovely to pull them all together and
get them in to a similar book that other people could flick through and use for the next generation and so I suggested
it for a topic for one of our archaeological leather group conferences and we thought and the ideal venue for such
a conference would obviously be the Royal Armouries in Leeds
Thom: "Hello I’m Thom Richardson and I’m Deputy Master at the Royal Armouries
and I gave a paper at the conference on leather plate armour mostly in the 14th Century which was really interesting
because it dovetailed with another paper on 14th Century Leather Armour finds from the Low Countries."
Barbara: "My name is Barabara Wills, I work at the British Museum and I’m a specialist conservator
I work in the conservation of organic materials.
I spoke about a Romano Egyptian helmet and cuirass made of crocodile skin but was it a military helmet and cuirass,
certainly it was made of crocodile skin and it’s in the collections of the British Museum and I conserved it some years ago,
in fact some decades ago, and this conference was the perfect place to put the story of the helmet and cuirass
before an audience who could understand it and I asked some questions from which
I’ve received some really interesting answers."
Nicholas: "My name is Nicolas Baptiste and I am working in Switzerland.
I’m finishing a thesis, a PhD at the University of Savoy and I am working as a curator in Switzerland, about Arms and
Armour but I am specialising in armours. I’ve been talking about the special leather component of medieval swords
call it with many names like shapes or hand guard or also couplets and pieces, it’s a little crescent piece which is on
the guard, terribly unknown in fact. So I tried to explain somethings about it.
Yvette: "I’m Yvette Fletcher and I’m head of the Leather conservation centre based in Northampton
and I conserve historic object made wholly or partly of leather envolated materials so any skin based material.
Today I’ve been talking about other uses of leather. I realise that most people were talking about defensive
weapons and I thought there was a lot of other uses for leather and it wasn’t all about fighting.
So I looked at examples would be football used in the first world war, communion set, army chaplain communion set
and also some uniforms from the ladies who worked in various male roles during the FWW.
David: "My name is David Nicolle and I’m attached in an honoury capacity to Nottingham University.
I was talking about some lamellar armour from the medieval period which was found in the Citadel of Damascus
Damascus which I was studying before the current crisis blew up
and I hope one day I can go back and continue to study."
Marquita: "Hello I’m Dr Marquita Volken from Lausanne Gentle Craft-Shoe Museum
and historical works conservation.
I presented the remains of a man who fell into a glacier and came out in 1984. The parts were collected
but like all things in archaeology we only have little bits but the leather survived very well.
David: "The conference was absolutely splendid actually."
Yvette: "It’s been fabulous, it’s been a real mixture of talks, everyone’s been really interesting."
Marquita: "This has been one of the best conferences I have ever attended,
we’ve had so many subjects that bordered on the next subject but only contributed and didn’t take away from it."
Barbara: "The wonderful sequence of presentations that seemed to perfectly dovetail
each with one another so it was a very indepth information and also very flowing information,
it was quite special."
Marquita: "An amazing amounts of people contributing and giving positive energy for every single subject
and opening new ideas, new horizons, new understandings and the all classic, ‘huh! THAT!’ "
Thom: "The whole conference has had papers from all over Europe which have dovetailed together
and told a really interesting story, something which hasn’t been put together as a study for nearly forty years
in a single place and were looking forward very much to getting conference proceedings published afterwards
so you can all read about the fascinating papers we’ve had at the conference.