legharness

English

Etymology

From Middle English legharneis; equivalent to leg +‎ harness.

Noun

legharness (countable and uncountable, plural legharnesses)

1. Leg armor.

   Hyponyms: legplate, platelegs

   • 1958, Claude Blair, European Armour, circa 1066 to circa 1700, pages 214 and 216:

     Right legharness and sabaton of an armour made for Charles VI of France as Dauphin. […] Right legharness and sabaton of an armour in the manner of Jörg Seusenhofer of Innsbruck, dated 1549.

   • 1960, R[onald] Ewart Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armor from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry, page 285:

     We have little pictorial evidence which can be dated reliably before 1320 of the existence of greaves like this, but there is an item in an inventory I have quoted before, of the arms and effects of Raoul de Nesle, which shows that they were in fact in use before 1302: “Item, ii furbished legharnesses, with closed greaves” (ii harnas de gaumbes fourbis, de coi les greves sont closes). The fact that the legharness is described as furbished has been taken to indicate that it was made of metal, not leather, but it is equally likely to imply that all straps, hinges and fittings were complete and in place.

   • 1982, T. C. Rypel, Gonji: The Soul Within the Steel (The Deathwind Trilogy; Book Two), Wildside Press, published 2013, page 222:

     After the wound treatment business, a number of new pieces of armament began to turn up on the training ground: shields and bucklers, cuirasses and half-armors, legharnesses, pauldrons and vambraces, helms with buffes and low-cut visors.

   • 1986, The Complete Encyclopedia of Arms & Weapons: The Most Comprehensive Reference Work Ever Published on Arms and Armor, pages 40 and 45:

     There were no legharnesses but, instead, special boots modeled after the Roman soldier’s caligae. […] In the early 1500s German armorers developed a foot-combat armor which had large symmetrical pauldrons with haute-pieces, full closed vambraces with laminated joint defense opposite the cowters, and full legharnesses with closed cuisses and laminated defense opposite the poleyns.

   • 2010, Noel Fallows, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia, The Boydell Press, →ISBN, pages 159–160:

     Like Quijada de Reayo before him, Zapata also insists that the jouster wear full legharness which, he says, ‘is fitting and proper so as not to hit the tilt or counter-tilt with your feet and break them and so as to enter safely amidst the kicks of other horses’. […] It is common on German-made armours of the period for the cuisses on both legs to break down so that the legharness could be used for different functions, be it war, the joust, the tourney or foot combat.

   • 2012, Kelly DeVries, Robert Douglas Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 2nd edition, University of Toronto Press, →ISBN, page 83:

     Early fifteenth-century leg defenses (legharnesses) also differed little from their fourteenth-century predecessors. Only two significant changes were made to the legharness and both came about 1430.