Jac of Plait

[kevin714]

Finn,
What color do you think the one from the Derricke illustration is?

I would not want to speculate, based on Derricke's illustration for color. Based on the two Scotish examples, they appear to be an unbleached muslin or canvas, tan in color I would guess.

I don't know about that the more I look at the O'Neill one and compare to the Derrick the more similiariaties I see. For instance the flair at the bottom. I think Derrick was trying to portray something similiar to O'Neills and his is reddish looking.
Do you think the straps were in the back, sides or front?

[finnobreanan]

The painting of Hugh O'Neil shows a reddish color to me. I just can't figure out the materials used. It almost looks like leather or possibly metal. I don't see any closing fastenings at the sides, so would guess it is in the back.

[Stephen Curtin]

Hey guys I was just going over some of these old threads and found this one interesting, so I thought I might add my 2c worth. First off for the portrait of Hugh O'Neill, I've heard that this is from the Victorian period, so it's probably of no use for us here. As for the chieftains from John Derricke, both H.F. McClintock and M. Dunlevy think that these are wearing some form of leather garment decorated with gold, as described by Edmund Spenser, and after some looking around I agree with them. The reasons that I don't think that these are jacks of plates are; one, the the lines on these garments are straight forming square shapes, while those on jacks are diagonal forming triangle shapes, and two, I've never seen or heard of jacks of plates with sleeves like in Derricke. After some searching on google images, I found some images of Elizabethan doublets, of a similar shape to these, with gold bands, which look like the lines on the images from Derricke. As for the circles, inbetween the lines, these could be small slashes to reveal the shirt underneath, or perhaps some form of gem or pearl attached to the doublet as was popular at this time.

[Stephen Curtin]

Oh yeah I almost forgot, to me the Irish chieftains costume resembles, albeit with more decoration, the outfit found at Dungiven, Co. Derry. Both consist of a tight pair of trews, shoes, a doublet (very similar cut except for the skirt area), and a conical hat (the sheepskin hat from Dungiven didn't survive), and a semi circular mantle. Also I'm not arguing that Irish cavalry didn't use jacks of plates, I think that there is some evidence for this somewhere but I can't remember, but I think that instead of the images from Derricke they would have looked like the second picture from Finns original post.

[Stephen Curtin]

Hey lads. I've been looking into Derricke's image of an Irish chieftains again, and I came across some good pics of Tudor period doublets to compare it too.

http://1uyxqn3lzdsa2ytyzj1asxmmmpt.wpen ... 31.77m.png


http://www.elizabethan-portraits.com/Leicester3.jpg


https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/ ... 5711_n.jpg


And here is one more image, showing that sometimes these doublets were worn over armour.  Meaning that if the chieftain from Derricke is wearing a doublet, he could be wearing a mail shirt underneath.


http://www.historiclife.com/images/Rese ... l/1936.jpg

[Stephen Curtin]

Two other possibilities, that I can think of are, that the chieftain is wearing either a padded jack (over mail), or a brigandine with full length sleeves.


Here is an image of a 15th century padded jack.  It's square quilted pattern matches that of the chieftain's, though it doesn't have the circular shapes within the squares as in Derricke.


http://www.historiclife.com/images/Rese ... 6_jack.jpg


As for a brigandine.  I used to think that they were always sleeveless as with jacks of plate, but recently I came across an image of a 16th century brigandine, with full sleeves, said to have belonged to Emperor Maximilian II.  


http://database.flg.es/fotos/3000/3310.jpg