As Jacobe notes that he made the extra pieces of two suits, presumably he did not make the rest of these two armours, and there is no evidence that he made any of the others. There must have been other armourers, and who were they? The question cannot as yet be answered, and it is not likely to receive an answer until the accounts of the sums spent on armour-making at Greenwich are discovered. The valuable researches of Mr. Charles ffoulkes have brought to our knowledge the names of various armourers who worked at Greenwich as Queen's armourers under Mary and Elizabeth; but no other details are known concerning them. They are: Nighel Pipe 1559, Hans Mightner 1559-74, John Kelte 1559-74, John Garret 1559-1601, Jacob Halore(?) 1559, Roger Keymer 1571, Jacob Halder 1574 (perhaps the same as Jacob Halore), Martyn Herste 1574, Caries or Tarys Spirarde 1574, John Kirke 1577, and lastly William Pickering 1591-1630, who, as we have seen, probably made the armour for Henry, Prince of Wales, and who, judging by the very great similarity of style and of execution which that suit bears to some of the more elaborate ones mentioned above as full examples of the Greenwich school, may also have been the master armourer to whom some of the others were due. [As with other arts the problem is to discover whether the master workman Jacobe, or any other master workman, possessed and exercised individual initiative, or whether he was only a foreman of a body of more or less skilled workmen. The marked character of the armour under discussion shows such a personal quality of design that it would seem as if there had worked at Greenwich master armourers of strong individual taste.—C.-D.]
That some of the armourers who worked at Greenwich for over one hundred years were foreigners is more than probable, for the great craftsmen of these periods were Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen, and Mr. ffoulkes' list contains many names which are not English ones. As regards the name of "Jacobe," Sir Henry Lee writes it "Jacobi." Sir Henry's rendering suggests that the final "e" was not a mute one. Now the German Jacob would not have become in English Jacobi, it would have remained as it was in German, Jacob, without a final "i" or "e." Jacobe was evidently not the Christian name of the Greenwich armourer, but his surname. Jacobi is a common surname in Germany; a cannon founder of Berlin who lived about 1700 was named Jacobi, and there are even arms-bearing families of that name. In France Jacobé exists as a surname, in Italy Jacopi. In the "London Directory" for 1917 can be found five Jacobis and five Jacobys living in London. It is probable that our Jacobe was of foreign extraction; but we are inclined to think that he was British born. He writes his name
