It seems fair to argue that this Jacobi, the Master workman at Greenwich, was the same "Jacobe" who made the extra pieces for two of the suits illustrated in the MS., and that he may have had the drawings executed, and that when the drawings were finished he wrote on the first eighteen drawings the names of the persons for whom the armours were made. We have no evidence as to who the draughtsman was, and therefore no evidence that Jacobe was that person. But the existence of the MS., the existence to-day of some of the suits, the preservation to-day of portraits and miniatures of the same persons wearing the suits whose names appear on the drawings, the fact that there was a school of armourers at Greenwich from 1511 until 1644 (the cost of which was defrayed by the State, and of which we have numerous records[1]), form the links in a chain of evidence in confirmation of the conclusion at which we arrive, viz., that the harnesses illustrated in the MS. were made by the Greenwich school of armourers.
We think that the draughtsman had in view the portraying of the decoration of the Greenwich school, which was peculiar to and evolved by the Greenwich armourers. It may be noted that in the case of the earlier drawings depicted in the MS., two of which the draughtsman assigned to represent suits made in the reign of Queen Mary, this style is not yet distinctly marked. The Greenwich style of decoration first appears in a marked manner in the second suit of the Earl of Leicester, and is fully developed in those of the Sir Henry Lee No. 2 suit, Sir Christopher Hatton Nos. 1 and 2 suits, the Earl of Pembroke's, and the Earl of Cumberland's suits; but it culminates in the beautiful suit of armour made for Henry, Prince of Wales, now at Windsor, which is illustrated and described in a later chapter,[2] and is, in the author's opinion, the work of this school, and may have been the one for which William Pickering received the large sum, for those times, of £320. This Greenwich school of armourers no doubt learned their art from the numerous foreign armourers—Flemish, German, or Italian—who had been brought to England by Henry VII and Henry VIII; but by the time of Elizabeth they had evolved a type of armour and decoration peculiarly their own, which, as we have already pointed out (ante, p.2), is very distinct from the type and decoration of contemporary suits made in Germany, Italy, or France.
