The Elusive Musekin—Interpreting a Mysterious Piece of Medieval Armour

Abstract

The field of medieval arms and armour abounds with terms whose meanings are, as yet, lost to us. Of these, none is perhaps as recurrent or as widespread as the term musekin, amply present in a variety of European sources and languages between the 13th and the 16th centuries. Although familiar to experts, and included in a number of seminal works, no one source has of yet provided a definite, well-researched answer as to what musekins might be. This paper’s aim is therefore to try and work out what object or objects musekins might have corresponded to, by bringing together a considerable number and typology of sources—textual, artistic, and archaeological—from a wide variety of medieval European cultures, which are then analysed in a multi-pronged, multi-lingual, interdisciplinary approach. Possible identifications are then presented, in a process which highlights the potential for complementarity between different European languages and archives in researching medieval arms and armour.