eastern wall of the smaller or Banqueting Chamber, is a fire-place, the
only one till recently discovered in any Norman Keep. A second and third
have of late years been found in the floor below, but the whole building
was designed for security, not for comfort and in spite of the use of
wooden partitions and tapestry must have been miserable as a place of
residence. On leaving St. John's Chapel we enter


_The Armoury_.

In connection with the Armouries, it should be noted that the present
collection of arms and armour had its origin in that formed at Greenwich
by King Henry VIII, who received many presents of this nature from the
Emperor Maximilian and others. He also obtained from the Emperor several
skilled armourers, who worked in his pay and wore his livery. English
iron in former days was so inferior, or the art of working it was so
little known, that even as far back as the days of Richard II German
and Italian armourers were the chief workmen in Europe. It should be
remembered that the earlier kind of armour chiefly consisted of quilted
garments, further fortified by small pieces of leather, horn, or metal.
So far from the invention of gunpowder having driven out armour, if we
may credit the story of the earliest employment of that explosive, it
was at a date when plate armour was hardly in use, certainly not in
large pieces. What actually did cause the disuse of armour was the
change in ideas as to the movement of troops and the large quantity of
armour which was made in the sixteenth century, and consequently the
inferior make. In England the disuse of armour seems to have begun
earlier than on the Continent, but at no time were the ordinary soldiers
covered with metal as seen in Armouries and other places. The weight,
and what was more important, the cost, prevented such a thing. It was