QuickCheck: Did medieval knights need to use a crane to mount a horse?

The Palácio Real weapons room in Madrid, Spain. Photography by: www.geocities.com/opgago/ Osvaldo Gag / fotografar.net

THE armour that knights wore was so heavy that they had to be hoisted onto their horses with a crane.

Is this true?

Verdict:

FALSE

Typically, the type of armour that comes to most people’s minds when they hear “knight”, is called full plate armour.

Plate armour became common during the High Middle Ages (the 15th to 16th century) and was usually made of steel plates that covered the entire body.

An entire suit of plate armour for a person of average height usually weighed about 20kg to 25kg.

It might sound like quite a heavy load to bear, but it actually isn’t. To put things in perspective, the modern fireman carries up to 35kg of gear and you don’t see them needing a crane to get into their fire engines!

An untrained person of reasonable fitness would be able to don a full suit of armour and do most activities they’d usually be able to do, albeit a bit slower.

For a man-at-arms who has been training since childhood, he would have been able to run, march, jump, fight and most definitely get on to his own horse without any help while wearing armour.

As a bonus fact, a warrior who wears full plate armour was called a man-at-arms. A man-at-arms could be a knight, or other nobleman, a member of a knight’s or nobleman’s retinue, or a mercenary in a company serving under a captain.

So all knights were men-at-arms, but not all men-at-arms were knights.

References:

1. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm

2. https://archive.org/details/europeinhighmidd00mund

3. https://careertrend.com/about-4760940-much-does-firefighter-gear-weigh.html