"Soldiers on the Lombard helmet plate of King Agilulfo, 7thC" Topic

Soldiers on the Lombard helmet plate of King Agilulfo, 7th century
This is used as a source for 7th-8th Century Lombard Cavalryman in Armies of the Dark Ages 600-1066 by Ian Heath

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Soldiers on the Lombard helmet plate of King Agilulfo, 7th century
7th-8th Century Lombard Cavalryman in Armies of the Dark Ages 600-1066 by Ian Heath

Druzhina
Illustrations of Costume & Soldiers

Its an interesting piece and I see no reason that it could not be genuinely associated with Agiluf. . The king looks right and has the right sort of beard to be a Lombard king.
What is interesting is that the shields shown on the guards are rather smaller than what can be reconstructed from finds in Lombard graves. Maybe they are reduced to fit the scale of the brow guard or maybe some Lombards had smaller shields…which would be more convenient around the palace.

Secondly, Paul the Deacon describes the Lombards in the suxth century as wearing white bindings on their lower legs. These chaps have wide trousers with what could be broad bands of coloured embroidery around the hem. Maybe that fashion had passed by then .

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I have to tell you, that rather than broad bands, it looks to me like they are wearing boots with their trousers tucked into the tops of them.

Interesting suggestion, but the second figure in from the left pretty well disproves that as the trouser overhangs the boot.

Paul the Deacon says (Ch.XXIV) that a Gepid: "began to provoke the Langobards with insults declaring (because they wore white bandages from their calves down) that they were like mares with white feet up to the legs, saying: "The mares that you take after have white fetlocks"."

Ch.XXII: "They shaved the neck, and left it bare up to the back of the head, having their hair hanging down on the face as far as the mouth and parting it on either side by a part in the forehead. Their garments were loose and mostly linen, such as the Anglo-Saxons are wont to wear, ornamented with broad borders woven in various colors. Their shoes, indeed, were open almost up to the tip of the great toe, and were held on by shoe latchets interlacing alternately. But later they began to wear trousers, over which they put leggins of shaggy woolen cloth when they rode. But they had taken that from a custom of the Romans."

According to the 1907 Foulke edition "The monk of Salerno says that king Adaloald (A. D. 616-626) was the first who wore trousers" – and he was Agilulf's successor, meaning that Agilulf's men should really have been in the pre-trouser leg-wrapping vogue.