Leather, as a material during the 14th century

Before 1350, leather was a common material used to augment mail defenses. The vambraces , cuisses , and greaves were reinforced with leather that might have been something like modern sole leather, sometimes boiled or painted with beeswax (cuirboille) or sometimes simply shaped, and finished with something like lacquer. The chief piece of evidence are the funerary brasses of knights from the period, but these brasses do not help us to determine whether the defenses were gamboised (quilted), leather, or something else.