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LONDON

Mkricoîte

MEDIEVAL LIFE IK ENGLISH WOODCARVING
BY

M. D. ANDERSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

Two contrasting King Penguin title pages,
1950 and 1954. The illustrations in Mosses
are delicate and linear. The illustrations for
Misericords are strong black-and-white
photographs. The word 'Misericords' and
the crown were drawn by Berthold Wolpe.

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BY JAMES LAVER

PENGUIN BOOKS
LONDON

BRITISH MILITARY UNIFORMS

The history of military uniforms is (perhaps fortunately)
much shorter than the history of warfare. Men have been
fighting in more or less organized bodies since (and perhaps
before) they became men. They have worn uniforms, in the
proper sense, only for just under three hundred years. It is
therefore possible to deal with the subject within the limits of a
brief survey, on the condition that the minutiae of regimental
differences are resolutely ignored. The different colours of the
facings, the different spacing of the buttons on the uniforms of
two separate regiments of foot guards in the second half of the
eighteenth century - these are matters which can (and must)
be left to specialists, if only for the reason that their adequate
discussion would require not one volume but a hundred. In
dealing with uniforms there are, in fact, four sets of variables,
and even if we confine ourselves to one country there are still
three: regiment, period and rank. Even when all these are con¬
stant, there may be different uniforms for different purposes:
undress, fatigue and the like. Added to this is the frequent
difficulty of deciding the exact forms of early uniforms from
the inadequacy of the records, the inaccuracies of painters
and the eccentricities of individual officers. Local patriot¬
ism has sometimes been called in, still further to confuse the
issue, as in the bitter controversies which have raged concern¬
ing the question of the ‘clan tartans’ of the Highland regiments.
All these matters are outside the scope of the present study,
the object of which is merely to record the main lines of evolu¬
tion, to attempt, in however inadequate a fashion, to penetrate
to the reasons why uniforms developed in the way they did
5

Title page and first text page of a King Penguin,
1948, reduced. The illustrations are figures of
soldiers reproduced in colour.

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