The entire collection of photos is on the jerkin’s Collections Online page. And of course you can still come to the museum and see it on display in our Medieval London gallery.
I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into the Tudor leather world. If you have indeed ‘reconstructed’ our jerkin, please let us know. Any comments on our jerkin – or jerkins in general – are very welcome (and so are corrections, honest!).
PS: My colleague Jackie Keily, our leather expert, has suggested the following for further reading:
Alison Nailer, ‘Items of dress – 3.1. Jerkins’, in Geoff Egan, Material Culture in London in an age of transition: Tudor and Stuart period finds c. 1450-c.1700 from excavations at riverside sides in Southwark,
MOLAS Monograph 19, 2005, pp. 17-21
Marian Foster, ‘Leather Jerkins’, in Julie Gardiner with Michael J. Allen, Before the Mast: Life and Death Aboard the Mary Rose, Volume 4 of The Archaeology of the Mary Rose, 2005, pp. 37-55
PPS: In case you were wondering about the title of this post, it is from the works of the French barber surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-1590), published in English in 1634. Paré described disguising himself during the siege of Hesdin in 1553:
… and for fear of being known, I gave a velvet coate, a Satin doublet, a very fine cloth cloak lin’d with velvet, to a Souldier, who gave me a scurvy old torne doublet cut and slasht with using, and a leather jerkin well examined, and an ill favoured hat, and a little cloake …
In the French version, Paré wrote that he had been given ‘un vieux pourpoint tout déchiré et déchiqueté par l’usure, un collet de cuir en lambeaux, un chapeau de mauvaise qualité et un petit manteaux’. I have seen ‘collet’ being translated as collar, not jerkin, which does not really make sense in this context (‘en lambeaux’ means ‘in tatters’). Have a look at the entry in this 1660 dictionary just for amusement.