brigander

brigander

English

Etymology

From Middle English, from brigaunt, bregaund.

Noun

brigander (plural briganders)

1. (archaic) Synonym of brigandine
   • after 1510, "Inventories of [...] the Church of St. Margaret, 1511, 1572, and 1614-15", quoted in 1900, Westminster (London, England), A Catalogue of Westminster Records Deposited at the Town Hall, Caxton Street, in the Custody of the Vestry of St. Margaret & St. John, page 237:

     Item ij holy water stokke

     Item A fire skomer

     i pair of briganders (coats of mail) and a salet (light helmet)

     A pair of curas (cuirass)

     ij old bills

   • 1543, Grafton, C. Harding, page 497:

     The Duke of Buckyngham stoode harnessed in olde euell fauoured bryganders.

   • 1611 (edition of 1632), Speed, Hist. Great Britain, IX, xviii, 915:

     Harnessed in olde rusty briganders.

   • [1888, James Augustus Henry Murray, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society, page 1102:

     A soldier wearing a brigander.]

   • 1906, George Woolliscroft Rhead, Frederick Alfred Rhead, Staffordshire Pots & Potters, page 70:

     ... with their “prickers” and “hoblers” armed in “coats of mail, briganders, palets or roundels, vanbrases, and rerebrases, and using horns and clarions." In this portentous and lively fashion they moved on to the borders […]

   • 1978, Martin R. Holmes, Shakespeare and Burbage: The Sound of Shakespeare as Devised to Suit the Voice and Talents of His Principal Player, London : Phillimore

     A brigander - better known as a brigandine - was a closefitting jacket lined with small overlapping plates of iron which were fastened by rivets to their textile covering.

   • 2011, Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Peter Cunningham, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, Cambridge University Press (→ISBN), page 288:

     Every Alderman reviewed the men of his ward, putting aside "all such as had jacks, coats of plate, coats of mail, and briganders, and appointed none but such as had white harness, except such as should bear Moorish pikes."