the.com/besagew
the armpit's bodyguard, a tiny disc that saved knights from sneaky stabs
means A besagew is a small round plate of armor suspended over the armpit or shoulder joint to protect the gap left where rigid plates couldn't fully cover the body.
from From Old French 'besague,' a word that wandered through the workshops of medieval armorers; it shares the family of terms describing the fiddly defensive bits bolted onto plate harness. The exact path is murky, as armor vocabulary often is, but it sits among that cluster of late-medieval French loanwords that English absorbed wholesale as knights upgraded from mail to plate and discovered all the awkward gaps that still needed guarding.
- function
- covered the gap between cuirass and arm armor
- shape
- usually a small round or fan-shaped plate
- era
- thrived in 15th-century European battlefields
- weak spot logic
- armpits killed knights, so this guarded them
- name origin
- from Old French, meaning a flat plate