We at Arms & Armor hope this finds you finishing a great year and looking to start an even better one in 2025! It has been a year of changes for us but in most cases they were for the better. Our plans for 2025 have us excited to keep improving our production and making some new things as well as better versions of our items.
The biggest changes for us this year have been personal wise. We had one retirement Mark Black and one semi retirement, Chris Poor. Both are around the shop some, but not every day for Chris and Mark visits occasionally. We had one sad passing as Greg Bentson succumbed to a battle with cancer. He will be sorely missed by many.
So we attack 2025 with a readjusted crew that is hitting its stride with lots of stuff being made. Axes, Knives and Swords oh my :-).
Our desire to make highly accurate replicas of pieces from the past has inspired us to improve several of our products with more accurate versions and this will continue as we move forward. Each time we craft a piece we strive to make it better than the one before.
This year saw us produce improved versions of our Italian Bill, Burgundian Pole Axe and Italian Pole Hammer
2024 saw us add a few new pieces to our line of weapons, folks got to meet for the first time our new
More glaive info here and here.
More info here.
We will not announce exactly what we have in the works to add to these fine choices above, yet. We prefer to have them ready to go when they are released! But they will start appearing soon and we hope they make your 2025 even better!
Thank you for all your support and love of all things Arms & Armor this past year and may the fates shower you with good fortune in 2025!
Nathan Clough, Ph.D. is Vice President of Arms and Armor and a member of the governing board of The Oakeshott Institute. He is a historical martial artist and a former university professor of cultural geography. He has given presentations on historical arms at events including Longpoint and Combatcon, and presented scholarly papers at, among others, The International Congress on Medieval Studies.
Craig Johnson is the Production Manager of Arms and Armor and Secretary of The Oakeshott Institute. He has taught and published on the history of arms, armor and western martial arts for over 30 years. He has lectured at several schools and Universities, WMAW, HEMAC, 4W, and ICMS at Kalamazoo. His experiences include iron smelting, jousting, theatrical combat instruction and choreography, historical research, European martial arts and crafting weapons and armor since 1985