A gorget covers the throat and upper chest, closing the gap between helmet and body armour — in mail for most of the Middle Ages, and in articulated plate only at the very end.
A gorget is a defence for the throat and the upper chest, sitting between the helmet above and the body armour below. It exists to close a gap, and the gap it closes is the most dangerous one a harness leaves.
For most of the medieval period it is not a plate at all. The throat was covered by mail — the skirt of a coif, a separate mail collar called a standard or pisane, or the aventail hanging from a bascinet — and by the bevor worn with a sallet.
The articulated steel collar that the word now brings to mind is a late arrival. It appears toward the end of the fifteenth century and becomes standard only in the sixteenth, which places its great period just outside this archive.
The mail forms are simple and effective: a collar of riveted rings, either integral to a coif or made separately and worn under or over the body armour, covering the throat and the tops of the shoulders.
The plate gorget is built from a main front plate and a main back plate, each with two or three narrower lames above and below. The lames are joined by sliding rivets, so the collar flexes as the head turns instead of locking it in place.
It hinges on one side and hooks or buckles on the other, and the neck opening is finished with a roped or turned edge for strength. On later harness it also carries the pauldrons, which is a structural job as much as a protective one.
The throat is where an armoured man is killed. The fifteenth-century fight books are explicit: against a man in harness, the point goes to the visor, the armpit, the groin — and the throat, which is closest to the weapon hand and least well covered.
A mail collar answers a cut and a slash well and a determined thrust much less well, which is precisely the weakness that drove the eventual move to plate at this one spot.
The plate gorget also solves an engineering problem. Helmet and breastplate cannot simply meet, because the head must turn; a separate collar lets the helmet rotate on it while the seam stays covered throughout.
Its strength is that it addresses a gap nothing else could. A harness with a superb breastplate and a superb helmet is still open at the neck without it.
Its limitation is movement. A rigid collar high under the jaw restricts how far the head can turn and tip, which costs the wearer awareness at exactly the moment he needs it, and no amount of articulation removes that entirely.
It is also uncomfortable in a way the rest of a harness is not. Weight bearing on the collarbones and heat trapped at the throat are constant complaints, and the mail forms it replaced were far easier to wear.
The mail coif covers the throat from the eleventh century onward, and by the fourteenth a separate mail collar is a recognised item, listed in inventories under names including standard and pisane.
The bascinet's aventail does the same job from the mid-fourteenth century, laced to the helmet rim and hanging over the shoulders, and the sallet's bevor does it differently from the mid-fifteenth by covering the chin and throat from below.
The articulated plate gorget emerges from these solutions in the last decades of the fifteenth century and becomes general in the sixteenth — after which it outlives every other piece of armour on the body.
Italian practice through the fifteenth century tended to attach a bevor-like plate to the breastplate itself, so the throat defence and the body armour were one assembly.
German practice kept them separate, pairing a sallet with a bevor strapped round the neck, which is why the German sallet looks so incomplete without it.
The independent plate gorget that supersedes both is a shared late development rather than a regional one, and by the sixteenth century it is universal across European harness.