Introduction

The Royal Armouries is the UK’s national collection of arms and armour. It originated in the working armoury of the medieval kings of England based at the Tower of London. In 1660 it opened two permanent displays accessible to the paying public, making it one of the oldest public museums in the world.

 It is now the home of the largest and most significant collections of arms and armour in the world, spanning both civilian and military use, and running chronologically from antiquity to the present day. The museum operates across four sites, three of which are open to the public: its historic home at the Tower of London, its main site at a purpose-built facility in Leeds, the Victorian Fort Nelson outside Portsmouth where it displays the bulk of its artillery collection, and the National Firearms Centre.

Research has been a vital element of the Royal Armouries since before it was a museum. The Board of Ordnance from which the museum traces its lineage advanced human knowledge in fields beyond arms production, supervising the Royal Observatory, the Ordnance Survey, and the Geological Survey. In the nineteenth century, pioneering antiquarians transformed the historic arms and armour held at the Tower from a storehouse of curiosities to a systematically catalogued and curated collection. Today, research remains integral to the museum’s understanding of the objects it holds, the context in which they were created, collected, and catalogued, and the way in which the museum presents its collection to the public, whether physically or digitally.

Cover image: © Royal Armouries