Quick Facts
Biography
Ian Eaves, FSA, is a British researcher and consultant on arms and armour, and served for eighteen years as the Keeper of Armour at the Royal Armouries. From 1978 to 1983 he served as the editor of the Journal of the Arms & Armour Society and from 1995 as the society's president, where he is now a vice-president emeritus.
Publications
In 2000, Eaves was approached to continue the work of producing a comprehensive catalogue of armour held in the Royal Collection. The project was intended to fill a gap in scholarship and supersede the somewhat cursory efforts of Guy Laking that had been published in 1904. It had begun in the 1980s as part of a wider cataloguing collaboration between Claude Blair, the keeper of metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who acted as general editor, and two senior figures at the Royal Armouries, A. V. B. Norman (armour, edged weapons) and Howard Blackmore (firearms). The deaths of Norman (1998) and Blackmore (1999) threatened completion of the project, so Eaves, as then Keeper of Armour at the Royal Armouries, was asked to take on the task, both updating and extending Norman's work and also adding completely new entries. Tobias Capwell, a curator at the Wallace Collection, said in his review of the resulting book - Arms & Armour in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (2016) - that
The book’s complicated history makes the materialisation of this work all the more impressive. Despite being aware of the progress of the project previously, I could never have been prepared for the experience of opening a package to find “new” work by a leading figure in the field who departed this life nearly 20 years ago. Beyond Norman’s central authorial role, the detailed introduction by Howard Blackmore comes as a complete surprise, while the extent of Blair’s direct involvement could not have been fully anticipated either. New words, from three of the 20th century’s great scholars, defying time and the grave.
Eaves has expressed some disquiet with the outcome of his private commission to write Catalogue of European Armour at the Fitzwilliam Museum (2002). Described as an "excellent" book, if rather expensive, reviewer David M. Oster nonetheless notes flaws and says that Eaves told him that he was dis-satisfied with some elements of the book's structure, which were imposed upon him by the Fitzwilliam Museum. Oster also notes that Eaves had no hand in the selection of illustrations or writing their associated captions, some of which contain errors.
Papers
Papers written or translated by Eaves include: