Quote Originally Posted by AKScott View Post
He mulled on that a moment or two, pointed at my sporran and asked, 'is that a purse?"

I said, no, not really. It is a sporran. It started out as a piece of armour to wear while sword fighting and it turns out to be real handy with a pocket sewn into it.
That's an interesting myth, and one which in all my years I'd never heard of until now.

I wonder if there may be some confusion with a codpiece, which was worn in the same general area?

The history of the armored codpiece is closely related to its counterpart in civilian male costume. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, male garments for the upper body had occasionally become so short as to almost reveal the crotch. In these times prior to the development of trousers, men wore leggings tied to their undergarment or a belt, and the crotch was hidden with a flap secured to the upper inside edge of each legging. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, this flap began to be padded and thus visually emphasized. As such, the codpiece remained commonplace in European male costume until the end of the sixteenth century. On armor, the codpiece as a separate piece of plate defense for the genitals appeared during the second decade of the sixteenth century and remained in use until about 1570. It was generally thickly padded on the inside and attached to the armor at the center of the lower edge of the skirt. While its early form was rather cuplike, it remained under the direct influence of civilian costume, and later examples are somewhat more pointed upward, similar in shape to a cashew nut.

(http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/afas16/hd_afas16.htm)