Effectiveness of leather armour?

In terms of padding I do recall reading somewhere that the innermost layer of padding underneath your armour (plate, mail, leather?) during the middle ages would be silk because if you were hit with an arrow, the silk not be penetrated but drawn into the body and twisted around the arrow head and this would allow the surgeon to more easily remove it from your body.

Silk was the most expensive fabric since it came via long trade routes from China so I would guess that only the nobility would have that sort of padding.

FWIW

 

Many interresting points here, I'll try to be consise....
Tests on TV...
The problem in "arrow vs plate", etc, is that the metallurgy part is often left out of the equation. The short version is that you can pretty much get the result you want, either beeing a "pro-arrow" or "pro-plate"-person. I'm personally in the "pro-plate"-camp, but if I should try to be neutral, I would say that the hardness of the plate and arrowhead is very important to find out more about if we want to find "the final and true answer" to this one. This is often the case with most of the TV-shows, they allways leave moderations, exceptions and details out, based on the principle "we must not bore our audience, so we need bombastic, and spectacular programs, and the truth is just a bonus in this"

Armor-types.
I like what Rebel Wado and Polar Bear writes; here's my cents:
Plate is very good at pretty much everything, provided you have shock-absorbing beneath (in medieval europe, this is allways layers of textile clothing).
Mail is very good at stopping cutting (it's still used in fish-factories as gloves to protect the workers from filet-knive-slashes), but it's not very good against thrusts. Against blunt attacks, it's the same as with plate, OK if you have padding.
Textile armor (NB not just "clothes"), Works pretty well against thrusts and surprisingly well against arrows. Against high-kinetic force weapons, like axes, hammers, spear-thrusts, etc, it's not so good, as theese weapons usually either penentrates the layers of textile (sharp things), or manages to let enough of the impact-force punch through and break things beneath. It's allso worth noting that textile-armor used in a stand-alone-setting was pretty thick; around 17 layers of textile, but when plate came into use, they made them thinner, as they didn't have to stop piercing/slashing weapons; plate took care of that.

Conclution: When warriors starts arming themselves with armor, not just shields, they start with mail then mail+padding then plate+padding. The 1400-knight can be regarded as a person with chobham-armor, different layers of different types of armour with different weaknesses and qualities. The plate distributes the impact to such a large area that the textile padding beneath manages to absorb the impact-force (in the car-example, this translates as a car with airbag ) Say an arrow manages to pierce a plate, then the point is blunted, and the remaining of the arrows energy is absorbed by the layers of textile (try to shoot an arrow at one layer of cotton hanged up to dry, and see what happens).

Why havent Stolenbjorn mentioned leather in his post?

-Because IMHO, leather is armor only in Hollywood, because it fiths with our idea about what the european medieval times was all about. I know that cuirbouilli (boiled leather) was in use, but mostly on horses, as chaffron's (head-protection). On horses it have several advantages:
*Doesn't make noise that distracts the horse
*Isn't too heavy
On a person it takes as long time to craft as plate, so the production is as expensive as plate, and because leather was surprisingly expensive in medieval times, the raw-material was actually allmost as expensive as plate as well, so...
Leather poor piercing-protection, some-protection, some cutting-protection.

 

some links...

NB, I don't know all parameters in theese links, but they give at least some impression on how things behave...
Cutting vs flesh: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v4j3mvrDyQ"]YouTube - ARMA Test Cutting-Cleaving a Deer Carcass[/ame]
Piercing vs mail+leather: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGu4bpb4eTI&feature=related"]YouTube - spear vs mail over soft leather[/ame]
Piercing vs mail alone: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqagYSP3PGs&feature=related"]YouTube - spear vs mail alone[/ame]
Some arrowpictures from someone who I know to be serious:
vs. wood and plate: http://www.kongshirden1308.no/galleri/2004_bornholm_2/thumbs.htm
vs. textile: http://www.kongshirden1308.no/galleri/2003_1308dag_03/thumbs.htm
Greek arma-vid that looks serious IMO: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJ6_KoXvqM"]YouTube - Test thrusts on maille[/ame]

 

One of the big things with most modern maile is that it's not rivetted so it's much easier to pierce. Get some properly made maile and you see a big difference.

Unfortunately the only proper way to test armour is to stick a person in it and they tell you how it feels. I had an insame student would let me cut them with power in various armours and told how it felt. Sometimes it wasn't hard to guess.

The Bear.

 

Since it hasn't been mentioned I would also add the use of "paper armour" as in the case of the Korean foot soldiers. FWIW.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

 

Actually, some mail in India was only butted, and it isn't nessecarily easier to pierce, but in order to be as good as riveted mail, it have to be made of thicker "thread". My first mail shirt was made of 9mm rings of very thick (and square) form, and was actually as hard to pierce as the other mail shirt i got that was riveted. The big difference was that the butted mail shirt weighed 16kg, whereas the riveted one weighed 7kg.....

So I'd say that riveted mail is harder to pierce than any butted mail of same metal quality and dimentions. :hat:

And I think all mail in my exsamples are riveted btw...

 

Missed this one; most textile armor have the same effect. Perhaps silk is the "ultimate" textile garnment, but you'd be surprised how much piercing-force a gamberson of linen can absorb.

Paper is allso made out of fibres (both linen and paper is made out of plants), so I'm not that surprised if paper have been used in armor, but I wonder how one shields it from sweat and rain; my newspapers are not very comfortable to wear after some hours in the rain

 

yeah and good luck getting your wife to give you the silk.

It would have been layered and sealed with a resin.

The Bear.

 

Unfortunately there is not a lot of information on this though I continue to seach. What I have determined so far is that the "armour" was about 1/2 to 1" thick and intended to address most of the minor sorts of injuries one might otherwise have to deal with if only clad in one's clothing. In this way, for instance, firing an arabusque would still put out the sparks, but these need not burn the sharp-shooter. Of course, noone expected the paper (paper-mache, actually) to stop a musket ball or an arrow. FWIW.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

 

I did some battle reenactment type fighting back home in village fetes as a teenager in the early 80s and this type of shield strike worked quite well. Though we also used this method to completely destroy shields just to prove the swords and axes used really were solid (unsharpened) steel and shields were wood that would eventually break down if you were stuck in a protracted and sustained battle.

 

In Korean sword, there are no "blocks" and deflection and timing are everything. Most people I have run into have practiced with wooden or bamboo swords so that they develop the bad habit of attacking the weapon instead of the person. Actually start to attack the person and the response is uniformly, "whaddaya tryin' ta do--kill me!?!"

Well,....actually.... yeah.

In the MYTBTJ the use of a shield-and-sabre combination are documented, but the shield is, essentially, rattan and is intended to confound a strike or jab rather than stop it completely. There is also the matter of working as part of a squad rather than individual combat. FWIW.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

 

Well the honest answer is we don't really know as there are no texts telling us how to use them. However, if you look at the viking shield wall etc. Then taking blows full on is exactly what their shields did.

The Bear.

 

The analysis of battle damage (see: "Blood Red Roses") seems to reveal a host of "kills" by arrows and spikes. Seems like these would have been the two items that the shields would have meant to be the best protection against. Thoughts?

BTW: Do any European re-enactor groups ever incorporate archery into their scenerios?

Best Wishes,

Bruce

 

Arrows aren't just arrows though Bruce. There's armour piercing bodkin arrows, broadheads, etc etc. Then you go into the types of bow. A longbow will pass though a shield, as will a crossbow bolt. However, a horsebow or hunting bow won't.
European warfare is so varied that there are no easy answers.

The Bear.

 

Gotcha...thanks. My frame of reference was the sort of massed flights arrows shot at maximum trajectory a'la Agincourt. I hadn't thought of an arrow shot at near point-blank. Thanks again.

Best Wishes,

Bruce

 

Agincourt is a good example actually because alot of the killing wasn't done by arrows but by the archers going into the bogged down french and knifing them through their armour gaps. Even the mighty english longbow (welsh) had trouble penetrating milanese plate.

The Bear.

 

Exactly. On dry land, getting up in plate is trivial. You can do cartwheels in the stuff. However, ever get a rubber boot stuck in the mud? Sure, you can get it out, but try doing that with hundreds of crazy Welshmen running around trying to gut you. Becomes a different story entirely. I imagine plate has all kind of crevasses that can fill with mud and make getting up kind of difficult from the suction. Then there's the danger of dying horses falling on you and immobilizing you, which of course makes fleeing difficult.

Best regards,

-Mark

 

Hi all,

Bruce, I would be interested to know what direction the bodies injured by all of the arrows were facing. Imagine how nasty that sort of Agincourt style barrage would be on an army that had decided to run?

And Bear, I am more than a bit skeptical of some of the modern re-interpretations of the role of archery in some of those battles. The English used to have a truck load of longbowmen in those invasion forces. Henry was no idiot, you dont take a bunch of people with you, repeatedly, if they aren't useful.

paul
paul

 

I don't see the reference I was looking for about Agincourt, but I remember reading a first hand account of the battle from one of the survivors. Supposely the arrows were not able to penetrate completely through the heavy armor the French nobility wore; however, the noise of the arrows was horrible and deafing as they hit and deflected off of the armor. I believe arrows did penetrate into armor where they could, but not lethal hits, but they did stick.

The weight of the armor, the muddy terrain, the crowded conditions, plus now the armor may have a lot of arrows stuck in it. I think there were 7000 archers. Some of the heavily armored French apparently fell down and could not get back up, actually drowning in their own armor.

I also don't know if the archers "knifed" the downed French. I believe they primarily used hachets, axes, and picks, not daggers.

As for the shield wall, the Battle of Hastings is an example of a shield wall use. The shields were interlocked together to form a wall.

With the larger shields, even back to the days of Sparta, the shield was not just to protect a person, it actually was vital at helping to protect the person to your left. So you were responsible for protecting at least half of the person on your left with your shield. You would not use it to deflect a blow into any of your comrades. Maybe when formation was broken, the use of the shield was different.