Hi Steven,

Steven H wrote:

You make several good points. But you neglect to mention glue-hardening techniques. Are you familiar with these?

I'm not, no, but it certainly sounds interesting. The only place I've heard of them is here. Do you have any references or sources you can share?

My initial reaction to the idea is that with hide glue it would certainly yield something very hard, but the result would probably also be quite brittle.

Again, the question has to be asked does it yeild enough of an improvement over water hardening to be worth the extra expense and difficulty?

Thanks.

I agree with Al on the water hardening, but am curious as to where the notion of beeswax being expensive comes from?
Also was it really 'leather' or was it literally raw hide that was treated, as many shields in Africa are as leather itself was a very expensive medium taking months to produce at this time so I am told? Never tried making anything with raw skin myself but I have seen shields and dried skins that were very tough indeed and would be a throw away item when damaged, any thoughts on this any body?

Regards Lawrence

Hi Lawrence,

Lawrence Parramore wrote:

I agree with Al on the water hardening, but am curious as to where the notion of beeswax being expensive comes from?

Umm, because it was? :D

Seriously though, tallow was the candle material of the regular man in medieval times. They were common enough that there was established a tallow chandlers guild in London over half a century before the guild of wax chandlers was established. They were at the time, and remain today, separate liveried guilds.

Beeswax candles were the lighting source of the rich and in major churches. I don't have any resources as to the actual costs but if you think about the fact that candles were basically the only non-natural lighting source available at the time, the cost difference between tallow and beeswax makes a big difference.

Quote:

Also was it really 'leather' or was it literally raw hide that was treated, as many shields in Africa are as leather itself was a very expensive medium taking months to produce at this time so I am told? Never tried making anything with raw skin myself but I have seen shields and dried skins that were very tough indeed and would be a throw away item when damaged, any thoughts on this any body?

If you look at the civilisations that have made extensive use of rawhide as combat armour or shields you will realise that they almost all live in places that are both hot and dry.

Rawhide will rot very rapidly if it gets wet. Sure, it's tough stuff when dry but get it wet and it goes all soggy in a way that water-hardened tanned leather won't.

I still don't understand the need to find an alternative to the explanation of water hardening for leather. It works better than any other method and requires nothing in the way of expensive materials other than the leather itself to make. Call it occam's armour if you will, but all of the other options I've heard of involve greater cost and complexity to produce somehting that is inferior to water-hardened leather.

I agree that rawhide would give good protection, most period sources I have seen for leather armour show it as being tooled and dyed. I may be wrong, but I'm fairly sure you can't do this with rawhide. Obviously this doesn't tell me that rawhide wasn't used - but it does point towards tanned leather.

I have used water hardened leather armour and it is tricky to get right. I found the easiest way was to soak it, form it then heat it. However it does need to be waterproofed, because when it gets wet again, it softens up and loses its shape. I tend to do this by rubbing in a beeswax-based leather preservative. So it kind of ends up getting waxed anyway. Whether this was done in period, I don't know.

I don't realy have any opinions as to what particular method of hardening was used in period - but something I have learned is that quite often there were many different methods used to create the same thing. Just look at mail as an example - the differing ring sizes and guages, mixed/solid links, punched/drawn etc. I couldn't even say whether it was hardened or simply formed in cold water.

But I do believe that it was worn primarily for impact protection during the transitional period to cover up the shortcomings of mail. Exactly the same way that the earliest bits of plate were used. (Knees, elbows, shins - all the bony areas)

Hi,

Umm beeswax is a product of making honey? still quite a common product and not expensive normally though of course you can pay a lot if you like? :lol:

I agree with water hardening, but also waterproofing is a good idea also, you could also waterproof raw hide this way and they do tool rawhide especially in the States I believe?

Regards Lawrence

Hi!

Here is another good picture abuot the leather armour, but I don't know where is it from. Only I know that it's italian from 1354. Can anyone help me?

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Just because it is brownish in colour doesn't mean that it is leather. Textile is just as likely.

Here are my experiences with leather armour.

Boiling it(or putting in warm water) is risky, as you cant be sure of the outcome, it can come out very brittle.
Soaking in room temperature water, than shaping (either with a last or with a hammer), followed by baking at a low temperature yields something what has shrunk or been distorted in any way, and is far from brittle. As for glue, I using hide glue to additionally harden the leather. There are several methods. Also, i have heard of half-tanned leather, where a layer of rawhide is left in the middle. It is rather interesting, as if used for example, an elbow cop, you can turn it inside out, and it will just pop back.

I am absolutely sure leather armour was used, it i s a great shock absorber, and even though i haven't tested much, it does quite well against sharp blades.

Personally, i doubt leather armour was ever boiled, as this would mean it cannot be tooled, yet the rerebrace in the british museum is tooled, as well as a lot of italian 14th century armour on effigies.

I'm in the SCA and I've made both wax hardened leather for lamellar armour and water hardened leather for bucklers and singlestick baskets. In my experience, wax hardening of any sort makes the leather easier to cut or punch/drill holes in. It's like several people have posted, the wax acts as lubricant for the blade. Water hardening is completely different matter. I have an ugly little bucker that I made out of 10 oz water hardened oak tanned cowhide that I've hacked at with machetes, tomahawks, swords and axes. It has some surface cuts, but no real damage. I've used it for about 4 years of waster practice and shinai sparring and it's still going strong. I think that leather armour in Europe was superceded by metal armour because it is less maintenance intensive. You can scrub/polish.buff mud, grime, rust and other ickyness off of metal, but leather, being more porous, just soaks it up and gets pretty dang nasty. Wet metal may rust, but it would take awhile for it to be rendered useless by the corrosion, whereas wet leather, left somewhere damp (like say in a duffel bag in the basement) while rot/turn moldy in a few months. Don't get me wrong, as a SCAdian, I love leather armour, it works great against the blunt trauma of the rattan sticks we use, but it seems that the real fighting men of history chose metal whenever they could get it.

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This was an interesting Post - has anyone picked up any new intelligence about hardened leather defences in the past year and a half?

I have seen an experiment in water hardened leather in which boiling ruins the leather (crispy and massive shrinking) and bringing to a set heat well below boiling resulting in a piece of hardened leather that easily handled a meat cleaver chop while sitting on a chopping block. However in saying that in a historical context the piece would need to be replaced before the next battle. Which may be the suitability of using leather as a defence especially over an another armour (either padding or maille) as it would be easy to replace compared to metal. I am not sure about it being cheaper. Some where in the previous post someone mentioned that leather was cheap being a by-product on the beef industry. It is one now and leather is not currently that cheap. If it was cheap in period then it would make it even better as a replaceable armor. The fact that a tanner would have to have a full cow hide pickling in a tanning pit for up to 18 months would be a slow way to make your fortune!

I would also speculate that beef was not as accessible to all levels of society as it is now and may have been an expensive meat choice even with the poorer cuts. In fact in terms of production value vs resource use you'd be better off with 3-5 head of sheep compared to 1 cattle beast over a two or three year life. Most of the period illustrations that I recall that have cattle shown are pulling carts or ploughs and that may have been one of their primary benefits combined with milk, meat and hides. Hopefully someone more well read in period animal husbandry may be add more to this...

Native American also had rawhide shields made from full thickness hides from the neck of the buffelo, which was proof against musket shot. I have handled a full thickness rawhide from a cattle beast and it was thick, dense but amazingly light. I would guess that the African tribes that used rawhide shields would have selected the appropriate area of hide to make their shields from. Modern dogchew rawhide is a by-product of the leather tanning industry (the straggly bits of belly that are trimmed off prior to tanning) so may not be a good approximation of period rawhide.

If water hardening was the primary way of hardening leather then the armourer would have selected the best part of a hide for the job. The hardening experiment I have witnessed showed that different parts of a hide stretched in different directions according to the location of the piece on the hide. Ie belly really stretchy and shrank more along the back-belly axis rather than the head-rump axis. The hypothesis was that the collagen buildup had stretched out in one direction more than the other. Any imperfections in the hide also showed up as distortions in the piece. Following on from that the hide from over the rump may have been the preferred choice.
As Al M has mentioned above pit-tanned leather has a far denser consistency compared to modern vege-tanned leather, and the shrinking we see in modern VT may not have been so significant, which is our biggest problem in trying to water-harden leather.

So when we look at water-hardened leather we can say (among other things) that there are these points;

Annoying shrinking habits of water heated leather
An armour that may have been trashed after any medium to serious damage
An armour that may require intense maintenance

which are issues to re-enactors (as amateur manufacturers and warriors, with full time jobs etc) but probably not an issue to a wealthy fighting man within period with access to a well developed industry and serfs!

Thanks for reading my ramblings - let the discussion begin anew!

Cheers

Boyd

The common misconception that wax hardening "lubricates" the leather and therefore facilitates cutting is crap. This is the same story over and over again without any actual testing of a proven method. We have been employing a method that has been in our family for generations that is much more than boiling leather and it provides exceptional protection.
http://schmitthenner.com/Armor_Tests.htm
These tests are not performed on dog chews. We actually craft pieces we would sell and test them harshly.


Now start screaming for "proof" and "documentation" for our traditional methods.

Leather armour was sometimes decorated with paint or gesso.
Leather that has been hardened with wax cannot be decorated with paint or gesso.
Therefore any historical pieces of leather armour decorated with paint or gesso cannot have been wax hardened.
It is possible that wax hardening was used for armour was was not intended to be so decorated.
Is it more likely that the same hardening method was used for all armour regardless of its decoration - i.e. not wax?

I don't see any useful testing info on the linked page. Are there missing photos or something?

There are videos.

Try viewing the page through Internet Explorer rather than Firefox - it eventually worked for me!

Great videos, Brawn. Thanks for posting. :D