Brawn Barber wrote: | ||
In relation to the evidence of leather armour is that he main problem the organic nature of leather. Say we were to strip off your skin and leave it lying around for 500 years or so. Do you think we would still find it? I think not. |
Please, read again what i wrote :)
I've said I know leather was used. There's plenty of sources refering to "cappellum de corio" (leather hat), "curazia" and "correttum" (leather armour), but i've never found an explicit reference to the use of treated leather.
I'm just saying: anyone who says that you can harden leather by immersion in boiling water is wrong, since this would destroy the leather (made exception for 4-5 mm thick sole leather). I've no doubt there are other methods, such as soaking and "cooking" in oven. Unluckily I only have a microwave oven and i don't think it would work properly... :(
What I'm stressing is that I can't find enough historical evidences of "cuir boulli" to justify the fact that everyone is so sure about this subject. I hope i was more clear this time. ;)
Other two cents on the subject: it has been said somewhere in this topic that leather was expensive. Sincerly I have no idea about the cost of leather in medieval age, but surely it was not as uncommon as today (we all know this), since there were battles involving more than 10.000 mounted knights by side, a number of beasts we can't even imagine nowadays. Therefore I can't guess how many horses, cows and bulls where around, but surely they could have made at least some hundreds pair of shoes and leather armours just by using horses dead in battle. I don't know if they used cow skin, horse skin or else, but surely they didn't lack any leather if they could afford to send in battle so many horses. Therefore I think (IMHO) that leather armour was not so expensive. Surely there was a wide range of prices and qualities.