Dan,

Quote:

Exactly. This happens all the time. An archaeologist makes a speculative guess and others start saying "the quote clearly states..."

[/quote]
your mixing up quotes out of context! The author states ' that the second leather object,possibly a garment' speculative guess yes, but then I stated in reply to James's comment, that 'the quote clearly states 'According to the De Rubis Belliis', a garment of Libyan hide..' She is not making a speculative guess at that point, but using a reference from
G.Sumner's Roman Military Clothing (2) AD 200-400, nor am I quoting a speculative guess as fact.
James,
I believe De Rubis Bellis was composed by a contemporary Byzantine anonymous author, and not meaning to labour the point, again the garment mentioned may not survive in inhumations due to it's organic nature.
Chuck,
The Roman Centurion curiasse you mention was also postulated by Bruce-Mitford as mentioned in the author's quote.

Going back to the Vendel /Valsgarde plates, some of the warriors are also wearing the bathrobe style 'warrior coat', decorated with rings!! What are we supposed to make of that? Like some of the iconography on the Bayeux Tapestry we can only speculate.
best
Dave

with regards to the BT and the "rings" how many people worked on the tapestry? how many people can draw one object the same way? did they want certain figures to stand out more than others? how would you make them stand out? :)

and to the rings on the warriors? which image of the vendals are you speaking about? i would love to see it. i don't see rings on the Sutton Hoo helmet figure though, maybe I'm looking at the wrong picture.

Thanks for the Bruce-Mitford mention, I can't seem to find his theory now :( only can remember bits and pieces.

Roman Military Clothing 2, pages 37-38 right for the Libyian hides? Reading it now. Punic/civil wars of the romans... over armour... light weight.. taken off when going into battle.. not normal practice mentioned by Caesar. but then again we're talking about 700-1000 years before the sutton hoo and the BT and in the wrong area.

man i love this. making me break out the books and researching hehehee

If you show a mail shirt to a class full of people and ask them to draw it you will see every depiction that is in the Bayeux Tapestry and a few more. Virtually all of the armour in the BT is simple mail armour. Armor scholars have known this for over a century. Hulit, Laking, Ffoulkes, etc all disputed Meyrick's work. It is only hacks like Ashdown that perpetuated this rubbish.

I might cite from FM Kelly who wrote in 1931.
"And at the start let me define plainly what I mean by ‘mail’. I hold that in the Middle Ages and, indeed, as long as armour continued… the term applied properly, nay, exclusively, to that type of defence composed… of interlinked rings. Only through a late poetical licence did it come to be extended to armour in general. ‘Chain-mail’ is a mere piece of modern pleonasm; ‘scale-mail’ and still more ‘plate-mail’ stark nonsense. As for Meyrick’s proposed classification of mail – ‘ringed, ‘single’, double-chain, ‘mascled’, ‘rustred’, ‘trelliced’, etc. – it may be dismissed without further ado. His categories, in so far as they were not pure invention, rested wholly on a misinterpretation of the evidence; the passages he cites to support his theories… all refer to what he calls ‘chain’ mail; otherwise MAIL pure and simple."
F. M. Kelly, “Chain Mail,” Apollo (Nov, 1931), pp. 264-270

Yes it seems like maille to me.

Hi Chuck,
I'll attempt to give you some answers to your questions and comments.

The tapestry (although it is actually embroidery) is said to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo, using A-S women, who where considered to be amongst the finest in Europe at the timet, has been postulated that the drawings where done by one person, ( the style appears universal throughout the tapestry), the lines pin pricked to transfer the drawing on to the linen back cloth, a black powder sprinkled on the original drawing material, transferring the drawing to the linen back cloth. The main figures in the tapestry Harold, Gyrth, Leofwine, William and Odo, name's are capationed above the 'lead' characters. The figure said to be Odo, mounted guy with mace, hauberk stands out because of the triangulated pattern on his hauberk, most of the figures have a ringed pattern hauberk. It's Odo hauberk that appears to cause the most controversy in interpretation.

I'm offshore at the moment but I think Valsgarde 7, but basically the two warriors in the boar crested helms and 'bathrobe' wrap over warrior coat with ringed pattern.

The Sutton Hoo highly decorated shoulder clasps were thought by Bruce-Mitford to join at the shoulder a leather cuirass.

Ref the Libyan hide/quilted tunic...welll there you go, a lesson learned, check out other peoples references!!

best regards
Dave

[quote="Steven H"]

Karl Knisley wrote:

Hello How about boiled leather?

Please don't :lol:
Please don't boil it. There are easier ways of using heat to harden leather for use in armour. If you search on armourarchive.org you will find extensive discussion of this.

As boiled leather relates to this thread though: I'm not aware of any examples of hardened leather being used as a stand alone armour. It was worn over mail (which is cut proof), to mitigate blunt damage. That's almost it's only use in armour in the medieval period.

-Steven[/quote

Steven,

I'm confused as to where you are coming by your data. We have Norse accounts of "reindeer hide" and "deerhide" coats being worn as the primary (and only) armour - you can find examples in the Heimskringla, as I recall. I'd have to go digging, but I seem to recall hardened leather helmets, inside of steel frames, being used at various times during the iron age, as well. We also know that hardened leather was at times made into bucklers, and according to the late 15th c master at arms, Pietro Monte, was a common material for Iberian shields - likely due to Moorish influence - which would need to oppose swords and spears rather directly.

I've tried cutting hardened leather armour, it's no easy task.

And why not boil it? It's a tricky process - much tricker than hardening with wax - but it makes the leather much harder and seems to have been how the leather was often hardened. Likewise, leather lamellar armour was used in Scandinavia, Russia and the Mid_east, sometimes over other armour, such as mail, sometimes not. Its first use I can think of was in the ancient period, particularly by the Parthians. They seem to have thought it worthwhile! As did the Japanese, who further hardened it with lacquering.

Besides the fact that leather rots, and leather armour would have been considered disposable, I think the reason we don't see a lot of surviving Western and Central European leather armour (I know of three pieces, total, all 14th c), is the same reason we know it was used in places like the Scandinavia and Japan. Europe is fairly iron rich, these other places are iron-poor. We know that leather armours were used and experimented with fairly extensively during the 14th century, but gave way to the technological changes in Europe that made steel plate armour not only possible, but more affordable. None of that invalidates the idea of leather armour, or the fact that it was used in places as far flung as Scandinavia and Tibet, to oppose swords and spears, often with no form of mail or quite fabric defense underneath.

So while I understand your argument in favor of a jack, the idea that leather armour didn't/doesn't work, and was only used over mail because it can be cut, is a little too extreme a position. Yes, it can be cut, so can mail. You really hate somebody, so can the thin pieces of a plate harness, when you're wielding a halberd or partizan (as several period masters at arms tell us).

Now, as to the leather gambeson the original poster asked for, that is another beast - I can't see why that would be more resistant than any other padded armour, and the leather shell would make it a lot hotter. I can't think of any examples of "leather gambesons" that can really be documented as such.

Best,

Greg

Why not boil it?

Because baking it works so much better. We have come so far in the last 5 years of figuring out how to reproduce very accurate leather armour. The main reasons people moved away from dropping leather in boiling water are two very important issues: shrinkage and time. Leather would shrink if left in the water too long, as well as any weak spots in the leather deforming the piece. I saw a piece of belly leather dipped into boiling water that after 10sec. was 35% of its former size. Secondly, you have very little time in which to shape the piece. After 30sec. the leather has "set" and very little tweaking can be accomplished. Instead, what people have started to do is to soak the leather in room temperature water, let it sit overnight (casing the leather), then tool/shape the leather, usually using the same tools as they do for metal armour. Truly accurate reproductions incorporate hide glue into the next step, as it forms a matrix inside the leather at the molecular level, changing its properties. They put it in the oven at around 180deg, and wait until it is dry. The prime temperature seems to be between 160-200 deg. Too low, and the polymerization does not occur. Too high, and the water is boiled out, resulting in cooked leather.

Yet rawhide is a different beast entirely than hardened leather. Cutting the two is trying to compare a frozen block of meat, to meatballs.

For a rather "unique" 14th century effigy, I would look at Guenther von Schwarzburg. Over on the Armour Archive, there was a topic referring to fully splinted limb armour here.

[quote="Steven H"][quote="Greg Mele"]

Quote:

From what I've seen, for Western/Central Europe, leather seems to have only been a somewhat fringe part of armour in the 14th century. Clearly there but never extensive. If I'm wrong on this point I'd love to see more :D (and not just because it makes it easier for me to make my own accurate 14th century kit).

No I agree, as the leather used is usually splinted in construction, thus making the leather largely just another fabric, as it were.

Quote:

For the Medieval period in Western and Central Europe (but not Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East etc) my statement , "That's almost it's only use in armour in the medieval period." is correct. The examples of leather armour in this time and place are few and far between. I erred in not specifying which area.

Fair enough! As I said, however, it was used in many areas, for centuries, and areas that, while metal poor, still had sufficient resources to produce helmets, swords, etc. Much as the balance of thought has gone from people seeing mail as easily defeated (and looked at us askance when we'd point out that it's damn hard to cut), and then swung to the idea on some of the discussion boards that a mail clad warrior is all but impregnable, I just think the case for the ineffectiveness of hardened leather armour is being overstated.

Greg Mele wrote:

I'm actually less convinced that a leather facing for a gambeson would be hotter. I've never sweat through my all cotton gambeson, so I'm not sure how much heat or moisture is actually transpiring all the way to the surface. But it still aint well documented.

Actually, I was speaking from experience there. I own three different gambesons - one cotton, two linen - one 13th c, two late 14th c, and I fought in a long, quilted leather gambeson for a few demos back in the late 90s, during my reenactment days. It breathed much less well (sweating into the lining did not help, the way it does with a fabric gambeson), and the surface retained heat much more readily. Issues of authenticity aside, it looked nice, but I didn't enjoy wearing it...

Greg

James, I use the snips and jigsaw to break down the hide to strips small enough to go in the pot ( I use the biggest stockpot I could find for soaking which is still pretty limiting in size ) for soaking. When I was a kid my mother had an enourmous granitware pot for canning that i'd love to find another one of as it would make fitting the hide in for soaking easier.

Ah I just toss the whole thing in the bath tub.

Thats not a bad idea, I wish mine were a little bigger ( and frankly newer ), i'd pirate that idea. I have one of those 70's remodel tiny tubs where your knees are knocking you in the chin if you were to sit in it.