Leather Cuirass

[Dan Howard]

3.So it may be that some flax was grown in classical Greece then? Even so, like grain, not enough to meet the needs of the many Poleis. The bulk was likely imported , therefore expensive. Dilutes my hypothesis, maybe, but doesn't negate it. Why is everyone carefully avoiding the Thucydides/ Xenophon/ Spartan/ contemporary connection ?

If Chadwick's book is correct then the Linear B tablets suggest that enough linen was produced for local needs and produced enough surplus for export.

4. Fair point, once raw linen was imported, the weaving 'en masse' part was within the means of almost all households. So was Leather making

Unlike weaving, leather cannot be made inside domestic buildings.

"Leather provides worse protection than layered textiles - to use your term "bollocks" but I would prefer not to use inflammatory language. Do you have information on the energy/force of contemporary spears/arrows - I do! Leather provides adequate protection for the purpose under discussion and in any event the Thorakes was not intended to be weapon proof and wasn't (I can expand on this if we wish to digress).

I have a test performed by Dr Alan Williams in which he demonstrated that a pissy 5 layers of layered linen offered better resistance against a blade than 5mm of hardened leather. A separate test showed that it was penetrated by a point with only 30J of energy. The same point required 200J to penetrate 16 layers of linen. In order to produce a 5mm piece of cuir bouilli you have to start with a piece of leather that is over 1cm thick. It was not cheap. In fact leather curies stopped being used in medieval Europe because iron plate became cheaper to produce.