Armor: How effective was Chainmail

[Kegluneq]

That might work today when you can drive down to the local store for a roll of wire. People have no idea of how difficult it was to produce enough wire for a single hamata using the technology of the time. The cost of the labour to make the armour was a much smaller percentage of the total cost of armour than it is today.

In fairness there has been some investigation of this issue - I have Sim and Kaminski's Roman Imperial Armour to hand at least, in which they address the production of ferrous wire. They established that to use draw plates, mechanical rather than human force must have been utilised (probably simple counterweight systems), which meant production of wire was certainly restricted to specialist sites. Annoyingly they don't break down the time needed to produce individual rings here (I'm sure Sim has elsewhere), but they do state that a coat containing 40,000 6mm rings (solid and riveted) took 230 work days to produce and utilised c.760m of wire.

Edit: They allocated 200 of those days to the production of the rings, with 30 days to assembly (a distinction missed by Travis and Travis). Preparation of materials, it seems, will have taken more effort than modern reenactors appreciate so your point is well made!

As for other costs involved, this is possibly very circumstantial. Lee Bray identified a value of 1.1 denarii per kg for iron at Vindolanda, but I don't know what charcoal would have been valued at, nor if it's even worth talking of commissioned labour when the available workforce was owned, seconded, or related to the recipient of the armour.