Basic kit for 5th century infantry?

[Robert Vermaat]

I'm sorry Dave, but I have to disagree.

The writings of Flavius Vegetius Renatus (and others such as Marcellinus) are in fact a consideration in trying to decipher what the Late Roman infantrymen would have looked like.

On this forum we have excessively discussed Vegetius, as well as his writings as a source for developments in infantry armour. I'm not going to do that all over again. I'll just repeat myself by stating that the claims of Vegetius regarding armour have been disproven. I'd say, search the foruk for those discussions, or read Coulston, J.C.N. (1990): Later Roman armour, 3rd-6th centuries A.D., in: Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 1, pp. 139-60 for a good start.

Rather, the essential claim was that Andrianople had a profound impact on the desire to resist heavy battle kits.
Who claimed that? Are you referring to your initial discussion or to ancient authors? If the latter, I must disagre - no ancient author made such a claim, that body armour was dropped in relation to the battle of Adrianople.

I believe there were other factors at play as well, for example the relative domination of cavalry over infantry (horses cost a lot on money and something had to be the bill payer to fund them), and the need for mobility, particularly in warding-off and/or responding to brigands, small unit attacks, and the like. As time went on, the empire became ore strapped for cash, and funding a huge army equipped with a heavy battle kit would have been hard to maintain.

Cavalry was indeed costly, and expansion of the cavalry had to be paid for. But was that done by dropping body armour from the inventory? I'd like to see proof of that, of course! Dropping body armour means decreasing battle survivability which, as any soldier will tell you, is not what they want. That the equipping of armies during the 5th c. became more and more of a burden for the state had more relations to the drop in tax revenues than the rising cost of cavalry, but in the end it came down to the same thing. Never though, was there a decision made to drop armour as a means of cutting the cost of the army. At least not that we are aware of.
The East Roman empire for sure never dropped infantry armour, that's for sure.

By the way, cavalry mobility is highly overrated, as studies and sources have amply proven. Cavalry mobility is mostly restricted to the battlefield and to short actions. After a march of 3 days, the infantry overtakes the cavalry (without remounts).