Armour Flexibility

[Achilleus]

This is your quote not mine. All I did was present evidence that directly contradicted this statement. First you specifically say that the cost of making armour in the middle ages could be used as an indicator of the cost for Roman armour and now you say it can't.

I didn't say that it couldn't, that would be ignorant at best seeing as the best plate armour naturally was a lot more expensive than the best chain mail, even in the late middle ages where the industrial infrastructure to mass produce plate was in place.

On equal footing quality wise I have always read and been told that plate was more expensive to manufacture than mail during the middle ages, heck it even is with traditional smiths today. Infact your two references are the only ones I have ever seen that would suggest that chain mail sometimes was more expensive than plate armour in the middle ages, for which there can be a number of reasons, such as the quality & design of the plate & mail armour requested or the time it took to make by the specific smith depending on what he was best equipped to manufacture.

On a final note: Having just participated at a medieval gathering this last week in Denmark I was told straight up that my future set of plate armour will be a much more expensive purchase for me than the chain mail suits I have been wearing so far; We're talking about roughly double the price. How can this be if not because plate armour is a more sophisticated type of armour to manufacture traditionally ?

Read Sim and Kaminsky's new book. The Romans had production techniques that seem to be more advanced than that used for most of the medieval period.

More advanced production techniques for what ? You're talking in very general terms now, but surely you can't be trying to suggest that the Roman smiths knew how to make steel of superior quality than the smiths of the medieval ages ? Let alone make plate faster & cheaper ?? If so you'd be the first person I have ever witnessed claim this.

Do some research on what it takes to produce iron wire without modern machinery. The cost of weaving the links is a fraction of the total production cost of mail armour. Citing slave labour as a cost saver for one industry and not another is disingenuous.

I know what it takes to make iron wire, and I also know what it takes to make iron plate, which is what makes me chuckle abit during all this talk about the expenses of manufacturing chain mail and plate armour. Cause even today a good suit of plate armour usually costs more than a good suit of chain mail.

And as for slave labour, this was in far greater use by the Roman empire than by any nation/kingdom during the medieval period. It can't even be compared. Infact the procurement of slave labour was the main driving force behind the many Roman conquests, as the extensive use of slave labour was what the Roman empire was build upon and the most important thing that maintained it.