Armour Flexibility

[Dan Howard]

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.

Irrelevant since today the proportional cost of the materials is much much lower than it has ever been in the past.

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

I believe that they are the only ones you have ever seen. Please cite a single primary source from anywhere in the world that demonstrates that plate cost more than mail to make.

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 ?

Ask them how much they would charge to make riveted mail using historial links, not the links imported from India. People doing this kind of work charge $2,000-5,000 just for a hauberk. Double this if you want leggings too.

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.

Plate can be made from poorer quality iron. You need finely refined iron just to enable it to be pulled through the draw plate otherwise it continually snaps. The cost of the raw iron is more expensive for mail than plate.

It takes much more time for someone to draw down a kilometer of wire compared to running a few billets through rollers. The cost of iron wire is more expensive than a similar weight of plate.

The fittings for segmetata are more varied but there are only a few dozen of them. Mail requires thousands of individual components all made by hand.

After the components are made it takes a day to assemble segmetata compared to around 20 days for a hamata. Assembling mail costs more than segmentata.

So in all stages mail costs more to make.

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.

Slave labour was used in most industries including both mail and segmentata fabrica.