Armour Flexibility

[Erik D. Schmid]

No, it was not going to be made from links imported from india, he made the links himself.

But please find me a smith that charges 7,000 euros for an authentic steel chain mail hauberk + hood & leggins then. That's an insane amount of money even for a steel riveted mail suit.

This seems a good place to raise my hand and say "here!" My thanks to Dan for bringing this thread to my attention.

I am sure everyone reading this thread would like to know more of the details surrounding this mail-maker you are referring to. €1200 for head-to-toe mail coverage constructed of hand-crafted riveted links seems to stress credulity to the extreme. I'm not saying you're pulling our collective legs mind you, but you have to admit that this does sound too good to be true. Cheaply crafted Indian mail is higher priced than this and they have a good system of producing their product rather quickly. How is it that this gentleman can do something of this magnitude for so little? Especially when you consider the fact that the links look identical to what is being done in India.

From my own calculations of having done such a project I can say that working at around ten to twelve hours per day it would take approximately seven months to complete this kind of project, give or take.

This is just an observation, but it would appear that you do not value another person's labor as much as your own. In all honesty would you work for several months for only €1200?

Throughout history mail-manufacture has been a huge industry. It had to be in order to create the amounts of mail that were produced. The concept of the lone smith working in his shop is something only seen in movies. This can be said for plate armour as well.

You stated that you've been led to believe that plate was always more expensive than mail. There are numerous records from the middle ages that tell a different story. Dan has provided a few. The 15th century Howard Household Accounts are another good reference. There are other accounts that would boggle your mind such as one for an order of ten thousand mail shirts to be delivered in six months. This is one order by a single customer. Plate armour seems to have always been rather low on the armour want list when compared to other forms of protection in spite of it being rather expensive.

You seem to imply that mail manufacture was more or less unskilled labour. That just about anyone could do it quite easily. My response to this assertion is yes and no. Yes, any fool can weave links together, add a rivet and squish it with pliers. But, it is in the creation of the links to begin with where the skill truly lies.

As has already been noted, plate could be made with lower quality iron/steel. Wire cannot. Take a segmentata plate for example. The metal used in its construction could not be used to make wire because it could more than likely not be drawn without breaking countless times. However, the ability to draw wire to a decent length is only part of the equation. Poor metal can sometimes be drawn to a surprising length, but it is the piercing/riveting operation of link making that truly tells the story. This is due to the fact that if the wire is not of a high enough quality, it cannot be pierced/riveted because of the possibility of the link splitting. Even with quality wire it takes a very keen eye and motor skill to be able to perform these tasks adequately. When you think of mail-making, you need to view it not so much as armouring per say, but more along the lines of jewelery making.

You see, the vast majority of tests that have been done on original pieces of mail have been limited to a few broken links here and there. Nobody is going to let someone remove a few hundred links from a shirt and subject them to destructive testing. For this reason we are left with massive amounts of speculation. As I've said before over the years, each mail link is a piece of armour in itself and should be viewed in that context. Much of the metallographical work done on plate armour is similar. A few 1mm square pieces cut from inconspicuous places around the edge of a piece are not going to give you the whole story as it were.

Anyway that's my take on things... 8)