Was the leather muscled curiass of the later times sexier?

[Matthew Amt]

I can come up with a lot more examples of hide and leather armor! The Dura Europas piece, by the way, is rawhide, so the individual lames or scales would be rigid. Rawhide scale armor was hugely popular among charioteers in the Bronze Age in the Near East and Egypt--King Tut even had a shirt of rawhide scales in his tomb. There's a reference to hide armor in the Iliad, and Homeric shields were made of several layers of hide. A leather shield dating to the Bronze Age was found in Ireland, plus a wooden mold for making similar shields. Of course rawhide and possibly leather were commonly used for facing wooden shields (Roman, Greek, medieval, etc.). Layered linen was used for armor by Mycenaeans and Classical Greeks, and very widely in the middle ages.

The reference to reindeer hide armor shirts in the Norse saga has been discussed at huge length on several armor fora, and thoroughly rejected--it refers to MAGICAL shirts, and gives no indication that leather defenses were any sort of common thing.

Godwinson had his men, the Huscarls and the Select Fyrd leave their mail coats behind and depend on their leather jerkins for defense .

What?? Never heard of that one! My first experience with the Battle of Hastings was in 1980, and I've run across a lot of odd things since then, but that's new to me. Got a primary source for it? Cuz no one else has ever mentioned any Anglo-Saxon reference to leather jerkins that I've heard of in 30 years! (The Housecarls rode to battle, and the Fyrd were all local, so not much point in ditching their armor, anyway.)

The theory that the Sutton Hoo clasps were attached to something leather is just that, a *theory*. Even if it was leather, we have nothing to say it was defensive. It if WAS defensive, I sure wish it had survived!

Late Roman and Carolingian artwork could simply be aping Hellenistic or heroic artwork, with little or no intention of showing actual contemporary equipment. (But I'm not an art historian!) I do know that descriptions of Carolingian armor describe mail, not solid cuirasses. And many depictions of Carolingian armor clearly show scales or mail.

Bottom line, yes, we KNOW leather was useful stuff. And we know leather and rawhide WERE used at some times and in some places as protection. But you can NOT use that to make further assumptions where there is no evidence currently known. That's just not how legitimate scholarship works. Now, I do tend to take a very rigid stance on that because as a reenactor I look at things from the standpoint of application. I want every bit of clothing and gear used at a public event to be as heavily documented as possible, with as little speculation as possible. If you're just standing around the punchbowl at a party, go ahead, and speculate your heads off. Just be careful here on RAT, because we lean more towards the academic and reenactor viewpoint.

Show us the EVIDENCE. Modern ideas of "logic" and "common sense" will get you nowhere.

Valete,

Matthew