Linothorax vs Spolas

[Sean Manning]

I have worn a hauberk over ordinary 14th century clothes (a linen doublet over a shirt). The only problem is that the mail was too large and not properly cut. A friend with a very nice replica English harness c. 1370 keeps lightening his arming garments; he finds that an arming doublet just needs to be two layers of sturdy cloth with plenty of eyes to lace the points to. In England in 1370, three layers of sturdy cloth over your chest was ordinary clothing.

Hi Sean, thank you for the line to line answer. Let me give some quick feedback below.

There is a similar lack of evidence for soldiers wearing hard boots in the Latin part of the medieval world. I think there are a few primary sources from the Latin world talking about men stripping off their shoes for a better grip ...

Depends on the circumstances. Maybe it was more comfortable (eg. in a case of muddy ground). There are circumstances that feet may beat shoes. First thing that comes in my mind is the metal floor of a modern ship. However, on the dusty grounds of Greece feet cannot beat the show just like that. All armies fighting in dense formations in history wore footware why would Greeks be the exception - especially when carrying 15-20kg of armor (even easier to slip)?

That's an interesting claim. What is your evidence that all armies wore heavy shoes? Medieval shoes didn't do much to protect the feet, and the usual solution to thick mud- strapping on a set of pattens- had other disadvantages for combat wear.

Since many ancient fighters fought naked, or just in trousers or a tunic, I don't think this is a very good argument! Someone with too much "common sense" probably wouldn't end up in the front rank of a phalanx in the first place.

Going naked in the Olympics was a rare exception and it was noted as such by ancient writers and accompagnied with a full story of how this tradition (only gradually adopted by most Greeks and over a long period of time) ended up. Had soldiers gone to battle naked, there would be no fuss about it.

But some Celts, for example, fought naked. Some Greeks went to war in just their clothes. Someone with any body armour and a helmet was well protected even if their family jewels weren't.

Do you have any examples of proof of this from Latin Europe between say 600 and 1100 CE? After de Rebus Bellicis, the first evidence of a separate padded garment under mail is from the 12th century. Dan Howard and others have been very politely insistent asking for sources, but nobody- including some pretty good medievalists and armour historians- has turned up anything.

Writers in the period up to 1200 AD did not write anyway much about much more basic equipment rather than the "modest" inner padding. I find this natural. Same can be for the ancient world.

But we have lots of descriptions of people putting on armour in Norse sagas and continental romances. In the 12th century, words for special padded garments under armour suddenly appear, and these are mentioned in literature and inventories, and occasionally turn up in excavations. Before then, nothing. We would expect to have some evidence from somewhere in Europe over the past 500 years if mail was usually worn over special padding. Claude Blair was aware of the problem in 1955, and since then the evidence has become stronger that early medieval people either wore mail with an integrated lining or just pulled it on over an extra tunic.

I'm not sure that a bronze plate cuirass could be adjusted that much! They were fitted pretty closely to the body.

... you mean to our modern bodies. For their bodies were much shorter and thinner.

No, I think Greek plate armour was fit tightly to ancient Greek bodies. Iron Age Greeks were not much shorter than their descendents in 2000, and taller than their descendents in 1900, according to the only evidence I have seen (a meta-analysis of skeletal evidence by Geoffrey Kron in Historia which supports Lawrence Angel's estimate of an average adult male height of 170 cm in the Classical period and 172 cm in the Archaic). The 18th and 19th centuries were a dreadful period for health and nutrition in the Old World, but the evidence suggests that ancient and medieval people were not very short. That would especially be true for the richest 10-20% of men who could afford bronze plate armour!