Corbridge A Breastplates - to cross or not cross diagonally?

[sulla felix]

I must mention to Svlla, that if one looks at the exploded views shown by Mark Downes. The top plate of the three at the rear has an angle to it, this is what keeps the shoulder plates with a verticle overlap. Then when we look at the front breastplates in exploded view, we find that the top of each plate has rightangle corners. If we change these angles to lets say, 88' and 92' as opposed to 90..90, then we can control the overlap of the front breast plates. there is also that in doing so we do not alter the slope of the shoulder in any way. I would also add, similar to what Tony Drake has mentioned, one dose not want to have Lorica plates that look as though they have gone through a modern rolling mill. This is where I also hammer my plates into curves, one achieves what is known as Stressed metal. Indeed I can make 22 gauge as strong as 18 g by doing so, as were the Corbridge plates.

I do see what you mean Brian (and sorry I missed this post somehow!), however, the point is that the neck cut outs for the surviving breastplates simply are not designed to hang vertically and accomodate somebody's neck IMHO! (See the pencil neck references above). Granted that you can of course make them hang that way, but only if you ignore the evidence and make the neck cut out wider than the artefacts, and in most cases make the breast plates much wider than the artefacts.

I was also under the impression that analysis of surviving plates demonstrates that they had not been stress hardened/hammered and were in fact soft iron. The theory is that this is deliberate to allow the armour to absorb more of the force from a blow? Maybe new evidence has come to light which challenges this though?