Armour Never Wearies E-Book

Timothy Dawson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 188

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Armour Never Wearies is the first volume to bring together all the hitherto scattered evidence – archaeological, literary and artistic – for the forms and uses of scale and lamellar armours in the region west of the Ural Mountains throughout the 3,500 years during which these armours were used. The interpretation of this data is informed by the author's long practical experience as a maker of arms and armour, martial artist and horseman. It offers systematic definitions and analysis of these often misunderstood forms of armour, along with detailed diagrams and instructions that will be of great use to any who wish to turn their hands to reconstruction. Along the way, this unique synthesis of evidence and interpretation debunks some myths that have arisen in recent years.

Leseprobe

Men soon grow sick of battle; when Zeus the steward of warfare tilts the scales, and cold steel reaps the fields, the grain is very little but the straw is very much. The belly is a bad mourner, and fasting will not bury the dead. Too many are falling, man after man and day after day; how could one ever have a moment’s rest from privations? No, we must harden our hearts, and bury the man who dies and shed our tears that day. But those who survive the horrors of war should not forget to eat and drink, and then we shall be better able to wear our armour, which never grows weary, and to fight our enemies for ever and ever.

The Iliad, Book 19

Cover illustration. A cavalryman from the Stuttgart Psalter. (Würtenburg State Library)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to to thank Michel Dziewulski of the National Museum in Krakow and Karen Watts of the Royal Armouries Museum for facilitating access to items in their respective collections; Donald LaRocca of the Metropolitan Museum for invaluable references and clarification of unpublished details of items in that collection; Mamuka Tsutsumia for providing information on Eastern European finds; and Nadeem Ahmad for useful discussion.

About the author

Timothy Dawson’s interest in medieval history, and especially military history and that of the Near East, was initially fostered by his participation in historical recreation (‘re-enactment’) and public education. Such interests led him to a career as a history educator and historical craftsman. He took a BA in Classical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, followed by a doctorate at the University of New England (New South Wales, Australia). He has published widely on aspects of material culture and social history, particularly clothing and military matters, using a methodology which combines conventional scholarship with practical experience and reconstruction to make significant advances in certain areas. Timothy is the author of Byzantine Cavalryman: Eastern Roman Empire, c.900–1204 and Byzantine Infantryman: Eastern Roman Empire, c.900–1204 for Osprey Publishing and One Thousand Years of Lamellar Construction in the Roman World, Levantia Guides no. 8.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1: Scale Armour

Part 2: Lamellar Armour

Conclusion

Key to Scales and Lames Collections

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

The question of whether men first contrived protective equipment for themselves to defend against beasts they set out to hunt, or whether it was the result of conflict arising between human communities, is likely to remain a mystery. What is beyond doubt is that once the need for such protection was perceived, the earliest manufactured form must have been small pieces of naturally occurring durable material, horn and bone, bound together with textiles or leather to create a fabric. This volume sets out to gather the hitherto dispersed evidence for external small plate armours as they were used in the West, to illustrate the permutations in form, and trace the fluctuating patterns of usage.

In defining ‘the West’, I use the conventional border of the line of the Ural Mountains, the 60º East meridian. This will, admittedly, take in areas that many people might not think of as ‘Western’, such as Iran and Arabia, but the former is certainly fitting, because external small plate armours were central to its military practices for a very long period of time, and because of the significant influence that region exerted on Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies in early times. The reason for the geographic restriction is primarily linguistic. It is very much harder for me to access source material from the Far East. The restriction is not absolute, however. From time to time I will refer to Oriental material for the sake of comparison where that is useful.

In its final realisation, the temporal parameters of this project have ended up being rather wider than anticipated. The starting point in the Bronze Age was noted by earlier scholars, and nothing has arisen in the last few decades to alter that. Rather unexpected, though, was the discovery that scale armour, at least, remained in functional military use much later than I imagined, beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. An epilogue to that is the use of scale armour in theatre and other pastimes, which brings us to the start of the twentieth century.

Origins of the armour

The origins of external small plate armour are lost in prehistory. While scale armour begins in very elementary form and becomes more sophisticated over time, the very earliest surviving examples of lamellar and its representations already appear in sophisticated forms from the outset. That those early sophisticated forms do not survive and spread implies they they did not necessarily have a considerable prior history involving gradual technological development, but perhaps were localised products of some unusually inspired artisan or group. Lamellar is often thought to have been introduced to the West from Central Asia in Late Antiquity, yet in 1967 H. Russell Robinson observed that the earliest evidence for lamellar is actually found in the West. This observation still holds true, despite all the research and archaeology that has been carried out since, with lamellar not reaching the Far East until Late Antiquity. Decades earlier, Bengt Thordeman felt able to be much more definite, writing that the evidence ‘proves that lamellar construction originated in the Near East’.1 With all due respect to Thordeman and many others, we should be wary of one assumption, which is very prevalent in studies of the history of art and technology. That assumption is that any basic technological innovation necessarily arises in one location alone and disperses outwards from there. The creation of segmental armours like lamellar and scale is a technology which could easily have been invented in more than one location independently, with the flows of dispersal from any one locus of invention fluctuating over time.

The genesis of these armours may in fact lie in the late Stone Age. Across Europe and the Caucasus, graves have been found with assemblages of pieces of bone, horn or shell that have been pierced and somehow bound together as bodily adornments, sometimes in quite complex structures. It is notable that in some areas male bodies in particular had such structures encompassing their heads.2 Otherwise, wide bands might enclose the throat or elbows, and there are larger masses that suggest skirts.3 It is quite plausible to imagine that a man wearing such ornaments might well have found himself in a hunting incident or conflict situation which showed the potential protective value of such a bone or horn fabric and thereby led to the construction of a denser structure designed for that defensive purpose.

Another consideration to bear in mind in terms of technological development is that, just as it may not be singular and geographically contiguous, it also need not be chronologically continuous. A technology may die out and be revived, either anew or from artistic or physical survivals. This phenomenon is conspicuous in the cases of both these armours. For further discussion of this, see the introduction to the section on lamellar.

Sources for the armours

The sources for external small plate armours are fourfold:

Firstly, examples that have been preserved complete – or substantially so – in collections. These are confined to the modern era. Provided that the material has not been aggressively conserved, or modified to conform to contemporary tastes (as so much armour was in the nineteenth century), the information it provides can be taken at face value, and can shed light upon prior practice.

Secondly, archaeological finds. The condition, and hence information value, of this material can vary enormously. Much has been found as disarticulated fragments, and so these cannot in themselves be very informative. Even better-preserved examples have sometimes been misinterpreted by non-specialists dealing with the finds. A significant amount of the material in major collections was either excavated in what would now be considered an unacceptably unscientific manner, or else was acquired through the commercial antiquities market. The latter has long been prone to having the provenance details of artefacts embellished, or simply falsified, for a variety of reasons. Hence, one must sometimes be very sceptical of the information that accompanies some items.

Art works. This category forms the bulk of the source material, and is the most problematical. Ancient pictures and carvings are not photographs, nor are they technical renderings of any portion. They are works of contrivance, created for particular purposes: propagandistic, didactic, religious or entertaining. They are conditioned, at the least, by the social and ideological expectations of their sponsors and expected audiences, or by stylistic conventions, or both. The medium itself may constrain or determine the character of the depiction. Furthermore, artists varied in draughtsmanship skills, or in their familiarity with what they were employed to represent, or by the amount of effort expected of them in their execution, leading them sometimes to create sketchy or garbled renderings. Like films today, historical pictures are often contrived for visual clarity and drama, even when the result is physically impossible. Such an example can be seen in illustration 34, where the arm and sword of the central attacking horseman must take on an Escheresque dimensional distortion if he is to strike the man he is pursuing. Specific issues lie in the observation that occasionally artists used an expedient pattern which can look very much like scales in order to represent mail,4 that horizontal banding which might be taken to be lamellar could be better interpreted as laminar or ‘anime’ armour,5 and in the proper identification of the pattern that nineteenth-century scholars called ‘banded mail’. As a result of all these considerations, no work of art can be taken entirely at face value. The study of historical armour generally is bedevilled by people determined to treat ancient and medieval pictures as if they were literally and completely accurate. One need only think of the trellised and broad-ring armours which nineteenth-century writers and illustrators made of the schematic depiction of mail in the Bayeaux Embroidery. Recent work encompassing external small plate armours, especially lamellar, has seen a considerable number of instances of this.6 Another problem with pictorial sources is dating. Some art comes from archaeological contexts or with textual or other corroboration, which allows a degree of confidence. A great deal more, though, is only dated by the processes of art history analysis, which is purely impressionistic. Given a certain artwork, an art historian may decide that it looks sufficiently like some other piece which has a commonly accepted date to propose that it must come from the same cultural milieu and period. If enough of his/her colleagues agree, then it becomes a ‘fact’. The problem is that the date of the reference artwork was probably established by the very same process, or may date back to the origins of the discipline in the nineteenth century when intellectual deference allowed historians of sufficiently recognised stature to simply make a decree and have it accepted as fact. Such issues are especially rife in the Art History of the Byzantine Commonwealth.7

The final form of evidence is textual material. This is the most marginal form. Just as with the artists, it was rarely relevant to the goals of authors to be detailed and technically precise about the armour worn by the people about whom they were writing. The exception is, of course, military manuals, which can provide some extremely useful information, especially when correlated with art.

Reconstruction

As this is an intensely practical subject, practical experience and experimentation can provide valuable insights. In contemplating a picture, one may ask, ‘Can it be built to look like that using techniques of the time?’ and ‘If it can be built to look so, is it functional?’ The answer must be ‘yes’ to both questions before the reconstruction can be said to support an interpretation. Similarly, experience in making and using items can assist in seeing through the effects of damage or decay in archaeological items.8 Yet, even acknowledging those parameters, we must bear in mind differences in outlook between ourselves and people in the past. Men in the past have in many situations been willing to put themselves in harm’s way to a degree that can seem inconceivable today. The point of armour was more ‘harm minimisation’ than ‘harm prevention’ for most warriors. On the other hand, that consideration varies with the quality of armour. If a high-quality armour is reconstructed in a manner that has significant vulnerability, then it must be incorrect.

Such practical considerations cannot, however, stand alone, nor can they override other evidence and analysis. It can be perfectly possible to build a functional item on the basis of flawed evidence or interpretation. I cite the example of my own early theory about banded lamellar which led me to build a klivanion based upon Ian Heath’s widely known oversimplified version of lamellar.9 That klivanion was reasonably functional, and the inventiveness of humans means that it cannot be said that it is impossible that somebody, somewhere, made such an armour, yet today I can say that it is inconsistent with the great mass of data now available and should be rejected. Hence, reconstruction must be an adjunct to methodical and methodologically well-informed research.

In preparing this volume, new theories (and, indeed, some old ones) which were potentially contentious were routinely tested by the manufacture of a sample.

Definitions of the forms

Past writers have struggled to come up with systematic definitions for these forms of armour.10 Part of the problem is the confusion caused by the pictorial literalism I discussed above. Another unhelpful thing is the old-fashioned use of the term ‘splint’ in relation to such armour. That term, in my opinion, should be confined to armour made of long, narrow strips, normally used for limb protection.

I suggest a simple system, that external small plate armours are divided into three categories: lamellar, scale and a category for which there is no widespread term.11 The overarching distinction between the first two is straightforward. When used in the primary protection zone (such as the torso of a human):

- scale armour overlaps downward, and is predominantly mounted on a continuous substrate, usually of textile or leather.12

- lamellar overlaps upwards, does not have a continuous substrate and its structure is created using some sort of cordage.

There are a few exceptions to these rules, but they are just that – exceptions, necessarily of limited scope.

The principal exception in the case of scale is the so-called ‘semi-rigid scale’ armour used in the early Roman imperial era, where the entire structure is made of scales fastened together with metal staples or ties, with no use of textiles or cordage as substrate or fastening. This only breaches the substrate aspect of the definition, for all surviving instances overlap downward, where a piece is sufficiently complete to infer its orientation. As discussed later, there is a very limited set of pieces where scales overlap upward, but they are not used for the primary protection zone.

There are pictures suggesting inverted lamellar on the primary protection zone; however, it should be noted that those few pictures occur in a very limited period and cultural context. They are all in Byzantion or areas artistically derivative of it, and primarily clustered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are also almost entirely in religious art, and are very often garbled in ways other than simply the inversion of the fabric of the armour. Their existence can be explained by the phenomenon discussed above – artists required to depict something with which they were not directly familiar and having to rely either on other pictures, which might themselves be defective, or on descriptions given to them.13 There are even more cogent practical reasons for dismissing inverted lamellar in the primary protection zone. In the first instance, the ‘amorphous’ forms of hanging lamellar (see below for an explanation of these terms) do not hang in a stable manner when inverted. Depending upon where the suspension laces run from and to, the material will be prone to fall open to some degree. Once on the body they will be a little more stable, but the tendency to drop open would itself make the armour much harder and slower to put on, as each row would have to be arranged to hang flat. A still more pointed (pun intended!) counter-argument is explained in the following section on the protective functionality of the armours (see here).

There are rare instances, however, where lamellar construction is employed overlapping downward for human (as opposed to equestrian) use (once again, confined to pictures from the Byzantine Commonwealth of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) but, as with scale armour, this application is only for limb pieces, and never in the primary protection zone.

Lamellar is itself divided into two micro-structural variants – ‘solid-laced’ and ‘hanging’. In solid-laced lamellar, the vertical connection between the rows is close and tight, allowing little movement. This tends to be a characteristic of earlier forms. In hanging lamellar the rows are suspended on loose laces, allowing considerable vertical flexibility.

Hanging lamellar harnesses may themselves be divided into two macro-structural categories, ‘amorphous’ and ‘structured’. (Solid-laced lamellar, and, indeed, scale armours, are inherently structured.) In amorphous hanging lamellar the only constraint governing the movement of rows relative to each other is the suspension laces. Hence, an amorphous lamellar is capable of telescoping more or less completely into itself, and when extended may undergo considerable lateral movement. Structured hanging lamellar has some sort of continuous binding at the ends of its rows to stabilise its fabric. This practice makes the armour much easier to use in donning and doffing, and more durable, although at the cost of making it harder to store and carry when not worn. The amorphous form was by far the more widespread and longest-lasting, being the dominant form in the East.

The third form of external small plate armour unnamed above is an unanticipated inclusion in this volume. Sometimes associated with the French term broigne, or more fully ‘broigne of plates’, it is an armour with (usually rectilinear) plates fixed flat to a substrate garment without any sort of overlap. In modern hypothetical reconstructions they are commonly riveted to the base, although modern re-creators will also stitch on panels of (sometimes hardened) leather. Even though this type of armour is a staple of quasi- or pseudo-historical movies, there is virtually no evidence for it in the historical record. The origin of the idea of externally plated armour lies in the same habit of uninformed pictorial literalism of nineteenth-century antiquarians that produced the similar fanciful ideas of trellised and broad-ring14 armour. There is a picture conjectured to be a broigne of plates in the Stuttgart Psalter, which shows a man whose chest is covered with a square lattice with dots in the centre of most compartments.15 It has even exerted some appeal over recent archaeologists. Researchers investigating an early eleventh-century site at Lake Palandru in south-east France found a small group of iron plates about 50mm square with a single central rivet, and decided they came from such an armour. Their reconstruction shows plates spread very sparsely over a short jerkin, leaving great expanses of unprotected leather.16 Facsimiles of this hypothesis made by re-enactors more sensibly place more plates closer together and sometimes even slightly overlapping, but this does nothing to alleviate one of the most basic problems with the theory. With a single central attachment, a plate might rotate, disrupting the coverage pattern, where there is one. Furthermore, as the garment flexes with the wearer’s movements, any edge of the plate could peel away, allowing a weapon behind, if not to pierce the base garment and wearer, then possibly to tear the plate from the garment. Other hypothetical reconstructions of a broigne of plates employ the greater security of rivets in all corners, but all share the fundamental vulnerability of unprotected intervals between the plates. The supreme armament of Antiquity and the Middle Ages was the spear, a thrusting weapon. Any gaps between plates are obviously at risk. Nor are metal plates a foolproof defence: a committed thrust, especially at any angle to the surface, will skate and drop off an edge into the unprotected gap. For these practical reasons and for the lack of any persuasive evidence, externally plated armour must be rejected as fiction, except for the one Western example which has come to light, which can be found in the discussion of culets in the scale armour section.

Materials

Surviving items of exterior small plate armours are, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly made of metal. Iron is predominant, with various copper alloys less common. Organic materials were certainly used in lieu of metal. The more limited survival of these is supplemented by literary references to horn, and more robust forms of leather such as ox hide. There is limited evidence to support the idea of more mundane types of leather being treated by processes such as boiling or wax impregnation in order to be used for these armours, although no one can say it was never done. Pragmatically, however, it is unlikely, for leather of that sort can be used to make large plate armours with much less effort.17 One thing is quite clear – that leather is used for external small plate armour reconstructions in both re-enactments and films far more often than the evidence justifies.

The protective functionality of the armours

In combat that does not involve firearms, armour is confronted with four types of challenge: sharp impacts, blunt impacts, cuts and stabs. The following observations are based upon several decades of the author’s involvement in re-enactment and military living history and in researching, practising and teaching Western historical combat forms.18

High-powered projectile impacts, whether sharp or blunt, from weapons such as ballistae, heavy crossbows and catapults, can be counted upon to overwhelm any man-portable armour system and so may be discounted from this discussion. Lighter projectile impacts, from arrows, quarrels, darts, javelins and sling stones, have the characteristic of being a momentary challenge to the resistance of the armour. Up to a point, small plate armours have an advantage in that a pointed projectile impact is more likely to penetrate something rigid, while the limited flexibility of small plate armours can have the effect of absorbing and dispersing much of the energy of the projectile. The author’s tests have shown that this flexibility, combined with the multi-layering that is found in many versions of these armours, is outstandingly effective in resisting sharp projectile impacts.19