Randall Moffett wrote: |
"Despite his elaborate armour the Earl of Douglas took five deep wounds". |
And it is worth noting that the only place on the Earl's body that the chronicle chooses to name specifically as being wounded (the eye) is a spot behind a well-known gap in typical harness. It would be nice to know where his other "deep wounds" were, but note that none of them killed him--indeed he fought again at Shrewsbury just months later. I've always felt that this passage was a testament to the effectiveness of his armour rather than its failure. The guy suicidally charged headlong into a barrage of arrows and--wounds or not--lived to tell about it. His armour worked--it preserved his life even against his own deadly stupidity. ;)
Randall Moffett wrote: |
Thomas Ruthal, Bishop of Durham, in a letter to Thomas Wolsey dated 20 September 1513 states it was not the armour but the fact the Scots were prepared with a plethora of things to defeat the English Archers: "The said Scots were so surely harnessed with complete harness, German jacks, rivets, splents [forms of body armour], pavises, and other habilments, that shot of arrows in regard did them no harm..." |
This still sounds unequivocally as though he is still attributing the Scots' survival of the arrow barrage at least in part to their armour.
Nobody's claiming that plate armour made its wearer 100% invulnerable to arrows; but it can certainly be demonstrated to have performed much, much better than the longbow crowd seems to want to admit.
And I still want to see an account stating unequivocally that a man was killed by a longbow arrow through his breastplate.
Most of the modern "longbow vs. breastplate" tests one sees the longbow guys posting on YouTube are flawed: the breastplate is almost always either a low-quality mass-produced Indian reproduction (and thus probably 18ga), or it's a poorly-shaped piece of metal. They clearly don't put anywhere near as much effort into the accuracy of their target as they put into their precious shooting tackle. I am reminded of one video in particular, which purports to show arrows shot from a 120-pound bow piercing a 2mm breastplate, but actually watching the video reveals that their "breastplate" is in fact a simple tube-shaped piece of sheet metal, and even with these inaccuracies, the metal still successfully repels more arrows than it allows to pierce it, and even those that pierce it do not do so to any great degree, often falling right out of the shallow holes they make in the metal. I wasn't impressed. I really think I'd trust a 2mm breastplate to save me from a longbow-shot arrow at all but the closest range and highest end of the poundage range. I'd trust my own 3.5mm+ cuirass against even the most powerful bow out there.