How effective are anti-armour weapons, such as warhammers and stilettos, against cloth amour?

Certainly, arrows are surprisingly ineffective against cloth armour.

I'm wondering if the acuteness of a stiletto would be detrimental rather than helpful.

The effectiveness of textile defences is of course dependent on their construction. A very heavy 25-layer jack will offer considerable protection against both the piercing and impact aspects of for instance a pollaxe, while the typical civilian clothing of 1-3 layers of linen and 1-3 layers of wool will offer much less protection. It can be surprising how much just a few lavers of cloth and a little padding can protect against non full force blows. My experience has been that the ability of a weapon to penetrate cloth is very dependent on the sharpness of the edge. A thin-bladed kitchen knife will probably defeat a few layers of cloth better than a quadrangular stilletto at a certain amount of force. On the other hand, one can apply a lot more force with the stilletto without it bending or breaking.

Not a test by any means, but I recently wanted to throw away some old overalls.

Deciding it better to cut out the company logo's on them before throwing the overalls in the trash, I took a kitchen knife and tried to first stab through (holding the overall in one hand and the knife in the other, i.e. without backing) and then rip the fabric open.

I managed to do it in the end, but it was by no means easy, neither the stabbing nor the cutting.

So the general consensus is that what is best for dealing with plate armour, won't be as effective against textile armour?

Agreed. A garment with that many layers is completely rigid. The wearer "floats" inside it and is unlikely to suffer blunt trauma any more severe than if he was wearing solid plate.

This of course depends on the wich "generation" of cloth armour we are looking at. The 25-30 layer jacks of the 15th century would probably stand up to idividual attacks.
Quite naturally, since this was the kind of weapons they where made to face.
However, since the figthing style was adapted to fight men in heavy armour, and repeated strikes and/or wrestling was the main tactic, they would probably sucumb in the same situations as men in plate, but a little quicker.


Cloth armour relies on the integrety of each layers cloth weave. As such, a cutting edgre that severs the threads is more efficient than a spike that tries to force its way through the weave. For instance, curved blades seem to do well against cloth.
A sharp edged spike, like a narrow spear point, might be the best.

There is an old spotlight topic with some rather extensive tests on cloth armour with various weapons. Though not perfectly representative, it demonstrates some of the mechanics involved:
http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131