[quote="Pieter B."][quote="Vasilly T"]

Pieter B. wrote:

You mean using bloomery or early blast furnace steel with slag inclusions being hammered into plates with varying thickness and then hardened and tempered by judging the color? Not that I am aware of, besides there was a lot of variance in quality back then so even a dozen of breastplates/helmets produced in that way might not be entirely representative.

Well, Williams in his book divided armour types by quality into four representative groups, so I guess it wasn't as bad as you say.

[quote="Vasilly T"][quote="Pieter B."]

Vasilly T wrote:

Pieter B. wrote: You mean using bloomery or early blast furnace steel with slag inclusions being hammered into plates with varying thickness and then hardened and tempered by judging the color? Not that I am aware of, besides there was a lot of variance in quality back then so even a dozen of breastplates/helmets produced in that way might not be entirely representative. Well, Williams in his book divided armour types by quality into four representative groups, so I guess it wasn't as bad as you say.

I imagine the problem "back in the day" was figuring out just where your own personal armour fell in that continuum of variable quality that Williams has more or less arbitrarily divided into four "representative groups" -- and doing so before you put your life on the line by having people hammering on it with weapons while you were inside... It would have been unpleasant to discover your top-grade breastplate had a couple unsuspected slag-inclusion weak spots only when the poleaxe hit there...

I wonder if the saying "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" actually started in the days of mail? A couple rings with inclusions in them could weaken the protective value of the whole shirt.

They probably were wearing steel helmets but their helmets got ripped off.
Richard the III was swarmed and captured, Someone could have easily torn his helmet off and would have. Why hack at a steel helmet?

I got into a vicious fight in high school during football practice. I pulled the other guys helmet off and not gently either, this was back in the late 90s.

It's pretty natural to pull protective gear off, that was the first thing I did.

Protective armor can and will be removed, if you are being overpowered.

Also the steel helmets could have fallen off from violent movements, made easier by being drenched in sweat. Or the wearer could have even removed it on his own accord.

Maybe the helmet was so uncomfortable they couldn't stand it and threw it off, maybe it was obstructing their vision or hindering their breathing.

There are many, many factors that play into why someone who went into battle wearing armor wasn't wearing all of it at the time of death.

Actually after reading the provided sources more carefully I've realised that we really just repeat the same conclusions made by the researchers:

Quote:

Novak (2000) mentioned that the head may have been the primary target. She suggested that the reason for this could be poor quality of the helmets. An alternative explanation could be that the helmets were easy to knock off in battle or that the helmets had been dropped by the men while trying to escape their enemies (Knu¨sel & Boylston, 2000).

Quote:

With reference to the above described skeletal samples, the trauma distribution in Uppsala indicates differences in quality of protective gear on different body parts of the victims—in this case a satisfactory body protection in combination with poor, or lack of, helmets.

Quote:

When analysed in detail, the trauma patterns indicate that the men were trying to escape or at least did not meet their enemy in a traditional face-to-face situation. The low prevalence of typical defence injuries, the high number of posterior injuries, the comparatively few frontal wounds on the crania, the large number of horizontal cranial wounds and the lack of a left side dominance among the wounds, all simply that most of the men in the burial were not standing upright facing the antagonists.

The last quote was only in regards to the Uppsala grave. Only two out of the 60 or so found had healed head injuries and the injuries were supposedly inflicted while they were fleeing. All of which indicates the grave of Uppsala was filled with inexperienced or even non-soldiers.

I found this recent article on Hroarr to be extremely relevant to this thread.


http://hroarr.com/the-use-of-the-saber-in-the...the-saber/


http://i.imgur.com/ZaiLYcz.jpg

I found two interesting threads. These are old threads but the posts in it indicate getting through a helmet with certain weapons might be a danger to the wearer after all. Which really makes me wonder why they didn't beef up helmets a bit more.

http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t...mp;start=0

http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t...mp;start=0

Modern SCA helmets require a minimum thickness of 1.6 mm as per these rules

http://www.sca.org/officers/marshal/docs/marshal_handbook.pdf

The thread lists how thickness in quite a few medieval examples varied from front to the sides. Seeing how the side of the head showed the most injuries it might explain a thing or two.

Quote:

Longbow: a Social and Military History by Robert Hardy (note the varying thicknesses between the thickest parts and the thinnest). German Bascinet 1380: Top Front: 150 thou (3.81 mm); Visor Snout: 60 thou (1.52 mm) German Bascinet c. 1375: Top Front: 96 thou (2.44 mm); Side: 50 thou (1.27 mm) Italian Bascinet c. 1375: Top Front: 120 thou (3.05 mm); Back: 60 thou (1.52 mm) Italian Bascinet c. 1375: Top Front: 180 thou (4.57 mm); Side and Back: 100 thou (2.54 mm)

It seems 18 or 16 gauge for the sides is quite reasonable with a weight not that much over 5 lbs.

Considering the average foot soldier might not have had high carbon heat treated helmets it seems within the realm of possibility that a strong blow could manage to dent and possible wedge apart 1.5mm of steel.

What makes you so sure that they used the same thickness for low quality armour?

Well of course they were around, there are plenty of examples of fraud in arms and armour market, from fake "Ulfberts" in Viking Era to fake bulletproof armour in Renaissance and Early Modern Period and it's only from the top of my head.

Still it doesn't give us a right to assume that wearing such fakes was a standard practice.

Quote:

One other thing to consider it doesn't sound likely that those thicker helms would have provided more protection than thinner "knightly" helmets.

Maybe not more but at least the same, or close to it. Higher quality steel was indeed a lot better though, not only because of higher carbon content and heat treatment, but also because it tended to contain very few slag inclusions, compared to munition grade iron.

Hats are a very variable thing throughout history. They weren't terribly common in classical Greece and Rome, although straw sun-hats were encountered. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, they were more of a common cultural thing.

Really it's a very culture-specific thing though. Some cultures wear them, others don't. The Romans simply were not big on them.