Hello! I have lurked around this board for a long time now and finally have worked up the nerve to pose some questions.
I play in the sca, and a good friend taught me how to make rawhide from white tail deer....among it's uses it makes a great cover for early period shields....While it does offer some structural strength and does help protect the plywood it seems mostly cosmetic(unless made with several plys, which seems wasteful) I found a source for cheap fresh cowhides and have been thinking a making rawhide with these....Thus allowing me to use thinner plywood more in style with early period center grip shields(mostly anglo saxon and romano-briton) Do you gentlemen have any suggestions to help me make a shield strong enough for sca combat and try to be as accurate as possible....Also what about using a wicker frame? It seems to me that I should be able to make a fairly strong shield with a ply of bullshide and another of deer stretched and dried over it joined securely to a willow frame......Any suggestions or comments?
Thank you for your patience

Kelly Powell

I know tha "early period" is being fairly vague....right now I am more interested in various construction methods(glueing ashwood panels together or number of plys of leather/rawhide how the boss was attached to a wicker frame or to a wood frame etc,etc,) So i can pick one of the easier ways and start a prototype....Actually I could care less about sca standards, I can cobble together something that "looks" real enough for sport fighting...I would like to get the feel of a few historically accurate shields so I can start making sport shields that move/behave more like the real deal.

Hi kelly

The Mycenians used to stitch layers of hide together using a frame work to give it shape from the existing stories it proved capable of stopping spears. The shield was a figure eight a later form was called the Diplon I believe the stitched about seven layers of hide together. There are a number of other types of leather shields many made of carbulli one point every one I have seen is leather if wood is used it is to provide grip or shape. I suspect the reason is simple leather even hardened is still to a degree flexible which aids in obsorbing strike giving under impact put wood under it you remove the flex and the weapons full force is delivered to the hide. You might consider researching making carbulli or try stitching up a multi layer shield I wish you luck either way.

I would suggest investing 40 dollars in this book:

[ Linked Image ]
http://www.amazon.com/Anglo-Saxon-Shield-I-P-...amp;sr=8-1

I recently purchased it here from another forumite and it goes into great detail describing the shields you want to build although there aren't as many pictures or line drawings as there could be...

on the matter of carbulli I made a call the best advice I can give is soak the leather well then fix over a mould or patterns until dry then bake it how long you bake is the tricky bit you'll need to suck it and see.

One thing to be very careful of is that rawhide shrinks as it dries. It has TREMENDOUS strength as it does so, and can easily bend or break a wooden backing! I made a Mycenaean-style shield (crescent-shaped) a year or so ago, with rawhide over poplar planks, and was lucky that it only turned concave rather than folding up entirely.

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/WVshld11.jpg

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/BAarmor.html#shields (third shield down)

Also remember that rawhide will be very susceptible to moisture unless you coat it with wax or something.

Only one of the shields that Homer describes is 7 layers of rawhide, that of big Aias. Has an outer layer of thin bronze, too. Most are only 4 layers, decreasing in size so that the center is thicker than the edges. And he really does seem to be describing hide rather than leather. However, he also makes it pretty clear that all the shields are round, so this is after the Figure-8 and "tower" shields have become obsolete.

A Bronze Age shield made of one piece of thick leather (with an extra piece capping the boss) was found at Clonbrin, Ireland. It is definitely tanned leather. Two wood molds for making similar shields have also turned up. The Roman historian Strabo says that Sardinians carried leather shields, and I'll be making one of those soon. (Not certain if those were leather or rawhide....)

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

Matthew

Thank you for the input.....I will hopefully have a few examples ready for my kingdoms big war in june.....As long as it is safe, I 'd like to see more historically accurate shields on the melee field.....broken shields were a common thing and should be a factor.

If you are in need of materials or would prefer to buy/look at one go to viking-sheild they have a rawhide edged planked and a rawhide edged plywood they sell boses etc. if you cant make one

I have a decent amount of deer rawhide(I make deer jerky for hunters and demand the hide along with keeping 1/4 of the meat....All my fun money is made by selling beef jerky and pickles at various bars around town...it may well become my full time job) and am in the process of making cow-rawhide....I found a small slaughter house that will sell me fresh hides at 30 dollars a hide.
I believe deer hide will work better for edging and lashings....it is thin enough to make parchment out of , but pretty strong ....I believe the cow hide will be much better for actual shield facings(instead of just cosmetic like I am doing now)
Some friends and myself are looking into forming a skirmish unit based on roman light auxilary..."peltast"?.. that was where I was thining about the wicker frame.

Kelly an old trick we use over here is to buy dog chews soak them soft then use them as edging for shields the stuff sets like rock and is as tough as hell. As to deer hide the stuff I have seen was somewhat soft compared to cow hide but if its cheap and available go for it.

The big Mycenaean figure eight shields went out of use in about 1400bc but Athenian troops were using a leather figure eight in the 8th century BC which is the Diplon I mentioned.

Some people have experimented with half-tanned hides, leaving the center core essentially rawhide, but the outer layer able to repel moisture. You might want to try that if you are putting it over a shield. Possibly the best of both worlds.

Sir richard of knotwolf armory uses dog chews....he will sew them together for shield rimming and affix the with tabs of rawhide and peened copper nails.
He was the one who showed me how to do rawhide...My years as a cook has made me pretty handy with an ulu knife and i don't suffer from a "ick" factor dealing with the hides.....For 30 bucks a hide it seems cheap enough to make all the rawhide I or my shire mates will ever need for shields and such....If this was a drier climate I would make some rawhide scale mail for a mongol friend of mine.

i've rawhided my edges on some of my shields. cut them out and sew them together. make sure the rawhide is tight on the shield when wet. I sorta put mine on like i would a bicycle, round out about 3/4 then stretch the top. when it drys it will be hard and not really need nails etc if it is done correctly. that being said i put some glue on my edges before i stretched the rawhide over it.

what about the full faced rawhide shields? not just the edges. anyone made a viking version of that? i bet it would be sweet.