Dan wrote in Mail: Unchained that the vast majority of mail from a very early time was made with alternating rows of riveted and solid rings. However, the end of the paragraph mentions this changing in Europe around the end of the middle ages, and I've seen enough pictures of all-riveted museum pieces to know they exist. I am now making my own blundering first experiments in mail making, just butting together galvanized 16 ga. rings of 3/8ths internal diameter that I'm making myself, and I'm basically using the method of pre-closing half of the rings, pre-opening the other half, and then weaving using the method described on artofchainmail.com. I fantasize about how much quicker it would be to punch half of my rings, and the only things stopping me are that I lack the equipment and know-how to punch rings myself, and that I'd decided for this first project not to buy any pre-made rings from others.

What I can't imagine is why, once the half-solid method was discovered, any historical mail makers ever bothered to make mail that was entirely riveted. I read somewhere that making riveted mail takes something like four times as long as butted, so why would someone bother with more rivets than they needed to? Half-solid sounds so much faster to manufacture, but I would also assume it would be more protective by making half of the rings more resistant to being forced open. Is there some benefit to all-riveted that I didn't know about, or is there any downside to punched solid links?

By the middle ages, each step in the process of making mail was a different job, controlled by a different guild. There were wire makers, and ring makers, and mail makers. Making sheet iron to punch out solid rings is generally said to be easier than drawing wire, since there is not as much concern about slag and metal quality. And you don't need *big* sheets of iron, of course. Punches are really not all that hard to make or use.

But at a guess, if the ring makers decided to just make wire rings, that means the mail makers would have to go to all riveted rings. That's assuming that there were not 2 different shops, one for winding and cutting wire rings and the other for punching out solid rings...

Dunno! It's an interesting question. I can only assume the answer made sense to SOMEone, for some reason.

Matthew

Possibly for the same reason not everyone drives around in Rolls Royces ? Simple economics ?

Punching rings from a sheet means much more wasted material than drawn wire. Even if you punch them in quincunx in your sheet, the inner circle is basically entirely wasted, and the outer leftover sheet is very thin, and quite likely to burn while you're trying to forge it back together. And also, drawing wire increases tensile strength (it's basically a form of work hardening). Flat sheet can also be work hardened, but it's surely more consistent with drawn wire (every single millimeter of wire length has been drawn for sure).

And just because rings are made from round section wire doesn't mean they were not solid. Just a few days ago I visited Castelnaud castle, and they had one mail shirt there, where every single ring was forge welded shut. I didn't take any picture: the low lighting and greasy case from tourists forehead was a lack of time.

Thanks to everybody who's commented so far. I'm learning so much that I didn't know, and there are so many different hypotheses.

Eric S wrote:

If your strictly speaking about European mail then it appears that after wedge rivets were widely accepted, solid links stopped being used. [...] Wedge shaped rivets do not flex to the same extent as round rivets, thus less rivet failure which eventually led to solid links being discontinued after a certain time period. Now inbetween the use of alternating rows of solid links and round riveted links and the introduction of all wedge riveted links there is evidence that alternating rows of solid links and wedge riveted links were used, with the solid link rows being slowly phased out. Eric S

That's an intriguing connection. But even if wedge rivets had a lower rate of failure than round ones, wouldn't wedge riveted links have been just as tedious to make as the round riveted ones? I thought the whole point of solid rings was that they made the process faster, and in that regard wedge rivets don't sound like any improvement. If we know they were making half wedge-riveted and half-solid pieces at some point, I wonder why they felt the need to make all the links wedge rivited instead of just replacing the round riveted rings that made up half the garments.

Dan Howard wrote:

Perhaps not all mail makers had access to punched rings. Dan Howard

The thought had occured to me, but it seems counterintuitive that there would have been more mail makers without access to punched rings at the end of the middle ages than at the beginning. If the tooling and technique for punching rings was simple enough that they could do it in the simplified material culture of the Post-Roman world, and if armor making became ever more industrialized and concentrated in cities as the Renaissance got started, then why would the proportion of surviving mail that was half-solid decrease rather than increase?

Matthew Amt wrote:

By the middle ages, each step in the process of making mail was a different job, controlled by a different guild. There were wire makers, and ring makers, and mail makers. [...] if the ring makers decided to just make wire rings, that means the mail makers would have to go to all riveted rings. That's assuming that there were not 2 different shops, one for winding and cutting wire rings and the other for punching out solid rings... Matthew Amt

Thanks for opening up the wider context. This is a direction of inquiry that I'd expect a more satisfying answer from.

Mart Shearer wrote:

Probably a combination of using water power to draw wire somehow making the cost of raw materials so much cheaper that the increased labor no longer mattered. Mart Shearer

That really would explain it for me if it were the underlying cause. I'd love to read about exactly what mechanism they used to draw wire using water power. I wonder, though, whether they used or could have used the same water power to make beating steel into plates and punching out rings that much quicker. Might it have to do with the fact that other artisans besides mail makers had reason to buy mass-produced wire? Just how many uses did wire have back then? I suppose decorative inlay comes to mind.

Geoffroy Gautier wrote:

Punching rings from a sheet means much more wasted material than drawn wire. Even if you punch them in quincunx in your sheet, the inner circle is basically entirely wasted, and the outer leftover sheet is very thin, and quite likely to burn while you're trying to forge it back together. And also, drawing wire increases tensile strength (it's basically a form of work hardening). Flat sheet can also be work hardened, but it's surely more consistent with drawn wire (every single millimeter of wire length has been drawn for sure). Geoffroy Gautier

I can imagine that wastage would have been a big problem. Was iron expensive enough back then that wasted material would have outweighed the labor savings on the mail maker's end? I hadn't thought about the work-hardening aspect either. If that's the case, then would forge welded rings have been the strongest because they were both drawn from wire and effectively made solid? I'd imagine they were the most expensive kind, but would saving material have made them more economical than punched solid rings? Would it make sense to make a shirt out of half wedge-riveted rings, and half welded?

Here is an example of European mail that I estimate is from around the 1300s, it has alternating rows of solid links and wedge riveted links. This would make it from the period right before mail makers stopped using solid links. The solid links appear to have been forged welded shut since they are round stock and not punched. Forge welding solid links would not have been easy, if these were the type of solid links that mail makers eventually stopped making altogether I could understand why. Is there any evidence that mail makers were still punching solid links during the time period when solid links stopped being used and all wedge riveted mail started to be made?

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My personal experience is that assembling all riveted mail is around 40% more labor intensive than assembling demi-riveted mail. The current train of thought is that the transition to all riveted mail in Europe began somewhere before 1300 and continued until circa 1350, when all riveted construction became more normal. These suppositions are very broad, and are certainly inaccurate in the details, but such is the problem with lack of specific datable examples.

The contradictory information regarding pricing provided by Randall Storey in his thesis, Technology and Military Policy in Medieval England, c.1250-1350 indicates that the cost of mail was sharply declining during this same timeframe.

Quote:

Over the course of the thirteenth century mail barding halved in price to 20s or less, but its adoption still varied due to the vagaries of individual assessments.

Quote:

The evidence presented here suggests that in England prices for arms with high iron and/or steel contents experienced the most drop over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In most cases the prices of substantial arms such as hauberks or iron helms fell to a quarter or even an eighth of their price in 1200.A hauberk for instance which commonly cost 40s in 1200 was often valued for 20s during the early thirteenth century and could be found for 5s in the fourteenth century. In relation to the costs of living, arms which experienced such large price drops may have cost one-sixteenth as much in 1300 as they had in 1200. The reduction in the prices of hauberks may have been heavily influenced by the introduction of new technologies such as wire draw-plates, but the overall trend is corroborated by prices of other substantial arms.

So how do you increase the time of fabrication while greatly reducing the price? The cost of raw materials like iron seem fairly constant when adjusted for inflation, so the area impacted must fall in the manufacture of value added products like drawn wire or hammered sheet vs. punched or rolled rings, or in the cost savings of volume production.

I am amazed by the parallels in modern lithium-ion battery production, where materials costs are somewhat stable, or slightly higher due to higher demand, yet the costs of the finished cell is drastically falling.