Excellent point - people usually neglect to consider the effects of cumulative damage. However, lamellar is unusually easy to repair, as armour goes (AFAIK), so the damage would likely have to accumulate in one battle. Whereas metal fatigue which might affect mail or plate is not so easy to see, and harder to fix.

Lance thrusts are quite a different matter from swords, especially couched lances. George's question concerned only sword thrusts, and those are a good deal less powerful than lances.

Pros: Mail offers better protection than lamellar of a comparable weight. Mail provides better coverage and is more flexible. Mail is easier to repair, clean and maintain. Mail isn't susceptible to water, lice, mud, etc. Mail can probably fit a greater variety of body shapes (less custom-fitting required).

Cons: mail's flexibility means the wearer is more susceptible to blunt trauma. Mail costs more and takes longer to manufacture.

"Brigandine" does not equal "lamellar". I agree that a brigandine is better than both mail and lamellar in many respects. If you want to discuss brigs, that is fine but don't confuse the issue by equating them with lamellar.

[quote="Tyler Weaver"]

Quote:

I think the issue with Lamellar, particularly the Japanese type of Lamellar where much of the cords used to tie the armor together are exposed on the outside of it, is the potential cumulative effect of attacks. Maybe one lance thrust pried a couple of lames apart, straining or even fraying the cords. Then a couple of axe strikes strained it further, pretty soon a good strike or thrust may tear a lame or three off or partially off, and then you have a nice hole to thrust into or cut into...

We may have to agree to disagree, because we definately see things differently. Having seen a lot of test cutting, including the video put out by Cold Steel where they repeatedly cut through 4" thick mooring ropes (among many other things) I dont think cutting through silk cords is particularly difficult for a good military sword.

Also, this is a bit of a segue (and will no doubt prove very contraversial) but I have recently seen authentic Japanese armor close up, including the mail. I got to look at four Do's from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries at a recent travelling exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Though the armor was beautiful, overall I was not impressed with the protection offered, especially compared to European armor that I have seen. The silk cords looked very exposed to me on three of the four Do, and still fairly exposed on the nicer (17th century) one. Interestingly, the lame on one of the do appeared to be brass, and all three had some brass components (or bronze, or some other copper alloy)

But the mail in particular struck me. It was very, very thin wire, not at all like western mail, and it was linked on the four corners, not overlapping in any of the 4 in 1 or 5 in 1 patterns the way western mail is. It looked lke it might serve as marginal protection against draw cuts, nothing more. I can certainly understand why mail was not considered the best armor in Japan! Granted this is a very small sample, but I spoke to some of the experts on hand for the exhibition and they seemed to feel the armor was authentic field armor intended for battle and fairly representative of the armor of two different periods.

Conversely, Lamellar was well known in the West, including when exclusively mail armor was widely in use. Lamellar was being used by the Summerians well back into the Bronze Age, and had remained in use in the middle east and Central Asia more or less continually until well into the Medieval period.

Personally I think Lamellar over mail can be pretty effective, but by itself it's far less useful as armor. All I have to base this on are a few thoroughly unscientific test cutting experiments that I know of. I would love to see something more systematic done. So I admit this is a subjective opinion to a large extent. :)

JR

Cutting through freely dangling rope, or rope stretched through mid-air, is one thing. You can move the sword from one side of the rope clear through to the other side. Cutting a cord or rope stretched flat over a metal sheet may not be the same thing at all. Your blade stops at, or just above, the metal surface (assuming that the metal lame itself is not being cut in half). It doesn't travel past the location of the cord.

Think about cutting sinew in a piece of meat. If it is hanging in air, a big swing with a sword goes right through it. If if is flat on a cutting board, with the sinew right against the board surface, a single slice or chop is not guaranteed to cut it in half.

Now if the cord is on a metal lame, and this is attached to a live, moving target, the chances of getting a good cutting blow on a cord is further decreased.

The cord is there to hold the armour together and the lames are there to make cutting the cord difficult: I like the idea suggested that cumulative damage is key to how effective lamellar armour could be; as mentioned before, a well maintained lamellar armour would at the start of a battle be very effective at stopping cuts and most thrusts but the cord would take damage. At some critical amount of damage getting the point of a sword through loose, looser or missing plates would become much easier. Before a whole group of lames fell off there would have to be many cuts at close to the same area of the armour.

One good thing is that between battles this armour would be easy to repair. If a warrior neglected to repair and had to start another battle with already compromised cord bindings the level of protection afforded by this type of armour would degrade at an ever accelerating pace. ( At least this is my theory. )

The only reason I can see a competent warrior would let this happen to his lamellar armour would be due to a long series of battles without any time out to do basic maintenance.

One question though is how many hits to ones' armour should one expect to be stopped by ones' armour in battle: I think the function of armour is to stop what you couldn't avoid, parry or deflect, armour is there to give you a chance to survive your mistakes or your bad luck and not to receive large numbers of hits passively. ( A hit to your armour is a mistake: But a survivable mistake because of the armour. )
If the number of expected hits to ones' armour is but a handful in a typical battle there should not be enough damage done in that one battle to degrade the protective qualities of lamellar armour. ( Whatever that is when new or in good repair. )

I've always been informed that Lamellar was more popular with archers and in archery cultures (Where arrows were your major threat) then with melee fighters, but I don't understand why. It seems very protective to me, and as such, I would think it would be popular all over.... So what exactly is the problem that I'm not seeing?

As to our troops and their armor in the hot places today, I'm not saying it can be done, I'm saying how can it heat you from a heat perspective? The more you cover, the hotter you get, so why did that ancient arab say wearing another garment protected you from the heat....


HEY! I have an idea... Maybe it protects you from the heat of your own metal armor after you've been in the sun all day? I bet it would heat up...

George,

Regarding the heat thing, to quote Colonel Hans von Luck, who served with the DAK as a Major from April 1942-March 1943,"One even got used to the cold nights. We didn't take off our tropical coats, and thick, nonregulation scarves, until well into the morning when the heat had slowly worked through them. This was the thermos principle, which we had learned by observing the Bedouins."

As to the protection that the padding would give from the suns' heat on the armour, you aren't that far off, again to quote von Luck,"The heat during the day gradually became unbearable.Everyone sought out a little patch of shade. Some men really did fry eggs on the overheated armor-plating of the tanks. It was no fairy tale; I have done it myself."

A wee little bit out of the time that we are dealing with, and a hotter desert, but the idea certainly comes through.

Two thoughts about heat and coverage:

Of course, cloth can be used to cover the metal, and provide some measure of shade . The other thought is the "bellows" effect of loose clothing. It seems that the multiple layers of loose clothing create spaces through which air can circulate when the wearer moves - in effect, a breeze within the clothes. After all, the traditional garb of Middle Easterners does involve loose clothing, often in multiple layers.

On Japanese armour.

I have studied Japanese armour a fair bit, I like to think I know what I'm talking about, but I'm certain that many of you know more than I. That said, here are my thoughts concerning lamellar armour as applied to Yoroi.

1. Material. The majority of the lames on most suits were made of rawhide. This would simply not stand up the same amount of abuse as steel.
2. Lacing. The lames could in more extreme cases be punctured for the lacing to the poin of being so structurally weak that they could not stand up to any abuse, much less that of a battle.
3. Damaging. One key difference that makes lamellar clearly inferior to plate is the simple truth that the overlap of plates is going to catch an opponent's blade, or point. (this is also true of maille, but none the less...)
Plate, especially from 1400 (or so) onward (in Europe), was designed to present a glancing surface, this is especially important against thrusts.
4. Maille. In my study, Japanese maille was almost always used to simply connect armour plates, and was never riveted. As anyone who has cut against butted maille can tell you, it does not stand up to abuse. At all. High quality steel or not. (And does anyone else wonder about this high quality steel thing; the Japanese used a variant of the bloomery furnace, so the product would bee a bloom of wrough iron, steel and cast iron. The Japanese would never be so impractical as to throw out the rest of the bloom, so what did they do with the iron?)

One area my research has been sorely lacking is about the thickness of the plates.
Could anyone give some info on:
- The thickness of plates (Japan and the Middle East)
- Material (wrought iron, steel, tempered, etc.)

Hopefully I've done something besides repeat the statements of others

The heat thing: When the air temperature is way higher than body temperature all those layers that keep you warm when it's cold might help keep you cooler than the ambient air temperature.

There might be conditions needed for this to work like air spaces between layers, fabric that breathes and others I have no idea about.

The layers would slow moisture loss to the air and that absorbed by the layers of clothing would cool these also rather than being quickly lost to the atmosphere. I.E. Slow down dehydration.

This should work in high heat and low humidity: With high humidity the cooling effect might not work at all.

In warm but dry places like Iraq traditional clothing seems to be heavy as mentioned but warm and wet countries light or little clothing seemed to work best.