A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in NYC this week got me wondering about the effectiveness of weapons vs armor. From seeing the pieces in the Arms and Armor collection, it seems that maybe we who have such an interest in swords may not give enough credit to how well different types of armor protected the wearer. Does anyone have any pics or first hand accounts of how armour (plate, maille, hardened leather) holds up after being hit by various weapons?

Marcos , simply put we know armour made good sense because people used it for so long ( thousands of years ) but
armour that gets used is armour that gets destroyed . I have a sallet from about 1500 that has two long shallow dents
on the skull from some sort of blunt instrument ( the steel isn't scored so the implement used didn't have an edge )
that I doubt rang the bell of the wearer at all . Also I used to own an indo-persian maille and plates coat that had seen
heavy use . The maille had many large rends and there were multiple small punctures in the plates . I took a bodkin
head arrow that I had from a blacksmith friend of mine and inserted it into the largest of these punctures which was square and obviously made by an arrow of this sort , and the tip of the arrow only protruded a half of an inch inside .
It never made it throught the padding the warrior would have had on underneath . As far as viewable sources i'm not aware of any dedicated resource to this but maybe somebody else here is . Most armour collections here in the states
tend to be in art museums so thats the focus of the display not function . Consequently your not likely to see armour thats taken a beating in those enviornments .

Hey Allan,
Would the book Armour form the Battle of Wisby be a good source?
Marcos,
My suggestion would be to look in archeological journals for studies on gravesites from various battles from the time period you're interested in, especially where the archeologists used forensic examination of the remains and artifacts as a part of their research.

Hey Rob . Good thought . While the excavated armour is in a state where its next to impossible to tell if it was damaged in use there is alot of written documentation regarding the wounds on the skeletal remains and shots of several maille coifes that have been split nearly in two ( as well as the occupants head ) .It's a great read to boot .