[Guy Thomas]

I found the recent posts on longbows and the protection provided by maille quite fascinating, not only did it re-spark an old interest I have in archery and possibly building longbows but it also raised some ideas about the efficacy of maille as protection from arrows I did not know about. As is my usual response to a new interest I ordered two books through the links on this site, The Great Warbo and The Crooked Stick. Please, I'm not trying to restart any heated discussions over the topic of how efffective longbows were against rivetted maille!

However I am also interested in making some fairly authentic maille which would require wire made from wrought iron if it were to be accurate enough. Is the protection of maille constructed with this type of material provided simply because it is wrought iron, that is iron with a fair amount of linear slag inclusion or because it is just relatively pure iron which is very soft and malleable?

Some new tests on authentic maille reproductions were mentioned that might be coming up in the near future. Does anyone have more information on who is doing this and when? And possibly the materials used?

Edited to add: I am currently using the search feature to comb through past posts on this topic but I am interested in current news about upcoming testing.

[Dan Howard]

The ARS is currently in the process of commissioning an authentic replica of a piece of 14th century Italian mail for the purposes of destructive testing with accurate replicas of contemporary weapons. The reason that this has not been done before is cost. The metallurgical analyses alone will cost around $6000 each. Then you have to add the cost of actually acquiring wrought iron of the same metallurgical content and creating the mail from it using period techniques and period tools so that it accurately resembles the Italian original. There are not many people in the world today who can do this. The cost is significant. Once this test is complete we will have a decent idea of the protective capabilities of 14th century Italian mail but then the same tests will need to be carried out on mail from other time periods and regions (since there is a huge variation in mail) to get a comparative analysis. Even if ARS members freely donate their time it will take many tens of thousands of dollars and many years.

[Guy Thomas]

Thanks Dan, I understand the cost involved in trying to pull together a scientifically accurate project like this. I found many items online yesterday that answered a lot of my questions (WAY more than was available years and years ago when I was making butted maille!). Mainly though I found a lot of infromation from Eric Schmid about using pure iron wire as a reasonable replacement for wrought iron wire. It supported my thoughts that for wire drawing purposes a very pure and clean wrought iron would be needed in the first place though much of the wire used seems to have been made by slitting it from plate. Even to make thin plate a nice clean wrought iron would be needed. Unfortunately, as many people before me have already found out, pure iron wire is hard to come by and wrought iron wire is practically non-existent. I have a supply of clean wrought iron available to me but it would invilve massive amounts of labor to convert it to wire and I'd rather save it for blade fittings and such though I may play around with it some on a small scale.

One thing I did find out is that most of the suspension bridges made in the 19th century used wrought iron cables wrapped in wrought iron selvage wire. This wire was around 3 to 3.5 mm thick and would be an ideal product to draw down further into smaller wire. Untold miles of this stuff must have been made, I wonder if any was left unused in warehouses or if any might be available from destroyed bridges. Just speculation.

By the way, Eric Schmid doesn't seem to have a website up anymore. Does anyone know what happened there?

[Aaron Schnatterly]

[Dan Howard]

19th century wrought iron is completely different to medieval wrought iron and has different mechanical properties. If you can't get wrought iron made in a similar fashion as medieval iron then you may as well just use modern homogenous iron.

[Glen A Cleeton]

[Nathan Robinson]

[Guy Thomas]

[Glen A Cleeton]

[Jean Thibodeau]

A question about wrought iron and excuse my ignorance here: Is it simply " pure iron " with no carbon or so little carbon as to not matter.

Getting the " ELEMENT " 100% pure iron is probably something for modern labs or modern chemistry, historically produced iron I assume would always have some impurities including some minimal amount of carbon.

Compared to steel iron is soft but not brittle so rings made from it would deform rather than break but would also be easier to cut.

I see the value of trying to make maille using the most accurate to period materials and testing it's resistance to weapons to find out for sure what it could stop and what it couldn't as historical research.

Pardon my scepticism: But I don't think it will prove to be a " Magic " or automatically " Superior " material to what we could produce today using the best wrought iron we could make today or some totally modern material we could develop to make the best maille possible.

Iron is iron, today or 1000 years ago: Small levels of impurities or inclusions might make a difference in quality, mostly to lower quality, probably !?

Another approach would be to try and find the upper limits of the materials: make the best maille possible and see what it can take, this might not tell us what historical maille was able to take, but it should give us the upper limit: Anything else would be less protective right down to butted maille being very weak.

In other words, I would want to know what is the most one could expect from maille.

I hope this is understandable as I'm not sure I'm expressing it clearly.