I have for long been curious about the rate in which mail was produced in the Middle Ages. Today many people estimate the number of man hours required to produce a riveted/solid mail shirt at 500 to 1000 hours depending on the size of the shirt as well as the diameter of the rings. But these are of course modern estimates based on attempts to accurately mimic the production methods used in the middle ages.

We know that there is much information from the Italian city states on the number of workers employed in mail making. My question is, are there any primary sources mentioning the number of mail shirts these workshops produced annually?

We know that it varied dramatically over time. The price of mail in England dropped four- to eight-fold between 1200 and 1300 according to chapter 5 of Randall Storey's PhD thesis (link), One factor was the falling price of iron; another was increased specialization in metalworking, He suggests that in the early middle ages, mail was probably made by smiths who made many other things; in the late middle ages we know that each step in making mail (producing wire, cutting links, weaving and closing the links) was a separate trade done by different workers. The later is obviously more efficient, but was probably less fun for the workers.

Hi Sean,

Very interesting article, thanks for sharing it. So it seems likely that it was only towards the end of the High Middle Ages that mail makers adopted a "Taylorist" approach to the production of mail. I wonder if such production techniques were also applied in the Middle East and the Byzantine empire.

Paris had a guild of trefilliers de fer , iron-wire drawers, as early as the mid-13th century. Italian mail production seems to have been organized into large shops, while Germany and others utilized more cottage industry. The growing use of water-powered mills to hammer iron sheet and draw wire certainly lowered the costs of the mailmaker's raw materials.

Wedge riveted maille, especially in combination with flat cross section links are also faster to make with reliable strength in the rivet point than the dome riveted variant. We can see this from modern day reconstruction.

In my opinion, improved ways to make the wire and other raw material combined with new ways to make the maille both sped up the process. Dome riveted was still being made though so it must still have had some advantage.

Le Livre des Metiers, Titre XXIII doesn't give us total numbers as far as I'm aware.

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k110190t/f235.image

Don't suppose there is an English translation somewhere? I can only read dead languages :\