This ring mail was quite popular in North East Asia during ancient and medieval times. Detail of Medieval chainmail Hauberk worn by medieval soldiers and knight. Medieval chain mail was sometimes also known as medieval chain armor. It also had other alternate names such as ring armor or simply mail. This medieval chain armor was particularly popular among the knights during the medieval times.
Initially, the medieval chain armor only covered the body but eventually a hood was developed for the head as well. Medieval ring armor mainly consisted of a foundation garment which was mostly made of leather. During the medieval times, blacksmiths made chain mails and the main task was the linking between iron and steel rings.
The ends of these links were commonly welded together for added durability. The use of chain mail continued after the medieval times but its form drastically altered with the passage of time.
Medieval chain mail was a primary device of defense and offered various advantages. The most immediate advantage was the protection against cuts made by the enemy blade. Besides, compared to actual armor or iron, chain mail took less material to make and was also flexible.
Finally, an important advantage of medieval chain mail was that it was relatively cheap and thus could be afforded by the common people other than knights. Early Medieval Chainmail with some plate armour worn in medieval turkey. Plate armour is still seen today in the form of the padding used for many "high-impact" sports.
Personally I do not believe that there was any one armour that was truly superior to another. Every type of armour has it's place in history, with it's matching arms and styles of warfare.
One disadvantage of Mail, that I would like to note, is it's weight. Well made armour of any sort should be shaped to the wearer's body, and distribute weight as evenly as possible. While this can be done with high-quality mail, it's still far from the near perfection of some articulated plate armour.
This, combined with the fact that some tight mail patterns tend to trap a lot of body heat making wearing Mail for extended periods quite tiring. The highly developed weight distribution that became possible with the era of Articulated Plate was simply amazing. A warrior clad in a suit of properly made Articulated Plate would have been able to do cartwheels in his armour.
Each plate balanced perfectly to a part of his body. This effectively dispels the myth of knights in armour falling off their horses and not being able to stand up. Such stories must have developed from certain examples of Tournament Plate Armour. Tournament Plate was specially designed to take the incredible impacts of jousting, so that it was very, very heavy. Such armour would have never been worn outside of a tournament environment.
Again, it is important to compare the armour to the opposing arms and warfare techniques of when it was used.
The history of Mail is a lot longer and more complicated than most people suspect. Samples of Mail go back as far as the Etruscans, that means that Mail has been around for over 3 millennia!
It would seem that Etruscan is constructed in a pattern that is more closely related to Japanese and some Italian patterns than the common European 1 into 4 pattern. The Etruscan Mail also appears to have some small metal plates on it's surface, which would make it more of a hybrid Mail-Lamellar armour.
Because the Etruscan Mail pattern is more akin to Japanese patterns and because historical examples of Mail don't make an appearance for another years, one can assume that Etruscan Mail isn't the base for European Mail. Most scholars, in fact, believe that European mail developed from a Ring Lamellar type of armour as I mentioned earlier. This brings us up to somewhere around the 2nd Century B. The Romans found that the Gauls wore the first known examples of European Pattern Mail shirts and soon adopted it as a common armour for their secondary troops.
Roman mail shirts were referred to as Lorica Hamata. The Roman Lorica Hamata are interesting in that half of the links that made up the shirt were solid rings, punched from metal sheets. This technique continued in some later European Mail examples, but most European mail is made fully from drawn-wire links. It is called "Theta" or "Bar Link" because the punched links have a bar across their center which makes them resemble the Greek letter "Theta".
Including down into what we now call the Middle East, north into the Viking Cultures and even in the far east where the Japanese developed their own styles of mail. The sole culture that didn't develop its own Mail Armour is China, although they did wear imported Mail from the Middle East. In some samples of superior European Mail, the maker will have links with an amazing variance in the same shirt. Thick heavy links over the vital organs in the chest, lighter, thinner links for the arms and areas that needed less protection.
Almost all authentic European mail from the Roman time forward has links that are either welded or riveted shut. For now this website only covers mail with butted links, I hope to include details of creating riveted and welded links in the future. This was because the drawn wire used for the links was very weak due to the high slag content of early smelting techniques.
For the mail to have protective value that justified it's construction time, the links had to be as hard to open as possible. Mail loses protective value as soon as a single link has been opened far enough to slip apart from neighboring links. This is where Mail that included solid punched links had an advantage.
As mail evolved in some cultures it became common to use the flexible mail to link together larger and larger protective metal plates. This was especially common in Persian examples of Plate and Mail Armours.
Persia also claims to have some unique mail patterns all their own, but I've never seen first hand evidence of historical examples of these patterns and use the name "Persian" simply for lack of a better name.
Hopefully I will eventually be able to include more historical evidence for persian patterns in the near future, along with information on how to work with plate and mail patterns. In Europe, as plate armour began to develop it became common to start using mail to protect areas that needed to flex more than the ridged metal would allow.
Mail became common in elbow joints, knees and so on. This plate and mail "Transition Armour" , along with Persian Plate and Mail are some of the Armours that cross classification, as I mentioned before. It wasn't long before full plate armour became more popular and with the invention of fully articulated joints, mail started to loose its popularity. Advantages of chain mail YouTube has several videos of swords cutting effortlessly through chain mail.
How likely was that scenario in the medieval battlefield? Not so much. Proper riveted mail is a completely different proposition altogether. There is a reason why different armies around the world used them so prevalently and for such a long time. Perhaps they were less effective against maces and heavier weapons capable of inflicting blunt force trauma, but a good riveted chain mail almost always protected the soldier against sword cuts and gashes.
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