The Armour Archive

Derian le Breton

It's simply unenforceable. Why bother?

I'd much rather see a good roman at an event than yet another genericelt or McViking.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

It's _hard_ to get a "good" silk.. usually what you find is either that sateen crap, or slubby nasty badly woven "raw silk". You can get good, decent silk, but it's usually expensive. Not here. There are scores of quality silk merchants in and around Vancouver, BC. Many SCA folk...

Derian le Breton

The lion's head on the or and argent checky within a black border is one of the An Tir populace badges, so that part is fine.

There's also the <A HREF="http://www.antirheralds.org/display/populace_badge.html">ensign</A>, which is simpler.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Milesent wrote:I think Donasian's the only Breton I've ever run across.

I've met a few others, but most are of the "genericelt" persuasion.

I do early 14th century Breton (1320s).

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

sha-ul wrote:wasn't there an early for of kilt that was died with a saffron yellow dye?

I think you're thinking of the <A HREF="http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/irish/leinecroich.htm">LÃ©ine</A>.

also what period was Rob-Roy set in?

About 1720.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

They certainly made a lot of mistakes on their coin dies. On lower-value coins they often just left them in. I've seen some tornesello (a Venetian colonial billon coin with about 11% silver) where they didn't even bother to polish the die face after flattening it. The field of the coin is covered in...

Derian le Breton

I think that goes up there with such SCAisms as: Great caravans of honey butter bolstered the economy of Central Europe throughout the medieval era. That's a regional thing, I think. I haven't seen honey butter out here at all. Everyone in the Middle ages was secretly a pagan except for the crusade...

Derian le Breton

The shading on the shields makes me want to say it was done on a computer... but I'm not certain.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Magnus of the Dark Wyvern wrote:Those boot images didn't load for me.. odd.

That's standard for angelfire and other such sites that forbid hotlinks. Just copy the link, paste it into a new browser tab, add a question mark on the end, and hit enter.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

I am trying to express the point that the SCA does not acknowledge "conventional education" as being part of the accepted path of knowledge to peerage. Any of it. The ability to successfully use a research library can get you "acknowledged" quite quickly, if that's what you desi...

Derian le Breton

There certainly are to many "orders" in the SCA but I guess that is like many things that just grow for no meaningful reason. Not true at all. There were hundreds of orders in medieval Europe, ranging from the high and mighty (garter, et cetera) to lowly gatherings of semi-noble folk who ...

Derian le Breton

Firestands similar to the one in the tapestry are very popular out here, since virtually no sites allow ground fires. They vary quite a bit in authenticity of construction, but I've seen a few extremely good ones.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

These were done in lead-free pewter, but we do a pair of silver strikes for the royals as well.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

<IMG SRC="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2394/2176780489_b407129615.jpg">

A good day. I struck 224 pennies struck after work last night with the help of a fellow moneyer. 16 to go and we'll have our full pound.

This is such fun stuff.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

I flew with my armour in a duffel bag once and my shield strapped to my other suitcase. It worked.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

I find myself facing the exact same problem with coin dies. The quality of medieval coins varied an enormous amount, from hideously crude low value coins, to astonishingly precise works of art for higher value coins in some places. Since I recreate almost exclusively relatively low-value coins, I ha...

Derian le Breton

Hi all,

Here's a link to my photos from Istanbul. The old thread was eaten in the Great Dataloss Incident of 2007.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/derianlebr ... 245951449/

To see the images from a particular site, such as hagia sophia, use the tags feature of flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/derianlebreton/tags/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/derianlebr ... agiasophia

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

And yeah, back in 2001 I had a drive failure that resulted in 75 gigs of one of my clients research data disappearing. I had told the backup software to back up the appropriate directory, but it had a problem: "/data/" backed up the full set of files and directories in data "/data&quo...

Derian le Breton

D'oh!

My beloved post count!

(edit: ouch, I lost about 1500 posts)

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

My wedge tent does extremely well in all sorts of inclement weather, but I do ensure the walls are taut...

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

The Hanawalt book will bring considerable insight. Generally, you'll probably get better results by studying each segment of society at the time. Detailed works exist for the three basic orders of life at the time: Those who fought, those who prayed, and those who ploughed. By reading up on each seg...

Derian le Breton

Hi all, I've heard from various sources that in the Met there is a small display of Roman jewelry that contains various polyhedra as main elements (cubes, etc). Does anyone have a picture of these items? I'm extremely interested in them. Unfortunately my only description of where they are located in...

Derian le Breton

I should note that this study would be significantly more interesting if you compared more than ONE longbow to ONE crossbow...

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

To see the pictures (instead of the "NO HOTLINKING ALLOWED!" page) copy the URL into a browser, and put a space or a question mark at the end.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Konstantin is on the money here. If you weld the rings shut, or use solid rings, the stress that they were relieving by bending will just be transferred to adjacent rings.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

I bought a doeskin pair of gloves at home depot (of all places), that have held up extremely well over the years. I was quite surprised at this, as the leather is rather supple and thin.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Possible sources that may assist you, from a quick <A HREF="http://www.google.com">google</A> search J. Smith, Men and Armour in Gloucestershire in 1608 (Gloucester, 1980) Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066-1550 J. Lawrence Angel, "Colonial to Modern Skeletal Change in th...

Derian le Breton

Using a pair of pattens will considerably lengthen the lifetime of your shoe soles.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Sucky. Best of luck to Mr. Warren et al.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Idealy, I would also include a set of short ties at the bottom of each leg so that loose fabric can folded over and tied into place. There is evidence of braies worn this way in illuminations where peasants are working with their hosen rolled down. Tied into place? I always thought they just rolled...

Derian le Breton

Could my old copper pipes come to use if i wanted to try my hand at this? Cutting them lengthwise and then cutting out blanks? The thickness is 1-1,5 mm. You could do that, the problem is that copper is *hard*, and getting it to stike up a good image is very difficult without striking your coins ho...

Derian le Breton

Wow, this is an ancient thread... Since posting I've joined the <A HREF="http://www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/guilds/moneyers.html">An Tir Moneyer's Guid</A>, and just finished my first coin die this past weekend! Indeed, the best way by <b>far</b> is to make your own dies and bang them out as ou...

Derian le Breton

I've been to most of those places, neat!

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

But yeah, totally cool looking event! Nice gear, and it looks like everyone's having a blast.

-Donasian.

Derian le Breton

Josh Warren wrote:Makes me proud to be Czech!

For the record, my ancestry is almost exclusively Irish

Irish and Czech? Can't your DNA make up it's mind?

-Donasian.

Re: Misconceptions about silk?

Ahhhh...

Istanbul images again...

Roman jewelry?