The Armour Archive

Sean M

Since Blair, the usual assumption has been that the knees are still sewn or riveted to a large leather or textile foundation, which may be separate from the foundation of the cuisses at this point. Until we have a dozen intact poleyns from this period we won't know though. Some of the descriptions o...

Sean M

I wish I could find linen heavier than 8 oz/280g in the EU. I must be searching wrong . You have a good point there. I am doing my eyelets in the modern way.... with the threads twisted around one another at the periphery, like a (modern) buttonhole. It may well be that they were not done that way i...

Sean M

Mac, if you are going to be sewing more eyelets ... are you doing the nice simple kind in the MoL? When you made the doublet for the helmet you seemed to be doing something more complicated. When I do medieval sewing, I always try to tell myself not to over-complicate things ... some modern tailorin...

Sean M

Humh, trying both of those strategies (using khaki thread and trying to bite less on the right side) seems to help. https://bookandsword.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/p1010413_practice_sewing_hems_on_scrap_with_khaki_thread.jpg I notice that this is easier to do on the full-sized garment than the scra...

Sean M

I am making up version 1.0, and have a puzzle. I am finishing the bottom edge like some of the fragments from London and Norse Greenland. On the reverse side it is most common that both seam allowances are turned the same way except for the shoulder seams (Fig. 17). To prevent unraveling there are t...

Sean M

Thanks. I have ordered "Shoes & Pattens" (the MoL is out of "Dress Accessories," and I can borrow "Stepping through Time" from the library). Spending some tens of dollars on research before spending hundreds of dollars on a new kind of clothing seems fair.

Sean M

La Belle Compagnie has some general advice about what works for camping and arming at http://www.peelaffinity.net/?page_id=460

Sean M

Thanks for the recommendation! His prices are a bit higher than I had hoped for, but I am still shopping around to get a sense of what is fair.

Sean M

Sartor carries silk ribbon http://www.sartor.cz/ribbons/267-silk-ribbon.html I have not had much success finding it in stores.

Could synthetics be a workable substitute? Most shops with cloth and notions carry rolls of synthetic ribbon.

Sean M

The Tudor Tailor sells leather points with brass aiglets by the dozen, but they are not cheap https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1229351 ... _active_10

I suspect that they would be happy to talk about sources.

Sean M

According to The King's Servants leather or silk points were sold by the dozen in 16th century England. The leather kind were the cheap ones. Don't know of any evidence from late 15th century Germany. It would be great to see the process of someone who makes aiglets out of sheet and a rivet (I am to...

Sean M

Thanks Mac, I will check them out. My local contact is a member of a living history group with nice things (I liked that they have a booklet with photos of their sources next to photos of their reconstructions, and 20 servants and artisans and hangers-on for one soldier) and I hope I can make a meet...

Sean M

So, in case my local contact remains unavailable ... what does one need to read to commission a couple of pairs of shoes in the style of Lombardy circa 1370? At least one will be worn under greaves. I have my usual collection of paintings, and have seen some remains of medieval shoes in museums. I k...

Sean M

The art reminds me of Niccolò da Bologna . The cutlers are turning out the same basilards with black hilts that he gives to the wicked soldiers in the Pharsalia in 1373. Here is the illustration for the arte of the merchants, ironworkers, and armourers of Florence (Ric. 2526 c. 7r). If there are two...

Sean M

Thanks for the links, Gustovic and Mart! Ok, here is the secret. I enabled scripts from senato.it, loaded http://notes9.senato.it/W3/Biblioteca/StatutiMedievali.nsf/23051974/0E9907DA61D5CEEFC1256F400051718F/?OpenDocument and scrolled down past the white space until I saw photos of the manuscript. I ...

Sean M

I can't get Mart's link to open ... I will try a sandboxed browser without my usual precautions. I think one similar illumination is on Manuscript Miniatures. So that is what "une tonneau muni de son chevalet pour fourbir la maille" looks like. Previously I was very skeptical that people in the four...

Sean M

She has videos of bowing cotton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2bRwwymKPA and pourponting on a frame https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-mkMu2PfjM She also has a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/fuhlendesigns... there may be photos there, I have trouble using FB because I block their Javascrip...

Sean M

Has anyone talked to Jessica Findley? She is experimenting with bowing cotton and quilting it on a frame. The coat armour of Charles VI was probably quilted on a frame, and a 'helmet sized' frame would be cheaper and less bulky than a 'doublet-sized' one. Either she or Tasha Kelly finds that they ca...

Sean M

A recent addition to this corpus of archaeological gauntlets is a discovery from Delft, found in the ditch alongside the town wall. The gauntlet has been associated with the siege of Delft in 1359 because with the pieces of metal, small fragments of leather were preserved that were dated by acceler...

Sean M

Unfortunately, gloves seem to be mostly published in obscure archaeological reports that you need interlibrary loan to obtain. When I ordered some of those reports, I found that often they just mentioned that a glove had been found and catalogued. Back in 2014, I found two overviews by archaeologist...

Sean M

When I looked at gloves inside gauntlets in the Queste del Saint Graal and Guiron le Courtoise a few years ago, the only colours I noticed were red and green (eg. http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4365/16759/ and http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4317/7113/). Colours in the white-blonde-brown range show...

Sean M

The other thing that I notice is that gauntlets in 14th century Italian art and texts usually have brightly coloured gloves inside, but these surviving gloves are dull browns and yellows. Have they lost their dye, or was there a change in fashion? For the people reading along in the Plictho de Lare ...

Sean M

Correct attachment of gloves to 15th century mitten gauntlet http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=136934&hilit=glove After looking through Matthias Goll's book I don't see any additional attachments, between gloves and steel, on these style gauntlets apart from the ones already...

Sean M

Historically, the "go to" for internal leathers would have been buff. The epidermis will have been removed, and both sides will look about the same. The thing you want is suppleness without stretchyness. I am using a heavy chrome tanned split. It's basically like those "craft" splits that one can g...

Sean M

Thanks Tom and Wade. I will try to post something here in a few weeks if nobody else posts anything ... I just do not have a lot of knowledge on this topic. My main research on this topic was back in 2014 I think. The 16th and 17th century gauntlets in Schloss Ambras are almost all missing their glo...

Sean M

You are welcome. I will keep thinking about illustrations for the "classical" and "early medieval" sections to break up the wall-of-text ... something will come to me. I hope I can find time to find chapter-and-verse for more things, and to copy and translate more things which are just available as ...

Sean M

Gloves and mittens of plates contain leathers to do various things, including a complete glove of leather or cloth. In this thread, lets talk about what we know about original gloves in the age of plate armour, and the modern substitutes which we find more or less useful. Evidence - One of the Churb...

Sean M

Mac, I am glad that my dumb questions are leading you in a helpful direction. The first week that an apprentice armourer spent sitting in the window with two or three other apprentices and journeymen to furnish three dozen pairs of gauntlets with leather, he must have learned a lot about how to work...

Sean M

I have had to put this project aside for two years now, so its time to announce it, not wait for a perfection which may never come. https://bookandsword.com/armour-in-texts/ Armour in Texts is a collection of texts which say something important about armour, and advice on how to find more sources fr...

Sean M

The Modern Maker is having trouble filling some of his classes on patterning 17th century clothing and may have to cancel them. It might be worth passing on to anyone interested in that period in your community. He is very serious about that style of clothing. http://themodernmaker.net/ https://m.fa...

Sean M

Did you have any problems keeping the fingers of the gloves open as you sew? Or bending the excess fingers out of the way while you work on the current one? That kind of manipulation is one of the things which makes me slow at manual work. Badly designed online stores are a bane, aren't they! You wo...

Sean M

Its also a hard question because we know so little about the development of the pair of plates. The Wisby type I armours already have horizontal lames in the belly, and nobody knows how old that design is, but I don't know when they first extended the plates downwards to cover the hips. Maybe by the...

Sean M

That's an interesting image, Jason. I'm not sure I've ever seen a medieval or renaissance depiction of a whetstone in use. The other oddity is that he seems to have a little square white "plaster" covering some small wound on his leg. Has anyone else here ever seen a 15th C Band-aid? I saw one or t...

Sean M

Thanks Tibbie. I have a lot of respect that they give you the sources which they are basing their modern patterns and instructions on ... and I am glad that I was able to support their work by buying the two smaller books. But it sounds like "Woven into the Earth" or the MoL volumes which I don't ow...

Sean M

The skirt on the statue of Saint George that Chris posted has it's scales overlapping from top to bottom, which seems pretty straight forward, but Hofer's skirt seems to have the scales overlapping from bottom to top. I'm not sure how I would do it that way and get the scales to sit nicely. Basical...

Re: Bands on the knees

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Re: Short Pleated Cloaks

Re: Short Pleated Cloaks

Re: Fourteenth-Century Shoes

Re: Fourteenth-Century Shoes

Re: Fourteenth-Century Shoes

Re: Laces for arming

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Re: Fourteenth-Century Shoes

Fourteenth-Century Shoes

Re: Maille making and cleaning in the XIVth century.

Re: Maille making and cleaning in the XIVth century.

Re: Maille making and cleaning in the XIVth century.

Re: Questions about padding a helmet in a period style for u

Re: Questions about padding a helmet in a period style for u

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: Announcing: Armour in Texts

The Leather Parts of Gauntlets

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Announcing: Armour in Texts

Matthew Gnagy Workshops Around the USA

Re: Dusting off the cobwebs

Re: Early Faulds

Re: Traditional Armor Finishing Processes

Re: Review "The King's Servants" and "The Queen's Servants"

Re: Building a German Harness