The Armour Archive

Are the late 14th century shields eith flat or curved. They seem to come in either kind from the effigies and images of the time. Also what is the thickness of the wood? And not for SCA if it is different than the real thickness of the shields. I seem to remember reading they were not very thick. Example of shields I mean. http://manuscriptminiatures.com/guiron- ... -338/1644/

The wood of the Black Prince shield (1370~) is about 15mm thick. (A little over 1/2" inch.)
I was looking through a book on medieval shields, and most seem to be in this region or a bit thinner.
It also seems period shields were made by either gluing/pegging together splints of wood with bevelled edges the edges to create a curve, or by joinging together thick pieces, then planing them down to create the curve.
(The shields would also gain a good bit of strength from the leather/rawhide that was usually attatched to the front.)

If you haven't have already, have a look here. It covers all periods of medieval shields.
http://michael-engel.io.ua/album325285_0

It looks like both flat and curved shields were made, but it could just be the way the photos are taken.
(The illustrations and photos are useful, even if you can't read German.)

Thanks very much for the info and link.

Also I do not think its just illustraions making them look flat. The effigies also have flat sheilds. http://www.themcs.org/armour/knights/Ge ... 201188.JPG

Buster that is a really great book. I only wish it was in English Do you know if there is a translated copy on the market?

I wish I knew of an English translation of that book, but I've never found one.

I think flat or curved shields had a lot to do with geography.
English effigies almost always show curved shields, but in France and Germany flat shields seem pretty widespread.

One thing I liked about the book was a lot of images where you could see the original decoration. That has added to my collection. Just wish I could read about the details

I think you are right on the geography.

just push the translate button in Google chrome.


Ty

PB

Will it work on images of pages instead of text?

Google Chrome will not translate the scans because the host pages are in Russian.

Hmm so same image of each page. Then use Russian OCR software to change it to text then use something to translate it to english. Thats all we need to do

If somebody is smart enough to figure out how to get this in English, please post idiot proof instructions so the rest of us can read it. PLEASE.

OK first you need OCR software that will recognize Russian like ABBYY Fine Reader http://finereader.abbyy.com/ . The trial version if it is a trial without limits for 15 days should work fine. So you use this software to turn each page into text instead of an image. Next you use one of these to translate each page. http://translate.google.com/ - http://translation.babylon.com/russian/to-english/ - http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ . If you used each one to translate a page and then compare you could probably get a better idea of what its supposed to be. Then you could fix some of the odd phrasing yourself. After you have a page translated reformat it with the image in openoffice http://download.openoffice.org/ or microsoft office etc. Then you do the next page and next page etc until done. When the entire thing is in your office program you can export it as a PDF.