The Armour Archive

I guess this is a type of "research", so here goes...

About two years ago I was surfing through various sites about siege engines, and came across one that showed a crew with the engine, and one of operators wore these pauldrons that looked like they were straps of brown armour-grade leather (maybe 1" or 1.5" wide?) woven in a basket weave pattern, on the diagonal.

Does this sound familiar to anybody? Can anybody provide a link to the site I'm thinking of? For a long while I thought it was one of Darius Architectus' image galleries, but I haven't spotted it since. Maybe it was some other Roman group, possibly a ballista crew.

I don't care so much about the "authenticity", or lack thereof, for this style of armour, but it's been driving me crazy that I haven't found it again.

Only in my nightmares...

I would bet that that was an SCA armor thing. We have tons of leather stuff from the middle ages and even earlier. We don't have that much leather armor however.

There is some, but I don't recall seeing anything like that.

f

Eastern armor (about half way down the page)

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/3505/page6.html

look at the image "Chinese Star Scale" - is that what you're talking about?

Will

William Freskyn Murray wrote:look at the image "Chinese Star Scale" - is that what you're talking about?

Sorry, no. This was a photo from some battle, the main subject was a siege engine, and it was just the shoulders that I recall had the woven leather. The rest of his kit was either Roman(ish) or European.

A lot of tournament armor was made from leather, some of it had some braided areas (Rene's Tourney book, look in Barber&Barker's Tournaments), but I don't specifically recall seeing any entirely braided leather pauldrons.