Tailoring a mail sleeve

[Konstantin the Red]

These things really do have laterality.
Mac

Left-ness and right-ness?

[Mac]

These things really do have laterality.
Mac

Left-ness and right-ness?

Exactly.

Mac

[Konstantin the Red]

Hmm, not a detail you pick up from looking at pics of the mail sleeves hung up in Churburg -- they show the sock-heel shape at the bend of the arm just fine, but left or right sleeve? Not so much. I'd been under the impression sleeves of mail were one pattern, no handedness at all in munition grade anyway, so this is news.

[Mac]

Hmm, not a detail you pick up from looking at pics of the mail sleeves hung up in Churburg -- they show the sock-heel shape at the bend of the arm just fine, but left or right sleeve? Not so much. I'd been under the impression sleeves of mail were one pattern, no handedness at all in munition grade anyway, so this is news.

Mail sleeves hung up on an armory wall certainly give the impression of symmetry. However, in light of my recent foray into the subject, I must conclude that this apparent symmetry is illusory. In fact the point of the elbow is somewhere between ""down" and "back", and the arm reductions are carried out so as to be in back. In short, they are either rights or lefts, and if you put one on the wrong arm, it does not fit nearly as well as if you put it on the correct arm.

Mac

[Mac]

Konstantin,

Here is a post from earlier in this thread that shows what I am talking about.

Mac

Here are a couple of pics which show both of Wade's sleeves in a different light. When you lay them out the first way. they look like they would fit either arm, but when you lay them out the second way, they have distinct laterality.

The larger sleeve.


The smaller sleeve.


Mac

[Konstantin the Red]

Yeah. It's been an education. Which is what I'm here for.

I'd have to really branch over into LH vice SCA to end up with a lot of use for genuine sleeves of mail, tho'... but a man can and should always dream. I mean, they nicely accessorize a billman's sleeveless brigandine and pot hat for LH presentations. Neither of which I have.

[PartsAndTechnical]

So....64k question...


Will there be an "under-plate" shirt project at some point in the near future? And if so, ball park?

Or are we just focusing on sleeves?


Thinking out loud here....

Im interested in the sleeves......thinking I might just adapt them to an existing shirt of same rings diameters etc.

[PartsAndTechnical]

What about say, Roman or ancient shirts? Im not up on my ancient mail....do we have any extant shirts with enough to study the arm pit area?

I guess what Im asking pertains to how far back the tailored sleeve might date. Im comfortable with long sleeves taking on this tailoring method, but not sure about open ended 3/4 sleeves in prior centuries.

Perhaps, for kicks we might take a peek at earlier extant shirts, particularly Ottoman, Persian and Indian ....if they exist. Most tend to be 15th century onward. Any earlier than say 1350?

[Atlanta Armory]

As I understand it, a block of rust smacked rings is considered well preserved from that period (exaggerating a little, but not by much). Maille doesn't seem to last nearly as long as other armour, probably because of the high surface area. Somebody may correct me, but the earliest objects that could still be called a shirt are less than 1000 years old. Much of the [Eastern] Roman, Celtic, etc is almost double that age. I would absolutely love to see a complete shirt from that age.

Anyways, from what I've heard from those better versed than I, is that the Roman Hamata was untailored. I assume there were several sizes issued, but that's about it. I don't remember any references to shirts with long sleeves any sooner than the dark ages, and mail segments were invented to fill gaps in plate armor, which didn't come around until about 1000 years after the era you are interested in.

Better news on the examples from the East. For some reason, I've seen more surviving shirts and apparel from the Middle East and further on. They played around a lot with hybrid shirts, with plates connected with maille. I don't know when most of the shirts were made, but it's easier to find an Oriental shirt than a European one from a quick google search. If anyone can get Eric to chime in or get his website back up it would give us far more information to work from. Right now I'm using the Wallace A2 shirt as a model, but I've been looking for others to mix it up a little.

-Ben

[Mac]

Anyways, from what I've heard from those better versed than I, is that the Roman Hamata was untailored.
-Ben

Ben,

I wish someone would bring the evidence to the table so we could all have a look at it.

I have a tough time believing that our ancestors did not start tailoring mail almost as soon as they figured out how to make it. It's easy to do and it makes a vast improvement in performance.

Mac

[PartsAndTechnical]

No doubt tailoring was done...but to what extent and to what means?

Rather there are silhouettes and form for various centuries. Even in the 14th century there are differences from the opening of the century to its close, in terms of the armoured profile.

Mail fails to achieve a perfect match of a ridged surface so its not going to be a perfect mirror of plate, thus its obviously not going to mirror a rooster or globose chest on its own. It lay across said surfaces, and must be allowed to follow those surfaces. In an age when such profiles and silhouettes were not on the in-vogue radar screen, and particularly when those profiles and forms created constriction and binding on the body, i.e. a cuirass or arm harness) I would be more cautious about applying 14th century form to say 11th century form when such binding over the body did not exist, not really. Heck the Bayeux Tap even has belt-less knights. And we have evidence that some chausses were laced/tied together in back suggesting that a total appreciation of tailored form was either non existent or just not worth it for some mail. Which then begs the question of who would have had tailored mail vs simpler mail. Maybe wealth is our determining point. Maybe the realized need to integrate mail under plate was another determining point for tailoring.

[Dan Howard]

Anyways, from what I've heard from those better versed than I, is that the Roman Hamata was untailored.
-Ben

Ben,

I wish someone would bring the evidence to the table so we could all have a look at it.

I have a tough time believing that our ancestors did not start tailoring mail almost as soon as they figured out how to make it. It's easy to do and it makes a vast improvement in performance.

I don't think we have a complete hamata so there is no way to know whether it was tailored. I'd be surprised if it wasn't but sculptures and illustrations show shoulder doublings rather than proper sleeves so they only had to worry about tailoring the torso and shoulders.

[Ernst]

Most complete mail lorica I've heard of is from Arbeia:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/6782327549/

An interesting list of finds, though the links to the Mail Research Society are obviously down.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/jenny-ba ... 5342643112

[PartsAndTechnical]

One clarification on a point I made above....

When we say tailored, thats sort of an open ended meaning. To be made, automatically suggests mild tailoring.

What I meant was that looking at a lot of images before 1250, suggests a number of belt-less and rather open sleeves rather than tapered. Even chausses wrapped around the leg, rather than over it.

Perhaps in my mind the notion of tailored in this later context, means an intentional reduction/expansion or arbitrary augmentation to achieve a fit that transcends and enhances the very flexible nature of mail anyway. Ie, if a cuirass or arm harness binds mail, it would be wise and incumbent to contravene that restriction by forming the mail in such a way that it can still achieve a similar sense of human physiological movement despite an area nearby being somewhat immobile where a breastplate or arm harness strap might exist. The other working theory, at least in my mind, is the arbitrary augmentation of the mail to mimic a abrupt topographical change, where its natural "grain" is not as useful, as might be true around the armpit, collar, or waist.

[Mac]

I don't think we have a complete hamata so there is no way to know whether it was tailored. I'd be surprised if it wasn't but sculptures and illustrations show shoulder doublings rather than proper sleeves so they only had to worry about tailoring the torso and shoulders.

Dan,

I did a quick image search for Roman mail and did not come up with any period representation, but only modern reenactors. Can you point me toward some pics to look at?

Mac

[Mac]

Most complete mail lorica I've heard of is from Arbeia:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/6782327549/

Well! That's tantalizing, ain't it?!



There are a couple more pics of it here. http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/Canterbury/Arbeia.html

It would answer some questions if that thing would be straightened out.

Mac

[Ernst]

Would be, or could be straigtened out. IIRC there was evidence of a barracks fire which had collapsed the roof. The oxidation from the fire might be rather severe, as these images are after conservation.

[Mac]

If it were my artifact, I would snip out a ring from the place where the oxidation was the worst and see how much iron was left. It is looked promising, I'd put the whole thing in a vat of Evaporust for a day or so and "Bob's your uncle". (It may be just as well that it's not my artifact)

Mac

[Arrakis]

Most complete mail lorica I've heard of is from Arbeia:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/6782327549/

Well! That's tantalizing, ain't it?!



There are a couple more pics of it here. http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/Canterbury/Arbeia.html

It would answer some questions if that thing would be straightened out.

Mac

Shouldn't be too difficult to run a decent tomographic scanner of whatever sort over the piece and then do some semi-automatic/semi-manual computer model generation over the scan, then just "virtually unfold" it...

[Mac]

Shouldn't be too difficult to run a decent tomographic scanner of whatever sort over the piece and then do some semi-automatic/semi-manual computer model generation over the scan, then just "virtually unfold" it...

Arrakis,

Is that true! Well, damn my eyes and call me a Luddite! The miracles of modern Geekery never cease to astound me. (I can still remember what punch-card readers sounded like).

That would certainly be a noninvasive way to sort it out. A win/win. You could have your artifact and see it too.

Mac

[Arrakis]

Remember the scans they did of the Antikythera mechanism?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2006/11/imaging_the_ant/

Pretty neat! I'm actually a PhD student working in shape recognition and I've done work on tomography (mostly electrical capacitance tomography (ECT)) before, as well. If anyone has access to a wadded up shirt like that and a CT scanner or X-ray tomography machine, they may be able to learn valuable things about how it was constructed, shaped, tailored...

[Atlanta Armory]

Would you happen to have access to a program where you can virtually manipulate the rings? I have access to Solid Works, but it, like other Cad programs, has trouble with point contacts (like torus on torus contact.

-Ben

[Arrakis]

I wouldn't want to model each ring; that would grow to unmanageable size very quickly for a shirt with some 20k-40k rings in it. I'd probably model rings that I could "tell" in some way were connected, either by some combination of adjacency and local orientation or normal direction, as patches of a surface, then try to stitch the patches together to create a (C2?) continuous surface; from there, you just have to use some kind of geodesic distance algorithm, like the recently proposed Heat Geodesics method (Geodesics in Heat, Crane et al. ACM Transactions on Graphics) to figure out how far apart each of some set of "landmark" points on the surface are from one another. That should allow you to reconstruct a surface that has the same geodesics as the folded up shirt just by moving those landmarks and adjusting the surface patches to follow, I would think.

This is, honestly, probably at least a Masters project in engineering, though, as I've described it.

Hmm.

My research focus is point cloud analysis; it might work for me to just get a simplified surface representing the chain fabric from the scanner (probably with the help of a very patient human going through and hand-modeling it) and then just sample a smallish (30k points) point cloud from it, then run the stuff I've been developing on it to get things like minima and maxima and geodesics, then use that information to build a new model that's roughly isometric to the surface represented by that point cloud.

If someone did get a scan of something like that and turned it into a surface representation (in pretty much any file format), I'd be glad to do some point cloud-based geodesic analysis on it and give back, say, a geodesic graph of the surface, showing how far apart each landmark point is from each other landmark point and doing some basic dimensionality reduction on it.

Lol anyone want to coauthor a paper?

[Atlanta Armory]

At one point I was going for my Masters... I guess I was over thinking it. If we "unfold" a shirt, it's a 2D surface made of various quadrangles, and where edges are not vertical or horizontal, there's tailoring. Any two adjacent high points are either connected or in the same row. You'd have to double check some areas, but you could use color bands to indicate rows.

-Ben

[Jason Grimes]

Blender 3d might be able to do it, and it's free.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1YIafaqF7A

Here is another example using the rigid body physics in Blender. 2050 links simulated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T7JWcCm5OU

To simulate a full shirt you are going to need a pretty beefy computer to run all the calculations needed.

Here is the link to the blender web site:

http://www.blender.org/

[Arrakis]

Again, I wouldn't even want to try and manipulate individual links; once you have the shape, you can either reexamine the scans to understand the tailoring, or just come up with your own tailoring method that produces an identical shape.

Still, pretty awesome stuff, there. I didn't know Blender was up to that sort of thing.

[Ernst]

There may be a larger market for mail sleeves than I had originally thought. Sean Manning referenced the thesis of Thom Richardson on another thread.
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3919/1/T ... _final.pdf

Page 33

From 1338, with the assumption of responsibility for military supply for the
war with France, Fleet handled a large quantity of armour. Included in the mail were
208 pairs of mail sleeves and skirts, ten paunces without sleeves and two sleeves
without skirts, 348 hauberks, 897 mail collars with 614 covers, 678 aventails, twelve
pairs of musekins, two pairs of gussets, nine mail coifs, ten mail corsets and one pair
of mail chausses.

Perhaps mail sleeves and skirts had already replaced the hauberk and haubergeon beneath the coat of plates by the 1330s?

[Knight Sir James]

A mail corset?? I believe we have the secret to the wasp-waisted effigies now...

[Ernst]

See
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=153028

Perhaps a sleeveless and possibly hooded body armor of mail based on two visual examples. There are a number of written documents mentioning the corset form the late 13th century onward.

[Paladin74]

Its like being in the presence of giants. To call it awesome is like saying the Empire State Building is tall.

[Kenshin Hanabe]

My hats off to you sir! Every time I even try working with links it infuriates me, I can't imagine tailoring sleeves.

[robertdonnell]

I read a detailed report on recycled chainmaile it had been a set of legs and there were a lot of mistakes becoming a hauberk, if you get those close without being exactly perfect, that will be period.

The elbow, beautiful!

[Sean M]

There may be a larger market for mail sleeves than I had originally thought. Sean Manning referenced the thesis of Thom Richardson on another thread.
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3919/1/T ... _final.pdf

Page 33

From 1338, with the assumption of responsibility for military supply for the
war with France, Fleet handled a large quantity of armour. Included in the mail were
208 pairs of mail sleeves and skirts, ten paunces without sleeves and two sleeves
without skirts, 348 hauberks, 897 mail collars with 614 covers, 678 aventails, twelve
pairs of musekins, two pairs of gussets, nine mail coifs, ten mail corsets and one pair
of mail chausses.

Perhaps mail sleeves and skirts had already replaced the hauberk and haubergeon beneath the coat of plates by the 1330s?

I think we should look as this as a new option becoming available, not one fashion replacing another. When I look at the rule from Hainault in 1336, the records from the Tower of London, the rule from Florence in 1384, Chaucer's Sir Topas, the Limburger Chronicle, and LeFevre/Warrin on Agincourt, I see evidence that both were in use from 1336 to 1415. After all, men-at-arms had many options for foot defenses or neck defenses, so why wouldn't they have made different decisions about what mail to wear under their plates? Some probably preferred the lightness of many small pieces of mail, others the security of layered armour and the versatility of a haubergeon.

[Signo]

There is another consideration to do:
For a wealthy knight, that can have his equipment tailored and fitted, mail or plate or both, doesn't matter, it is possible to have the best protection avaiable with the less limitations to movement, the best protection from mail come from seamless coverage of the various body parts. On the other hand, for common soldiers that are equipped with standard mass produced stuff, mobility and fit are best when the pieces are individual, this allow more freedom of movement and make easier to find stuff that fit decently everyone.

[Kerr]

Not just the best, but the best suited. Walking through the desert in Afghanistan I saw a lot of variations of equipment even among regular soldiers, not just the black-budget SF types. Just because you can afford full-body protection doesn't mean that you want it. One of the most common forms of death among knights of the fifteen century, IIRC, was heart-attacks caused by a meat-rich diet, lack of exercise, and overheating in all that plate. It seems to be common for men with visored helmets to fight with the visors up except when the extra protection was absolutely vital. Likewise, even a well-off knight with a packhorse full of the latest cap-a-pied plate wouldn't wear all of it unless he really needed to. Knights riding out frequently just wore mail and breastplate and a light helm. You tailor what you're wearing to what will provide the best protection, taking into account your physical limitations, need to breathe, and the fact that after twelve or fourteen hours in the saddle some armours are just more uncomfortable than others. And the likelihood of archers. Never understimate the archers. Add to that the variations of local manufacture and import, and you find that medieval battlefields were even more varied than we can really imagine.