The Armour Archive

i've noticed that when making maille i have a 'grain' i'm not sure what the appropriate term is but that's what i think of. is it better to have a vertical or horizontal grain in the sleeves of a hauberk?

The answer to that one is "um..." -- for it seems to have been done both ways for differing purposes.

The grain you are noting also shows its effect in the way the mail fabric behaves. In one direction, a mailpatch is quite elastic, stretching and compressing easily and neatly, while in the other, there's practically no stretch-and-compress at all. I personally speak of the resilient direction also as "row-wise" and the nonresilient, "column-wise," because of how they ride on the body in use, row/resilient horizontal, column/non-, vertical. Having the resilient horizontal permits easily donning and doffing the shirt, as it will open up and let go of you when you remove your belt and bend over.

For short sleeved mailshirts, the historic European mode for quadrilateral shoulder sections (basically a rectangle of mail with a neck-hole offset forward like a shirt's collar -- with modifications to bias the sleeves in a forward direction for arm freedom forward and across the body) was simply to extend the linkrows of the shoulder section right down the arms, producing an open-hang sleeve. This works well enough on short sleeves and seems to have found favor with long sleeves as well, once some proper ease was built into the elbow-joint area to permit the wearer to bend his arm all the way. This sort of thing is attested to in extant examples of mailshirts and in European art of the period.

Less well attested (as it only is known from artwork and not from antique pieces of the stuff) are other ways of making mailshirt shoulders that really better encourage the sleeves to have their resilient dimensions go around the arm rather than down it -- the 45-Degree/Four-Trapezoid/Yoke-top/Mantle-top family of mailshirt types, with the Mantletop being the only one of these actually seen in period art. These are characterized by having their shoulder sections' linkrows circling the neckhole in either curved or polygonal shapes, from the squared, mitered-corners layout of the Four-Trapezoid through the oval or circular varieties of Mantletop. All these, one way or another, present their linkrows in such a manner that the sleeves merely continue their weave right down the arm as needed, attaching just like enormous dags, really.

Long after the hauberk era (as early as the late fifteenth century), we come to the "mail sleeve" as an individual, modular component of infantry or munition armor. This critter seems to have been made with its row direction going around the wearer's arm. It was a flexible, one-size-fits-all defense for the arms, and was made as a rather narrow, tapering cone with the small end around the wrist and the large end over the shoulder joint with a flange of mail attached to that for better coverage of those parts of the upper torso not defended by a breast-and-back. For a picture of its shape, imagine a mail windsock, or a Salvador Dalí limp traffic cone, constructed of mail. It relied on having a bit extra at the elbow rather than a pouchy bit over the elbow point to allow the arm to bend well.

That was a good answer.