The Armour Archive

What length (as in knees or thigh)of mail did they use for the Crusades?

I am pricing out and trying to find out what i should get in mail, as in length and size.

I am 6ft and my weight is about 145 pounds, if i remember correctly my chest size is 30 or 35.

I am looking to get mail that i can use in sca combat, i plan on wearing it over an aketon.

What mail should i aim for in chest size to allow movement after all that padding?

How far should it come down my body, (thigh, knee?) and are long sleeves ok, or should they come to the elbow?

Thanks in advance.

ps i plan on getting flat rivited mail,

your gonna have to choose a period within the crusades, they span roughly from 1050 to 1350. look at this post:

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=54881

Tybolt, RandallMoffett, and Konstantin the Red give a very good descriptions of a crusaders.
maille to the knees, I'm building the same persona, though using butted 3/8- 14 ga rings until I get my riveted rings down.

good luck with it.
PS measure your chest and add roughly 10 inches of 'expanded' maille. will give you enough room for a gambeson and still be able to move.

Like John said, the long sleeve, short sleeve, and possibly byrnie comes down to which crusade. The very first one had a sleeves to the elbow, by the second and third (King Richard the Lionhearted), they started to move toward longer sleeves. The best references I suggest for you to work with are the Maciejowski bible (1250s) and the Bayeaux Tapestry (1070-ish?). The only site that has the Manesse Codex is a little hard to work with but you might try there (13th cent. as well I believe). If you are doing a 12th cent. persona, you might just have to extrapolate based on effigies that you can find. Another good idea is to see if you can find William of Tyre's "A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea" as he directly relates his experience while there. The only problem is the last printing in english was 1930s. Not sure if they have reprinted it since then. More later have to get to class.

To tell you accurately whether you should get a "medium" or a "large," and given mail's collapsive property, I'd go for big, as you're going to fill out -- you're skinny -- we're really going to need an accurate chest measurement, a proper jacket size, OR what size T shirt you take.

Chest measurement, also known as jacket size: loop a cloth measuring tape around your chest at a level about an inch above your nipples. The measurement in inches is your jacket size, along with Long, Regular, or Short to cover the essentials of your build. (E.g., I take a 48 Long jacket.) The tape should be tight enough to stay up and slack enough to easily slip a finger underneath it. You can get somebody else to take this measurement, or you can manage it yourself.

Any kind of riveted mail will more than do for SCA. Depending on whether you go eleventh century, twelfth, or thirteenth, you'll have a hauberk with half sleeves, or long sleeves with or without mufflers and an integral coif. Of course, you're still having to put the SCA-mandated rigid protections in the required places, which will be most convenienced with a 1066-style half-sleeve hauberk and Norman-conical-style helm.

OK i used a metal tape and came up with 33inch, i know you said to use cloth but i dont have one.

When you say the mail came down to the knees is that below or above them?

I think the with my chest size of 33 any thing from 43 to 50 will fit me nicely. I would really like long sleeves so i will pick a later persona to match the long sleeves

I am at work right now so i cant spend alot of time reading what you linked to but i will when i get home. Thanks

Some kingdoms also allow "heavy maille" to be substituted in place of a kidney belt but you might want to carry a kidney belt just in case, because a marshall might not feel comfortable with you wearing just maille (I know Steven of Forth Castle has had some problems with trying to not wear one). The other easy way is to get the aketon first, and then measure everything else off of that instead of trying to estimate since it is kind of hard to alter riveted (compared to butted). I believe that the maille came to just above the knee in the Mac Bible (leaf 12, pic 2, guy under wheel) and the aketon is also shown above the knee (leaf 9, pic 7, bottom left) 1250 puts you almost exactly into the Crusade of Louis IX if you want to be able to point to something that is right at your timeperiod. The Mac Bible also has finger mitts in addition to mufflers (leaf 13, pic 2, middle guy in maille). Have fun, we need more crusaders to balance out all those early persona and 14th cent guys.

OK wow thanks for all the help, i am doing a 15th italain persona and am almost finished with it. But i just did well in the stock market so i figured i would buy some mail, I have always wanted some and now have some extra cash to go around.

I think i will go with a high 40 or 50 inch chest to make up for all that padding, i also plan on wearing a sort of coat of plate (just some hardened leather over key areas, but not over lapped) under the mail, nothing historical just someing to give some protection.

Thanks for answering the knee question. i think a 36 inch in length will work for me. With all the padding it will come to about 2-4 inchs right on top of the knee.

Does any one know were i can get cheap aketon around $80 to $150, i like the one the polish guy (forgot the web adress and name right now) makes but dont really want to deal with the bank transfer. And it will be a bit over what i want to pay.

Oh should the slits be on the side or the front and back, with somthing that long i would think that if you dont put slits it will make it hard to walk.

for crusades the most common slit is front and back

It depends on how wealthy you were trying to be. Most of the slits run front to back for maille shirts but the clothing was front and back if you were rich enough to be riding a horse, and side-slit if you were not planning to a whole lot. I am not sure if it is because if you had maille you were rich enough to own horses and ride into battle or if the common infantryman wore maille too instead of cloth armour. The side slits would also potentially open up a slice to the outside of the leg but protect one from becoming a eneuch. Most of the art I have seen is front and back but in the Bayeaux tapestry, the pic I am thinking of (shirts carried on poles down to the ships) there would be no way to draw sideslits. Anyone know of any documentation for a maille "skirt" for infantry? Something with a couple of gores(?) on each side to let it move? I have heard that they have found a pair of maille shorts so I guess anything is possible.

i have made a couple gored maille shirts; but have not eben able to find extant examples of such. it works quite well as long as you don't hang it so long that it interferes with the bending of the leg when injured.

I really, really hesitate to believe side slits, particularly if you wish to fight on foot, and particularly in a kneecaps-length hauberk. Long side slits will pull the skirts right off your thighs, exposing them to get munched, when you drop into a fighting crouch. Center slits keep the mail on your legs.

Maybe short slits at the hems of haburgeons might have been done -- something about four fingersbreadths deep. For my money, additional expansions in the mail would do what a slit would, and offer better protection.

Adjustments of some inches of hauberk length at hem can be accomplished as the work of a moment, with a tight waist belt. Pull the mail up beneath the belt and flop the extra over the belt's top.

You can check your chest measurement by using a piece of string, placed around your chest and pulled a bit snug as described above. Mark it or cut it, then use that tape measure to measure its length. This will just confirm or refine the 33" measure you got.

You are skinny. They could slide you down the bore of a 16-inch naval rifle on any Iowa-class battleship.