The Armour Archive

Hey redwald, great stuff! Looking into vendel culture myself at this point. I was curious if you knew a location to acquire a pattern for the warcoat style tunic being worn? And I was curious where your group acquires furs...

Thanks,
Sigurd

Thanks for the kind words, Sigurd and apologies for not replying until now. I don't visit so often these days.
The coats are made by members of the group - you can see more examples on our Face Book page - (wulfheodenas). I made mine by adapting a dressing gown pattern.

The furs generally come from Canada.

Cheers,


Paul

Wulfhere,
I'm surprised to note several criticisms of the decoration on this warband's equipment. While we have a limited amount of surviving gear from which to judge, I think that many recreation groups don't include enough decoration on their gear. Drawings in surviving manuscripts may not include much ornamentation on the clothes and armor of the people they depict, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the peoples of the Migration Period favored complex ornamentation:

I think that you are absolutely right; the peoples of this period went in for decoration in a big way and there are contemporary images that support your thesis and quite a lot of them. A detailed examination of the pressed plates (pressbleche) from the helmets provides a lot of clues. Then there are the small sacrificial plates, usually of gold (goldgubbe) which were deposited in building foundations and elsewhere. There are thousands of these, and despite their size, they often show costume details that have been carefully included. Examples are the additions of braid around the edges of the wrap around coats, artfully coiffured hair and jewels.

In our group we try very hard to base most of what we do on archaeological evidence, however, we do sometimes have to fill in the gaps ourselves.

Paul