The Armour Archive

Isak Krogh has made his baccalaureate thesis on the mail at Veste Coburg available on Academia.edu. This contains lots of tailoring information and photographs, which Isak has put to good use in making well fitted reproductions.

https://www.academia.edu/34809530/Mail_ ... ste_Coburg

Splendid! Thanks!

Mac

Sixty years late, but someone finally did what Martin Burgess called for!

A number of the sleeves have expansions in the back, a feature which I believe Isak has correctly identified as evidence that the sleeve was cut from a shirt. He also cites several seams of different style rings as evidence of later modification, though I suspect this might have been a normal practice when assembling armors from mail "by the bolt" which was cut into components and seamed together.

Awesome, thank you for sharing!

Ernst wrote:. . . I suspect this might have been a normal practice when assembling armors from mail "by the bolt" which was cut into components and seamed together.

I'd hesitate to speak of "cut into components" from some inventory of a bolt of the stuff such as a modern mailmaking machine generates. I figure that the components in question were made up as various sizes of quadrangular shapes of mail, plus optionally such things as expansion arrays of a shop's most usual sort. Expansion arrays may make either slight expansion or a very considerable one; they are handy that way. At any rate, you are looking at hand-built mail, so I doubt such a thing as off the bolt like cloth existed for the stuff; premade mail-patches seem more the thing.

A made-up expansion array -- or if inverted, a contraction array -- would have two links at its apex and a varying number of links down at its base. Its edges are easy to weave onto the rest of the mail, simply zipping them on with one column of links, or two if required. A pair of links up top can be woven into the links of a shirt with a single link through them, and links to either side filling in once the array is anchored.

Take as an example an array using 5/16" internal diameter links, expanding from the pair of links at the apex (amounting to 5/8" internal measurement across) to a base 3" across: to comfortably arrive at three inches plus a little wants a base row of 10 links. So one needs to insert enough expansion links inside the body of the expansion array to arrive at that many links on the bottom edge. Not much to keep track of; what you mostly have to be alert to is to have the apex links of any two expansion arrays, as in left and right shoulders, be lying angled the same direction, so they will go into the rest of the mail weave in the same linkrow, and not be displaced one row up or down.

Similar calculations for our SI correspondents can be done for any number of millimeters ID they like -- the example has the two apicial links spanning right about 1cm.