Why was coat-of-plates material so popular in the 14thC?

[Maelduin mac D]

. What do you have exactly?

Cheers,

Max

a rather red face right about now?

[Kilkenny]

Not just in coat-of-plates themselves, but also in the cuisses and gauntlets.
It's a good concept for SCA armour, but I imagine real spears and arrows would shread the cloth/leather front up pretty quick. Then you'd be left with metal plates permanately riveted to a piece of cloth/leather that will only rip more as time goes on.
I realize knights didn't go in to actual combat every week, but it still seems strange to make an armour style that would be so difficult to repair.
This can be helped by riveting the plates on the outside, but plates on the inside still seemed to be the more popular option. In fact, coat-of-plates with matching cuisses seems to have been the default knightly armour from the 1320's through the 1360's. (In England, at least.)

Perhaps since live combat was not a routine thing, appearance was deemed just as important as ease of repair?

Here is a pretty good example of the fallacy of applying "logic" to questions where we just don't have anywhere near enough information to try and fill in the holes.

The simple fact is that the record shows a great deal of armour of this general design for a significant period of time. That there was much of it and it was used for an extended period should be considered pretty strong evidence that it worked for the intended purpose.

The question then should be something more along the lines of "how well did it hold up in actual use?" . That's a very different question than you get by beginning with the assumption that it did not hold up well.

[J. Morgan Kuberry]

I tend to go off the idea that if people used it in more than one locality for more than one generation it worked, though maybe for reasons we can't understand yet. That being said, this is a society in which a few pounds of nice ferrous metal is not meant to be cheap and disposable, no matter what its been riveted to, and what the condition of that material is. I could come up with lots of plausible reasons why a CoP might be thrown in a ditch instead of salvaged, but they'd all require some circumstances more severe than some torn cloth. Suffice to say, just because one person failed to loot it does NOT mean the originator of an object meant it to be semi-disposable.

A CoP with the plates on the outside is basically a form of scale armor. My guess is that protecting the metal from rust was more of a priority than protecting the cloth from cuts. Being able to pick up your armor without getting fingerprints on it is nice for that. Putting the metal inside also prevents the plates from being directly exposed to sunlight, which might increase the wearers comfort level somewhat. You also then get into the armored surcoat as a possible forerunner, and then you'd want the plates inside to keep the cloth for displaying arms and later, displyaing general wealth through velvet, cloth of gold, whatever.

[fghthty545y]

. What do you have exactly?

Cheers,

Max

a rather red face right about now?

not really.

[audax]

So how about posting some pics or some sort of credentials.