I've handled a lot of real medieval mail,
this is as good as modern made mail is going to get. Now is the moment. Yes
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Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop here and we're back with another film from Arrows versus Armour
2 again with Toby Capwell, Augusto Bront, so our historian and our armorer, but in this
case actually not only is Toby a historian, he actually writes history books on Armour so he is
explicitly qualified to talk about this. These two guys know so much more about it than I do,
so I'm going to hand over to them very quickly and really let them take it forward, but what
we're doing today is we are looking at the mail that we are going to be using for our upcoming
test. And we have a sample of commercially available mail and we have a sample of the
highest quality handmade mail that we can get. Now we would love to have done the whole hauberk
in this high quality mail but at a Dollar a ring, a Euro a ring, there's just neither the time or
the money to be able to get a whole hauberk for this film, so we have bought the best hauberk
that we can find, but how does that compare to the best quality mail that we could get?
Well we need to find out. We need to set that benchmark, so we're going to test these two
samples against each other, just as we've done in the other films. We'll shoot the arrows,
we'll measure for the depth of penetration to try and work out which one is more resistant.
So to support the mail we put it onto a four layer linen and canvas backstop that's sewn in,
so it allows a little bit of protection as itself. But I think really now over to you two guys,
so Toby. Yeah so mail is essentially fabric made out of metal. Depending on what type of
link you use, you can vary the flexibility and the protectiveness of the material quite drastically,
you can build mail that's really stiff and heavy and protective, but equally you can make mail that
flows like silk and doesn't impede your movement at all. And mail is fantastically successful as
a protective material, it's been around since at least 300 BC and it never really fell out of use;
people working with sharp knives wear mail gloves even today, mail aprons and so forth. And
of course it's one of the most important forms of armour throughout the whole medieval period
even as different rigid plate armour is being introduced in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries,
mail is always there, it never went went away. There was no age of mail giving way to an age
of plate, that never happened. Mail in the 15th century remains really important, so it's got to
be a central ingredient to our to our test setup. We can't shoot at a real medieval hauberk and
replicating medieval mail to a high standard as Tod said is fantastically expensive, so we've got
what we can work with practically; commercially made mail that's actually half riveted. That means
that alternating rows of the links are riveted and then solid punched out of sheet and that's fine,
that's accurate, that's real, it's sort of more of an earlier medieval thing and later in the
Middle Ages they tend to go for all riveted. The really, really super nice replica piece that's as
close to shooting at the real thing as we can get, it's made by Phil Parkes here in the UK,
he's one of the world's very best mail makers, he's handmade every link, he's put it together,
he's drifted the links, punched the holes, put the rivets in this. I've handled a lot of real
medieval mail in my museum curators career, this is as good as modern made mail is going to get. So
we really just want to shoot at both of these and get a sense of how they perform, how well does the
commercial mail do? Does the arrow just chew right through it, does the high quality material stop
the arrow? How much of a difference is there? That all feeds into the way we're going to interpret
our shooting results with our our full figure. From an armourer's standpoint as far as the the
materials go well what have you got to add? As you mentioned, mail could still be the primary defence
even though even in the 15th century still for example. The aventail that we're going to shoot
at tomorrow which was made by Isak Krogh in Sweden is made of like this really thick big chunky rings
which are I suspect most likely gonna stop almost anything coming at it and underneath, steel. We're
going to have a mail collar still made by Phil Parkes which will also provide extra protection
made of this tiny ring, still with thick wire to make sure that even if something bypasses the
aventail, it is still going to protect the wearer. Yeah these shooting pieces are just intended to
give us a kind of a baseline, what's the basic relationship between commercial mail and the
real thing. Well thanks guys, I mean it's really good to get the insider's track on that, so we'll
get Joe shooting again. Yes let's go! This is the commercially available mail Joe, so take it away.
that's on
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Good let's go.
Well some nice shooting here by Joe again and there's actually quite a lot of interest so
I'm gonna avoid the mail for the moment because there's something else. So these two here just
struck the textile armour on its own and just, just poking out the back whereas when Joe was not
shooting against textile armour when it's just the foam, they were clearing the back by quite a lot,
so even that four layers has been enough to really slow the arrow quite a lot,
so that's interesting. First of all and now we come to our three
through the mail. So I'm just going to .... it's a bit of a tricky one to measure but....
so 17 centimeters through the mail.
24 centimeters.
and 19. Compared to the effects though, well compared to the textile....
30.
28. So I mean it's interesting that there is clearly the mail is doing something. Yeah
it's obviously not doing enough to stop you from being killed, but how much something does it do
compared to the very high quality handmade? Well we gotta find out. Now. Now is the moment. Yes.
So now Joe you can be shooting against the very expensive handmade mail, so enjoy.
Still in trouble though isn't it? Oh yeah, Oh yeah.
Nice yeah that's on the very end.
Yep
That'll do. Okay good, all right should we go see? So we've got three good shots
here on target; that's close to the edge but it has gone clean through the links,
it hasn't clipped the edge so we're good with that, so measuring off.
So we have a depth of 23.
16.
and 13. Hmm. Wow that is a thing! So we had before 17, 24 and 19 depth, so this is a significant
improvement, it's obviously better, it's obviously better. It's still not gonna save you whichever
mail you're covering him with, be it that one or be it the commercially made one, the fellow inside
is going to get significantly injured or killed because this is denser than flesh as well. Yeah
but let's also say that the mail we're testing here..... the maker is not trying expressly to
defeat arrows. This mail is the supplemental defences where you can't have anything better,
but it's useful to know what the protective differences are between the real thing and
what we're going to put on our figure and it it seems to me that for our purposes the commercially
made mail for the figure is just fine. The higher protective quality of the medieval mail
would matter a lot more when it's combat with hand weapons and when it's you know the thrusts with
spears and swords and things that's when this mail might stop it and the commercial mail doesn't. Yes
now I think that's very true, but the other thing is the main difference here as you were
saying alluding to is the areas that you really do need to defend around the neck
there, we have gone for the very heavy, the very accurately made. Yeah beautiful and if you said
to the same mail maker I want you to make me a primary defence that has to stop arrows,
he makes you a different material something that's denser, heavier more inflexible and
we've got that on the figure too. Yeah so we've got some six in one weave under on the standard,
under the neck yeah which again is very different to this four in one, four in one style weave and
as well as the different weave on those primary defences we also have much more robust textile
backings. So it's all about what the mail maker is trying to achieve, so what we can take from
this test is that the very high quality, very carefully made handmade mail does perform better
and it's always fantastically interesting to know these things rather than just suspect it and so in
the sense of would this be the game changer that keeps our man alive if he's hitting the armpit?
No it's not. But it's all this kind of information to see the difference between the commercially
available and the really expensive, to see that difference, that just allows us to feed the
information back into our, into our thoughts, into our discussions and ultimately into shooting our
knight. Because it's that that really gives us the insights and the understanding, things like this
and so again, it's an Arrows versus Armour 2 film which has been funded by
the Kickstarter campaign. This, none of this, would have been possible without the donors,
so thank you so much for allowing us to understand these things, so that when we do the main film,
it's just so much richer for.... for us all really. So thank you very much. But
there are other films out there in the Arrows versus Armour 2 Series. Go check them out.
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