Now when I hit it; doesn't hurt.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I am at dover castle again,
so thank you English Heritage, thank you Dover Castle, for letting me film here.
It is an amazing place and it was built well nearly 850 years ago and for 13 very
important years, I have been working with Dover Castle making them exhibits for the Great Keep,
renovating them, keeping them going really and in other films we're going to look at that and
there's a fantastic Channel 4 documentary from 12,13 years ago, it's also on YouTube. I'll link
to that, where it shows exactly why it was done in the way they did it to really try and present
the castle as it was made then. But there's also a fantastic group of volunteers who work here
and I've made them a demonstration box about mail, chain mail; how it's made, what it was for,
how it was used. So I'm just going to go through the various elements of that box now,
just explaining really in a whirlwind tour, if you come here to have a look around and you encounter
one of the volunteers what might get explained to you about mail. So I'm going to show you
how we start with the wire and we end up with the mail or the chain mail. But the first thing I want
to say is that old French for chain is maile, so the translated term, if you call it 'chain mail'
is chain chain. The people who built this place, they would have called it maille,
so that's what I call it. I'll talk you through the maille making process at breakneck speed. So
not on a window cill here but in a forge, you start by forging out a thin steel rod maybe
three millimeters/eighth of an inch in diameter and then you put it through a drawing plate where
the holes get progressively smaller and you pull it through each of the holes until you
end up with a fine wire of the thickness you want and of course because it's getting from bigger
diameters to smaller ones, it really rapidly gets a lot longer so you end up with a coil of wire.
You then bend that around a mandrel; mandrel is a posh word for a steel rod you just bend, wind
it round and round and round and you end up with what looks like a spring but it's made of iron.
You cut that with a chisel into links so you now have lots of well what look a little bit
in modern terms like split washers and then what you do is beat the ends of those flat,
you punch a hole through each side and then you close it together and you link them in a system
that's called 'four in one' for regular mail. So you have four links go through every one
and then you rivet them together and the whole process takes absolutely ages and this hauberk
here which is also in the castle down in the armoury has actually around about 40 000
links in it. So now I have my very expensive and very time consuming coat of maille,
but it's actually, it's not enough to protect me. So I'm just going to put this here on my hand and
I'm going to hit it with this well fairly small mace, but even that hurts. Now it will stop a
sword cut for instance from actually chopping bits off me and it may or may not stop a spear
completely, you might just get spiked a little bit through it but the thing is it's not enough and so
what you do is you wear it over padded fabric armour and this one is a gambeson, it's made of
linen and a wool lots of layers of it. Maybe you have an aketon which is made of cotton wadding,
but either way it is a thick fabric layer and now when I hit it... doesn't hurt at all. I couldn't
do that on my bare hand so that is what you do, maille is not armour on its own, it's a composite
armour with a fabric armour behind it. Now if we imagine that you don't wear any armour at all,
that barbed arrowhead is a great thing to shoot at those kind of people because it goes in,
it causes well trauma obviously and it's difficult to get out, so there's lots of advantages, lots of
reasons why you'd want that. If that bladed head is sharp, it'll go straight through that almost
like it's not there, but you put maille over the top, well maille on its own it will go through,
but you put the maille over the top and then what happens is that bladed head gets blunted
as it goes through the maille and it does not go through your padded armour, your gambeson
quite as effectively. So what that means is you wear your maille over the top of your
gambeson and a bladed head is not going to really go through, you'll be safe.
A short bodkin from later on, not for when this was made, but they started developing heads like
this and again it'll go straight through maille on its own, fabric armour it may or may not go
through a little bit, probably not, but you combine the two? Definitely won't, but plate
armour is much more effective against it. In a military context a bladed head is awesome and
devastating because if that goes into somebody's body, the amount of trauma, the amount of blood
loss, the amount of pain is massive and they cannot fight on because you can't pull it out.
Something like this needle bodkin, the trauma, the blood loss, the pain is less than with these
and well if your life depends upon it you can pull it out, you can fight on. So the
thing is there are lots of reasons that you want to use the bladed head, but this kind
of armour will resist it. The needle bodkin, it cannot resist, so it will go through the maille,
it will go through the fabric armour maybe to five centimeters/two inch depth, maybe a little more,
but the thing is you put beeswax on that and it will nearly double the depth that it goes through.
So I've actually done another film on that a couple of years ago now, so I'll link to that,
but it's a really clear and definite difference, it really is and do we know that they actually put
wax on their heads? No we don't, not for a fact, but there is an Arabic treatise from the 18th
century where they talk about waxing their heads, so did they do it. I don't know, but it's just
something that I'm fascinated by because I think they probably did and in the context of maille
and the context of fabric armour needle bodkins are what you want and you want to grease them up,
you want to wax them up. And that's the whirlwind tour of the maille display box that they have
here at Dover Castle. Come and have a look at the castle, come and have a look at the keep
and find one of the volunteers and they'll take you through this and explain everything
in pretty much the way we've done it here but in better surroundings than wherever your living room
is because there is hardly anywhere better than Dover Castle, it's magnificent. See you again