Lamellar vs Briagandine. Weapon Tested!

Hi guys, my name is Stavros. I'm the author of the Tome of Six, book one of The Fateful Force, and I'm also a warbow archer. Today we have a new and exciting armour test, and it's going to be lamellar versus brigadine. We're going to put the brigadine on as well, and Oscar's actually going to hit me in the torso with the tenderiser. Now what is the difference between lamellar and brigadine? Both brigadine and lamellar armour are quite similar. They are both a type of plate armour made up of smaller, often overlapping plates of metal to form a greater piece of armour. Due to being made up of small interconnecting plates, they are relatively flexible and articulate compared to what we think of when we talk about full plate or what people generally regard as plate armour, which is a single homogenous piece of metal that is used to protect the body part like a breastplate. To demonstrate this difference, we have here a Sherberg style 14th century breastplate, and we can see that kind of homogenous nature of a single piece of metal as compared to what we can see clearly on the lamellar, the smaller plates, and obviously the brigadine is the same. We can see the rivets, and we can see that both armours are made up of smaller interconnecting plates. Typically for lamellar, the lamellar lames, as they're called, are smaller interconnecting plates, whereas with brigadines they tend to be larger. However, there is also precedent for brigadine to be made up of varying degree in size of plates for its protection as well. Now the key difference between lamellar and brigadine is the way that these smaller plates are fastened to one another. So in the case of lamellar, the armour is actually laced, usually with leather, but possibly as well as hemp or some type of linen cord. Typically lamellar is free-floating, which means that the fastening is occurring from plate to plate, whereas opposed to the brigadine, brigadine is a type of armour that's riveted to a facing of either leather or a type of textile. So that's the key difference between the two armour styles. Now the two armours that I did bring here today are from the same manufacturer. I got them both from Colt Athena, but they're both from Lords of Battle. Now unfortunately I did try to match the plate thicknesses so that they can be identical, but it was impossible. So the lamellar, unfortunately, is a little bit thin. It's at 0.9 millimetres thickness, whereas the brigadine itself is at about 1.2 millimetres thickness. Now a lot of people are going to say, well, that's too thin. Now there is precedent for armour being that thin. There's actually even precedent for plate armour being as thin as 1 millimetre and just under 1 millimetre at the frontage with 15th century armours. Now I agree, they were probably in the minority, but they do exist. So what we do have here is two armours that probably represent armours that are on the lower end of the quality scale when it comes to thickness in the plates. However, there is one thing we do need to take into consideration and that these armours are made from modern homogenous rolled steel. So what that means is in comparison to medieval metal, medieval armour was made from bloomery steel and bloomery steel has a lot of slag inclusions in it. And what that means is that even for relatively similar carbon content and even Vickers hardness, they will have a lower fracture toughness. And what that means is that they are slightly more brittle because of the impurities within the metal. So even though we do have two armours here that are probably on the lower end of the thickness, the quality of the metal will then comparatively increase the quality of the armour to a similar example from the medieval times or from, you know, historic armours. But what we are going to be doing today is we're going to be testing both of them to see if there's any material difference between the way that the armours are constructed. And that is, as I said earlier, the laced versus the rivets. And of course, we're going to see if we can penetrate the armours as well. Even though there is a difference between the armours, we'll take that into account that, you know, obviously the lamellar is a little bit thinner than the brigadine itself. Now today we're going to be using my 107 pound bow and we're going to be using that bow for two reasons. I do have a heavier bow, the 110 pound MR Tiron, but I want to use a 107 pound bow for a reason. And the first reason is that the actual performance difference between the 107 and 110 pound bow is not all that much. It's only a couple of joules of difference with the similar weight arrows. So it's not a world of difference between the bows. Now, the second reason, of course, is that I have quite a few arrows to get through on two sets of armours. So I've got a lot of arrows to put out today. And even though there's only a three pound difference, you know, when you put a lot of arrows onto a target, those three pounds actually do add up. And the H1 heavy draw seems to be a, has a more forgiving draw curve as well for its draw weight compared to the MR Tiron. So that's the reason why I am going to be using the 107 pound bow today. Now what I'll do now is I'll show you some of the arrows we are going to be using because we're using some new and exciting arrows as well. Some arrows that we've never used before. So I'll run you through the arrows real quick. And then I'll also run you through some of the other weapons that we are going to be testing these armours with, which I'm really, really excited for. Okay. The first arrows I'm going to be using are going to be these War Bodkins. Now the first War Bodkin is actually a Type 9 from Will Sherman. And the second one is actually from a new fletcher, Matthew Hotston. I will put his Instagram details into the description and I'll put it up on the screen so you can see it. One of the things I loved about Matthew was that I requested that he actually, with the shafts, that he actually put a shoulder onto them. Then I can shave the cone out so I can fit the individual arrowheads onto them. And he did that for me. And it made my job so much easier fitting these arrowheads onto these beautiful arrows. So they're the same arrow shafts that Dash Render uses on his channel. And what I do have on this one is a War Bodkin from Fairbow. So it's not quite a Type 9. It's a little bit more angular, but they're both types of War Bodkins. The next arrows I'm going to be using are going to be these Square Section Needles. The next arrow type will be the M2 Tudor Bodkins, with a Hector Cole M2. And now we're going to get to the new arrowhead types. So I have here a Type 10 War Bodkin. And this one is from Will Sherman as well. These Type 10s though are a little bit lighter than your Type 9s and your other type of Cressy War Bodkins. But I'm going to be quite interested to see how they go. And the last arrow types are actually going to be Manchu arrows. So I got some arrowheads from Fairbow. Some Manchu Tang arrowheads. And I actually couldn't fit them to the arrow shafts myself. So I got my good friend Oscar, who people that are familiar with the channel have seen him participate in some of my videos. He did the sword test. He's done some archery stuff for me as well. And he was kind enough to fit the arrows, because they are Tang, into the arrow shafts. And the Manchu arrows themselves are from Samart Archery. So I'm very, very excited for these. I've got two types. Both these arrowheads are consistent with both Chinese archery, as well as Japanese archery actually. So both arrowheads are far eastern in their style. They are Tang, as I said, on a Manchu shaft. So I'm very excited to see how these arrows go. And now we have one of the special weapons we're going to be using today as well. We've got this 16th century German dagger hammer. It's a blade profile, but it's not sharp at all. It has been broken at the tip, and that's because I was testing it, and actually it ended up rolling on some of my other plate when I was kind of like doing some preliminary tests to see how the weapon worked before I actually did this video. I've actually hammered it out. I've tempered it. I've taken off the point, because the point itself was what was causing it to curl. So I wonder how it now goes with this kind of, you know, obviously cut off point. It's a little bit more robust now, so I think it should perform better against the armors because it won't curl. But we also have the back end of the hammer as well, which is a good bludgeon to see how that goes as well. We do also have some other weapons. We have Oscar's war hammer. I have a few other weapons as well, but we're going to see how we go with these tests, because we've got quite a few arrows to get through, two armor samples, and quite a few different weapons. So we'll see how we go. But predominantly, I want to test it against the bows, the German dagger hammer, as well as Oscar's more traditional war hammer. So let's head on down to the range now, and let's see how we go. Okay, so this is the setup. We're going to start with the Brigandine first. So coming a little bit closer, what I have done is I've got the ballistic gel. I'll go through the ballistic gel in a moment, but I've got the Brigandine here, 1.2 millimeter thick Brigandine. And beneath it, I have got some padded gambeson, and I'll show you what it's comprised of. So it's two layers of cotton batting, so it's a suitable undergarment. What I want to say about the ballistic gel is that this is 20% NATO standard ballistic gel, not 10%, and it's highly, highly resilient. It's far, far more resilient than flesh. And I've got here a Todd Cutler bollock dagger, and these are optimized for thrusting. And you'll see what I mean by this. I'm actually going to go in really ... Okay, there's no doubt that if you were to do this against a flesh, that would have gone to the hilt probably. But you can see that it's quite resilient. So what we're going to do is today, we're going to assume that ... We don't know if we're going to get any penetrations to begin with. But if we do get penetrations beyond the Brigandine and the lamellar later, the lamellar will be set up in a similar fashion, and the gambeson, anything that's sticking into the ballistic gel, we can assume that it's going to be far more impact and far more deadly against a flesh target. I also have the 16th century dagger hammer here, and I'm going to show you a similar phenomenon with this dagger hammer. On observation, it looks like it doesn't penetrate, but it does. You can see that's a bounce, but we can see here, it does open up the gel. So again, that's just to demonstrate so we have our expectations aligned, that if anything does stick into the gel, we know that it would be far worse than what is going to be represented today. So with that said, let's shoot the armour, see how we go. Okay, first arrow is going to be the Will Sherman needle bodkin. These ones are very, very tapered, so I wonder if they're going to curl. This one is 1,282 grains. Oh! But actually, I can tell from here, it broke the head. Next arrowhead is going to be another needle. It's from an unknown Arrowsmith, but with the Matt Hodgson arrows that I got. So 1,268 grain on this one. Let's go to the next arrow type. Type 9, 1,084 grains. Oh! Next arrowhead is going to be the Cressy, 1,500 grains. I believe this is the heaviest arrow I'm going to be using today. It's gone in. But I think what's happening with those ones, because I inspected it before and I'll show you that on the camera later, is it's actually skipping off the plates and going through and being redirected through the fabric to the side and not actually penetrating to the ballistic gel. We might have to try those again and actually hit the plate front on because we're going a little bit left and, well, we're seeing that the armour is actually kind of working. Let's actually bring the camera down and we'll show that now, to be honest. So, yeah, so bring it a little bit closer. I'll have to take these arrows out, but it seems to be skipping off the plate. So it's penetrating, but it's coming in at an angle and skipping off. I'll put the camera in here so we can see inside the ballistic gel. And we can see they're actually not really going through the plate. They're being redirected by the angling. So we're going to take them out and try and put some solar strikes onto the Brigadine again with those and see how we go. All right, so I've got another needle here. So this is 1,445 grains. That has actually stuck in. I don't know how far, but that's definitely stuck in. That's actually going in as well. I think I hit the other arrow and I broke the other arrow. Let's bring it down. Let's check that out, actually, because that was pretty funny. Yep, look at that. I hit the wood. So let's continue, though. Let's continue. New arrowhead time. Type 10, 938 grains for this one. That's got stuck in as well. Now we have the Manchu arrows with the far eastern heads. But this one is 990 grains. I think that's the same as the early arrows where it skipped off to the right. I suppose the skips are good, though. It's showing us how the armour does work. That if they do come at an angle, they end up skipping like we do see with full plate. Brigandine does that as well, so I need to be able to hit a cleaner. And we'll try and get some more solid strikes on. Let's see how we went. Let's bring the camera down and review the damage. All right, so this is the carnage. So we have here the Will Sherman Type 9. Come a bit closer. We'll show the head. Even with a robust Type 9, it is deforming it a little bit. This one struck here. It's probably bent the plate. We'll take the Brigandine off afterwards to see what's happening underneath the Brigandine. But it's bounced out. The Type 10 is up here. It's deformed the head as well. The Cressi as well has gone in. I can feel that it has maybe penetrated the plate. I don't know how deep it's gone in. It's stayed in, but I don't know if it's defeated all the plate and defeated the gambeson. On the last shot, we saw a lot of arrows fall out. I will show the damage that we did to the... I believe this was the Will Sherman needle. And the M2 actually got stuck in there like that and actually Robin hooded it. We can see penetration on the plate right there. We can see some penetration of the plate. We'll take the Brigandine off and we'll inspect it properly. But we can also see how one of the arrows... I believe it was the Will Sherman Type 7. Skipped up off the plate, which we're seeing that as well on the flanks as well. So the armour is definitely redirecting the arrows when they hit at a slight angle. This one as well. So I'll show you the Japanese arrow as well. The Pyramid. Again, this one has hit flush on. It's hit the arm underneath. But it's ended up skipping through the suede and breaking and bending the tang. One sec. Get that out. There we go. So definitely, you can see we're deforming the arrow head a little bit. And we're bending the tang and skipping out. However, this one has definitely penetrated. And this is the Type 7 needle bodkin from an unknown arrow smith. I bought them second hand from another fellow warbler archer here in Australia. And this one has penetrated through the plate, through the gambeson and into the ballistic gel. That is a frontal hit. So come bring the camera a bit closer so we can see the damage through there. We will take it off. And we can see it's gone into the gambeson. And it's only just poking into, it's very hard to tell, into the ballistic gel. We're going to take the gambeson off now. We'll flip it and we'll see how many penetrations there are to the plate. But that one is definitely a penetration all the way through to the ballistic gel. While I don't think it would be a killing blow. It would certainly be worse than, as I explained earlier, the ballistic gel. The ballistic gel is very, very resilient. It probably would have been worse than what we're about to show. But I suppose the armour is doing its job to protect the soldier from any fatal injuries in this case. Even though we have been able to penetrate it a couple of times with a couple of different arrowheads. Okay, so we've got five penetrations on the brigandine where the arrows have gone through. That's the Type 9. I don't know what this one is here. And this one here that definitely wounded the soldier. I'm going to put the brigandine upright. It's definitely the needle. This one here actually is the Cressy. So again, the Cressy penetrated. And the one that went the deepest is the needle. So we can see that's gone straight through. About that deep. Definitely gone through the padded gambeson. Right here we can see the hole. Straight in. So definitely we've been able to penetrate the armour once all the way through on a frontal strike. But the armour did defeat, even though there are some perforations in it, it did defeat all the other arrows and protect the soldier underneath. With just probably one arrow that would have caused perhaps a minor wound. But again, it's hard to tell with this ballistic gel because it is so resilient. We're going to put the brigandine back on it now. And we're just going to hit it with the hammers. We found the needle that ended up skipping off the armour. So we'll show that again here. That's actually the M2 penetration. But we can see a skip here on the armour. And that's from the Will Sherman needle. Look at that. It's curled it. And you know what? I kind of thought this would happen with this one because this is a far more tapered Type 7. Whereas the other one that penetrated, even though it's a needle, it's a little bit more robust. So that's the curling effect of that type of impact. Okay, so that's the results from the arrows of the brigandine. The brigandine I think is definitely doing its job. And what's important is that the plates are not becoming unfastened from the rivets. Which is what I wanted to test. Now, of course, we've seen other people's tests against brigandines. And the rivets generally do not burst when the arrows hit the plates. Whether they penetrate or whether they bounce off. The rivets seem to fasten the armour quite securely to that front edge. So it's not a potential weak spot where plates can come loose. And then, you know, obviously subsequent shots may be able to sneak past the armour. Whether it be from arrows or whether it be later on in the melee. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to use the German dagger hammer. We're going to try and get a really solid strike onto the torso. Let's see what happens with this type of hammer. I'll do one more with the blade part. Right in there. Let's give Oscar a go now with his warhammer. Let's see if the spike itself can actually penetrate the plate. So I've got here the hammer I made. It's a fair bit longer, you'll notice, than the one Stavros is using. If I really want, I might try both hands on this one. You can get a really, really long stroke out of it. I'm going to start with the tenderising head. Didn't get through. I think I took a rivet out. Which one? Oh, there we are. Yeah, I see it. See, the rivet that's been, I think as I came up there, flipped off. And that's worked remarkably well. I don't know what that's done to the ballistic gel underneath. Now, let's see if that's actually skidlocked the plates. It's gone around the plates somehow. We don't know. We can't tell. And then what we'll do is, we're going to put the Brigandine on as well. And Oscar's actually going to hit me in the torso with the tenderiser. We're going to start light. I want to see what the transference is. Because we're definitely, I feel, deforming the plates. But we want to see how much energy transference is through this type of Brigandine onto the person underneath. So bear with me, let's see how we went. Okay, so we can see, again, we are able to, because of the angle of the attack of the hammer, it goes through, skips off the plates, and goes between. But it's not going through the gambeson underneath. Again, the armour is acting to deflect the hammer itself, the point from going into the target. In a similar way, we saw the arrows when they were going to the flanks. So we can definitely see deformations occurring in the brig. Bring it closer. We can see it at the top with Oscar's strikes from his normal warhammer. We can actually see it on the front of the brig as well here. We can see one of the rivets here is burst, but it doesn't seem to be drastically compromising the integrity of the Brigandine armour itself. Here, where it's actually penetrating the suede, the armour itself is defeating the hammers, and also we've got some deformations down at the bottom as well. Nothing significant, so what we're going to do now is, we're going to have Oscar, and these are already deformed, so they're actually going to be closer to my body. I'm wearing a 30-layer gambeson underneath. We're going to start light, see what kind of transference there is, and we'll get to the point where it starts transferring some energy into me, and we'll call it quits there, but let's just see how we go. Of course, we can't emphasise on this one enough. Don't try this one at home. Don't try this at home, and we are not professionals. Stavros is doing this because he's claimed he's okay with getting hurt, and of course, we are going to start very light. I'm going to start here. I'm going to start just driving this flat section in. You can definitely feel some transference of energy. I mean, the heavier we go, it's going to transfer more and more energy, but certainly, you do that at that pace against an unarmoured opponent, it's going to really, really hurt. Definitely can feel it. I can feel the impact. It's not painful. It's just a matter of I can certainly... There is an energy transfer through the armour. It's nowhere near hurting me, and nowhere near going to be winding me or injuring me. 1,290-grain Will Sherman needle. That's bounced out, but I can see from here it's actually deformed one of the plates, and I think this is going to be the weakness of the lamellar. Even though it's defeating the arrows, I believe that this is the weakness of the lamellar. Let's continue. Let's get some more strikes on it. Let's see what happens. This is going to be the more robust needle. That's gone in. Don't know how deep it's gone in, but it's definitely gone in. Cressy War Bodkin. Bouncing, but deforming the lanes. Last arrow. Actually, I'll retry the M2 as well. Last arrow for now though for the eastern ones is going to be the pyramid head. That bounced back onto the GoPro. Okay, so let's just do one more. I'm going to do the M2 tutor Bodkin again. And that's the last arrow. That one's bounced as well. Let's bring the camera down and let's see how he went. Okay, so we can see with the lamellar armour, and this is what I suspected all along actually, because I've seen this in other people's tests, way of archery, I think that one is cap and ball. I'm not sure. I've got a few of them up there and I'll put them up on the screen so you can see this kind of phenomenon with the lamellar armour. It's the weak part of the lamellar armour is actually the lacing. The lacing bursts, but I think what we are seeing is that there is a positive to that as well. When the laces burst themselves, they absorb some of the energy off the arrows. We don't have any penetrations of the lamellar into the ballistic gel. And in fact, while we are piercing it in sections, so we can see here is where the needle went in. It's caught onto a secondary plate underneath and bounced out. Over here, I think was maybe the type 10. I'm not 100% sure, but we can see multiple places. Definitely, we are piercing the armour itself, but it doesn't penetrate beyond into the gambeson itself. So we'll take the 16th century dagger hammer to the lamellar now as well. Yep, we're definitely deforming. Definitely deforming, bursting more laces, but not penetrating. Do one more, driving that spike down. But I think surprisingly, unless those plates are already compromised, it seems to be doing reasonably well. There we go. That was solid. You can see that point of impact there has been enough to pop one plate, but it's stitched on the side. It's still got the plates next to it. But I think what we are seeing with the difference between the rivets and the lacing, the lacing is a weak spot that gives a bit more give in the armour itself. So while the laces are being burst, they're expending some energy to be burst. That's robbing the arrows of potentially some energy, and it's preventing the arrows from fully penetrating all the way beyond the lames themselves. Whereas with the brigadine, we definitely got a few punctures into it, and we definitely got one that went into the gambeson and into the ballistic gel itself. Now, it's not a whole lot of difference. The brigadine definitely did a great job as well. But we can definitely see, I think, that the lames, while they're fresh, potentially offers better protection, despite it actually being thinner. This is .9, so same manufacturer, Lords of Battle, .9mm versus 1.2mm. But then subsequent strikes, you could imagine a lucky hit. But not only that, we can think about the melee of combat as well. And there's some really great videos out there of De Quetem doing their un-choreographed duels in full armour. And we often see them, you know, obviously discard or be disarmoured their main armaments, and then go to their rumble daggers. And I've got the Todd Cutler, you know, bollock dagger here. It wouldn't be hard for me to sneak a stab wound into one of these sections that has been compromised. Okay, so I'm not an armoured expert, but I do have a black belt in karate, I have a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I have about 20 years of martial arts experience. I am proficient in the unarmoured arts, not the armoured arts in the context of swords and HEMA type of combat. But there are some transference of skills in the grapple. So if we can imagine, say, we get to a situation where I am able to get what we call the whizzer. The whizzer is also called in wrestling and BJJ, is an overhook where I disable or I immobilise the arm, so I can then attack other areas of the body, go for submissions, go for sweeps, go for takedowns, whatever it may be. But we see this actual move in one of the De Quetem's unchoreographed combats as well. It's definitely something that's been transferred into the HEMA and the armoured combat type of set. Now usually they go for their rumble dagger, and they go there, and usually we're going to go for the gaps in the armour, the gaps in the armour. But now that we know that we've actually compromised the lamella, so Oskar, if you know I'm going to keep going to the top, you're going to try and block that continuously. If I can then sneak it in, the lamella potentially provides, if we can imagine that I'm doing that whizzer in that grapple, and of course, nothing's guaranteed to fight. The other person's going to be fighting back as well, and they're potentially going to have a dagger as well. But now I have more spots that I can potentially attack, putting the opponent at a disadvantage in the mallee. So even though I think that the lamella is better while it's fresh in stopping the arrows, despite it being thinner than the Brigandine, nothing really penetrated all the way through, it then starts to become very compromised as the battle goes on. So I suppose there's a pro and con to both armours. These tests are not 100% conclusive, but we definitely can see that the lacings themselves are the weak points of the lamella, and there's actually, I want to give a big shout out to Justin Ma from The Way of Archery for this. He's providing one of his lamella tests. Even though we're getting similar type of results with the bursting of the cord, a lot of people might say, well, perhaps the cord itself would have been more robust in the period. And that's true as well. I don't know. But there are museum examples where we do see precisely this type of battle damage on lamella from historic arms themselves. So the potential is that this is a known weakness of the time period for lamella. So we have this kind of pros and cons of both armours. Again, I should have added as well, in terms of the arrowhead efficiencies of going through, we saw a number of penetrations with different types of arrows against the Brigandine as well as the lamella. We do have a number of, you know, perforations in it, but I don't think it was a surprise that the robust needle was the one that did the most damage and penetrated the furthest against the brig. This type of arrow seems to be consistent against whether it be gambeson, male, my shield tests, and now the plate tests. You know, it's got a robust enough tip that even though it's a needle, that it doesn't curl on impact as opposed to these more tapered type of needles. And this one here, specifically this one here, they really, really curl. And we see Dash on his channel use these same arrows, and he has the most success with these type of bodkins as well. Okay, so that was our Brigandine versus lamella armour test. I want to give a special thanks to Oscar for helping me out today, bringing his Warhammer and performing some of the tests for me as well. I needed a partner for the wizard. Okay, so I think, you know, we can take away some things from it, but, you know, did I get anything wrong? Are you seeing something that we're not seeing? Yeah, absolutely. You know, obviously your feedback and your comments are going to be always valuable, so please drop your thoughts in the comment section. And if you do like this type of content, please like and subscribe. And once again, thank you, Oscar, for helping today. And a big thank you to my brother as well, who was the cameraman. So stay tuned for our next... Yeah, we'll find something new and exciting to bring up. Correct. Stay tuned for our next video. We've got some more armour tests and some more warbow archery to present in the future. So thank you again.