Medieval Armor: DID THEY 'MIX & MATCH' ARMOR? What are the risks?

Hey folks, Matt Eaton here, scholar gladiatoria, and today we're going to talk a little bit about armour fitting, and how it's fitted to the wearer, and how important the fit really is. So in the medieval period, in the 14th and 15th centuries, plate armour was very prevalent. Of course, male armour didn't disappear, it was still worn underneath plate armour, and sometimes it was in fact worn as an independent defence by itself. But the simple fact is that plate armour, because of its shell-like structure, preferably has to be fitted to the wearer, although it wasn't always in reality, and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go deeper into this video. We're also going to look at why it's very important that certain pieces of armour are made to work with other certain pieces of armour when they interact in particular ways. But before I go on, we're going to have a word from our sponsors who are Raid Shadow Legends, my favourite mobile and PC turn-based fantasy combat game. 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So the reason I'm holding these two particular pieces of armour up is for a very good reason, that's because the main point of this video is how certain pieces of armour that interact directly with each other, and I'll get a little bit more in depth on that particular nugget of detail in a minute, when they interact directly with each other it's very important that they are either made together, in other words they're kind of a set, they're a matching set, or one of them is made to go with the pre-existing piece. So say for example I'm a man-at-arms or a billman or something in the 15th century, middle of the 15th century, and I own this sallet but I've decided that I really want to make sure that the lower part of my face is better protected and so I want to order a bever. Well it's not simply about the colour or style of them or anything like that, although that can also be an important factor if you want to look cool, but quite simply this bever needs to work with this helmet. When this visor is down that bever has to sit inside of it. Now believe it or not in my earlier life I had a different helmet, when I dabbled in the world of Wars of the Roses reenactment 20 years ago, I had a sallet and then I did, much like this imaginary man-at-arms in the 15th century, decide to get a bever to go with it and I stupidly went and bought a bever at a trading fair without having my sallet with me and lo and behold the bever didn't fit into the sallet. Now it's not just a question of size, it's also a question of shape and if you look at the bottom of the sallet here, it has a certain outline that should be matched fairly closely by the line of the bever going into it and if one curves, if one's a bit more pointy at the front than the other or if one curves slightly differently around the side, it's a bit like a sword blade in a scabbard, you can't just assume that your sword blade is going to fit in a similar looking scabbard, it might not do, the curvature might be slightly different, the distal taper might be slightly different and it's the same with a sallet and a bever, so those two things have to go together. Now as I said that doesn't 100% mean that you have to buy them together but you have to at least have one and check that the other matches. Now in reality in the medieval period not everyone could afford to have armour made bespoke for them and this is something which I think that a lot of people on the internet sometimes make misleading statements because they're trying to educate people who don't know much about the medieval period or don't know much about armour. They make this very strong hard point about how armour has to be made to you and has to be made to fit you but if we delve deeper into the subject, if we start looking at the medieval records, at the texts that remain, we see that lots of armour was actually handed down in wills and in inventories, so armour wasn't just made for an individual and then when they died it was scrapped, it was handed on and it was used by other people. Equally sometimes armour was literally mass-produced, so famously in Florence during the wars between the Italian city-states, Florence, Milan and other of the city-states, Pisa and so on and so forth, produced and kept armour in storage for when it was needed and then dished it out to the soldiers. So in some cases you might be given a helmet or you might inherit a helmet that doesn't fit you fantastically but you have to make do because that's what you've got and if you want to partner it up with a beaver, well then your beaver might also come out of store and they might not have been made together so you might go through a few different beavers and find one that fits. Equally if you were buying one in a shop and again if you're thinking about video games or role-playing games this kind of thing or even writing a novel, if a person is buying armour from a shop they need to have the corresponding or the relative related pieces of armour so that they can check that the two things work together. Now I've used this example of the salle and the beaver fitting together, that they have to go together in order to function. What does that actually mean? Well it doesn't literally only mean that for one to fit inside the other, they actually need to work together as well and sometimes quite subtle differences or subtle conflicts between two pieces of armour can create a real pain in the butt when you actually start wearing the stuff and riding horses and trying to fight and doing all the things that you need to do on a military campaign. So it's very important that those two pieces of armour don't only superficially fit together but they actually work together as well. Now this is an issue when I see people in the modern world accumulating armour piecemeal, piece by piece. Not to say that that's necessarily a bad thing and you can definitely do it and in fact with my next armour I'm intending to do that myself. But it's very important that where two pieces interact a lot that you have the armourer who's providing the new piece check that it will work with the old piece and if it doesn't then alterations need to be made. Maybe to the old piece, maybe not to the new piece. Remember that old armour can be altered in some cases. Some armour can't be altered so easily. So sallets were in fact occasionally ordered and we do see sallets. You notice I'm saying sallet and sallet. I'm trying to portray myself to say sallet rather than sallet but old habits die hard certainly for me. But sallets were altered and in fact we do know thanks to Dr Tobias Capwell's research I'm aware of the fact that some sallets were altered into later close helmets. So sometimes you can see a 15th century sallet hidden inside a beginning of the 16th century close helmet. So they just cut bits off and add bits on and used basically the helmet bowl for later helmets. In fact we do even see medieval helmets turned into other objects not even just other armour. We sometimes see them turned into pots believe it or not. So some medieval helmets have survived archaeologically because they were used as pots and buckets for wells and all sorts of stuff. So going back to the original point it's very important that armour that's being reused is checked that it works with the corresponding new pieces or different pieces that you're having to put with it. Which particular parts of armour do you need to check that with? Well I've already mentioned helmet and bever so any you know this could also be true of maybe a wrapper or gorget that goes with an armet for example or a close helmet. There are wrappers in fact worn even with great helms back in the 14th century. So anything which goes on the throat needs to interact correctly with the helmet obviously. But equally anything that goes on the throat needs to interact with the breastplate correctly especially if it needs to connect to it and in some cases certain types of neck defence actually connect. Certain cases have a pin and a pin with a kind of bolt projection they actually connect to the breastplate. So obviously any connecting points need to work. One that I think gets overlooked quite a lot is shoulder defences and the cuirass. So particularly with large pauldrons, large pauldrons overlap the breastplate and the backplate. So obviously they need to be deep enough to fit around the breast and backplate, the cuirass, and not interfere too much with the movement in either way. And equally of course we talk about fit of armour as well. So a breastplate, say you have a cuirass that you have inherited for example from your dad and your dad was just a little bit smaller than you. You don't get the breastplate stretch but you do get an armourer potentially to alter the arm apertures on the breastplate such that you still have full mobility of movement and things like this. You might even need the way that the breastplate and the backplate go together, you might need to have that expanded slightly or the angles altered slightly so that you've got the full movement ability for your shoulder blades and stuff like this. When I'm talking about full mobility as well you have to remember that armour is always to some degree restrictive. There's always compromises being made and you don't only gain protection from armour, you obviously gain weight and restriction to your movement and extra heat and stuff as well. But you have to accept that you will not have literally the full degree of movement that you have out of armour that you do have in armour. You can't wear gauntlets and have the full range of motion that you would have not wearing gauntlets, certainly with most kinds of gauntlets and some kinds of gauntlets are very restrictive in what you can do with the wrist in particular. So we've dealt with helmets, we've dealt with throats, those interact, then throat and breastplate those interact, shoulders they interact with the breast and backplate with the cuirass. The cuirass normally includes the culet or fold of the skirt essentially which goes around the groin. Now legs are an interesting one, so in some ways legs can be a little bit more independent at least in my experience. If you have different experience to this feel free to chime in but I think that you could quite comfortably most of the time get your leg armour, your leg harness made by one armourer and then maybe all of your upper body made by a different armourer and the two things are not really going to have much problem interacting because the leg harness just attaches to your legs and it doesn't really particularly directly interact with the upper body armour or the cuirass or even the fold. One possible exception to that is you have to make sure that the length of the fold what protects your lower abdomen and groin is enough to be covering the upper part of the leg defences which might necessitate the use of a male skirt, usually or in some cases male hot pants but basically male shorts. So you have to make sure that there are no obvious gaps in that region because it's a very vulnerable region and not a part of your body that's very easy to defend when you're wearing a helmet with limited vision either it has to be said. There's also if we come down the body, if we come down to the legs, the way that greave interacts with the sabaton is also quite important and usually you want to have your sabatons made to fit the greave and the lower legs and it's quite a similar relationship as the bever and the sallet in that regard in that one has to basically fit up against or inside the other. The other one is arms of course, now arms to some extent can be independent, they obviously have to fit with the type of either spaulders or pauldrons that you have on your shoulders unless you just have a male, the projection of the male hauberk or shirt sticking out which was done sometimes to not so much protection but you do get more mobility that way because you can lift the arm up higher without it conflicting with your helmet or your bever as much as with a pauldron for example. But arm armour has to obviously interact correctly with the shoulder defences, also interestingly, I'll just put the helmet and the bever down for a second, the way that your cuirass is cut around here has to not conflict if you have fully encased upper arms, the fully enclosed upper arms need to be as tight to your body as they can afford to be and still give you full movement and flexation of the muscles and not clash too much with the edges of the breastplate. I have myself experienced a breastplate that was cut a little bit too wide here and arms that were cut a little bit too wide and it massively, massively restricts your movement so you need those things brought in as tight as they can be to give you the widest range of motion for the arms. And the final one I guess that comes to my mind are gauntlets and your vambrace. So gauntlets have a cuff on them and the cuff has to be wide enough and angled in the correct way to accommodate whatever style of lower arm cannon the vambrace that you have on here and you don't want this to be too long because it will interfere with the cuff of the gauntlet. So to cut a long story short, all of your pieces of armour which interact with each other are a bit like a chain and each link in the chain has to work with the next link in the chain but there are parameters for you know you can have it working perfectly and you can have it working 90% and it'll still be fine basically for most use. So you can to some extent pick mix and match pieces of armour and put them together and expect and have them work but you need to be mindful every time you get if you're getting a new pair of gauntlets do you think well will this have worked with my arm harness or if you've got gauntlets first and you're getting arm harness next do you think well is this going to work with my gauntlets? Are the vambraces long enough? Is there going to be a gap left here? Are my vambraces too short and my cuffs are too short so it leaves an exposed bit? Very vulnerable here you've got to have the cuff overlapping the lower arms but equally you don't want it to be so close to the lower arms of the plate here that you've got no wrist mobility whatsoever although I have to say some gauntlets don't really give you much wrist mobility which changes the way you give blows and everything else. That's a topic for another video. So there we go, I hope this has been somewhat thought-provoking. This is obviously a video more aimed towards people who either don't have armour at all and in some cases never going to have armour but might be interested in armour as an idea. You might be doing role-playing games or writing novels and you might be interested in how armour actually functions and the things you have to think about if you want to make armour work or indeed the restrictions if you get these things wrong and that can be historical as well. I'm sure there were lots of people going around in armour in the 15th century that didn't work 100% perfectly and they would just have to live with the consequences or it might be useful for some people who are getting together their harness or have an idea to put together armour and these are some of the things you really want to be mindful of and ask for advice from and always talk to an armourer about, you know, if you've got existing gear ask them, you know, I need this to work or say to them I need this to work with what I've got here and give the bits you've got to them if possible because then the armourer can actually check that the two things work together. I hope this has been interesting, see you again for another video on Scholar Gladiatoria channel really soon and take care folks. Thanks for watching, we've got extra videos on Patreon, please give our Facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already. Cheers folks!