Armour, from Linen to Plate

Harness: the old word for a complete armour, from the French harneis, gear. Before dawn, around 1450, a young squire arms his knight for a tournament, feet first, the way the old English treatise says it must be done, and between the buckles, three thousand years of armour... Inside: Greek marines who wore a Bronze Age armour for eleven hours, the helmet with flapping bronze wings, a chest of Roman armour left behind at Corbridge, the pig-faced bascinet, the dent that gave us the word bulletproof, a knight who climbed the underside of a ladder, warhorses the size of ponies, and Spanish soldiers who borrowed Aztec cotton armour. Boucicaut will be there too. Chapters: Cloth and hide · The bronze men · Rings of iron · The Romans in strips · The knight in mail · Plates · The armourers · The arming · The squire · How heavy? · The tournament · The horse · Elsewhere · The last of the harness · What armour is. Sources: the Dendra endurance test (2023), Kalkriese and Corbridge, How a Man Schall Be Armyd (c. 1450), Le Livre des fais de Boucicaut, the Leeds armour treadmill study (2011). Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

Before dawn, in a tent at the edge of a tournament field, a young man is kneeling on the grass, buckling steel onto another man's feet.

He starts at the feet, because that is how it is done. Feet first, then the legs, then the body, then the arms, then the hands, and last of all, the head. By the time the sun is up, the man he is dressing will be covered from head to toe in more than a hundred separate pieces of shaped steel... and he will be able to walk, run, kneel, mount a horse without help, and lie down on the ground and get up again.

It took people three thousand years to learn how to make that possible.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode two... armour, from linen to plate.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is the year fourteen fifty, or near it, and it is early summer, somewhere in the north of France.

You are seventeen years old, and you are a squire. You serve a knight, a man of about thirty, steady and patient, who has fought in two wars and many tournaments. Your job, among a hundred others, is to look after his armour... to clean it, mend it, keep it from rust, and, on a morning like this, to put it on him, piece by piece, in the right order, with every strap and lace in its place.

There is a little book about this, written in English around this time. Its title is How a Man Shall Be Armed at His Ease When He Shall Fight on Foot. It lists every piece, in order, and every lace. It is one of the reasons we know exactly how this morning goes.

But before the squire begins, let us go back, a long way back, to where armour began. We will return to this tent at dawn. The knight is in no hurry. He is still eating his bread.

Chapter one. Cloth and hide.

The first armour was not metal at all.

People protected themselves with what they had... thick hides, layers of cloth, quilted padding, woven reeds, wooden slats laced together. Almost none of it survives. Leather and cloth rot in the ground. So we know of it mostly from pictures, from carvings on old stone, and from a few lucky scraps.

It is easy to look down on soft armour. That would be a mistake. Many layers of cloth, quilted or glued together, can stop a surprising amount... a slashing blow, an arrow at long range, a glancing spear. And it is cheap, light, and cool... well, cooler than metal.

The ancient Greeks wore a kind of armour called the linothorax. The linen chest. Greek writers mention it, and it appears in their vase paintings... a stiff body armour that wraps around the chest, with shoulder pieces that come over from the back and tie down in front.

How exactly was it made? Nobody knows for certain. No ancient linothorax has ever been found. Some think it was many layers of linen glued together with animal glue, like a thick, light board. Some think it was quilted. Some think it was leather with a linen cover. Modern scholars have made copies all three ways, and shot arrows at them, and argued about the results with great energy.

What is certain is that it worked well enough for soldiers to wear it for centuries, and that the great Alexander is shown wearing one in a famous mosaic from Pompeii.

Chapter two. The bronze men.

The second chapter of armour is bronze.

In a tomb near the village of Dendra, in southern Greece, archaeologists found, in the year nineteen sixty, a suit of bronze armour about three thousand four hundred years old. It is made of fifteen pieces of bronze plate... a great collar that rises up around the neck, a breastplate and backplate, shoulder guards, and three broad bands below that hang like a bell-shaped skirt, each overlapping the next.

It looks so stiff and heavy that for a long time, many scholars thought it could only have been worn by someone riding in a chariot, or only for ceremony.

In twenty twenty-three, a team of scientists in Greece decided to test it. They made a careful copy, and asked thirteen volunteers from the Greek marines to wear it... not for a few minutes, but for eleven hours, while doing what an ancient soldier might have done in a day of battle. Walking. Running. Throwing. Fighting with a spear and sword. Eating, even, in a pause.

The marines finished the day. Tired, of course. But perfectly able to fight in it. The armour was heavy, but it was well made, and it moved.

It was a good lesson. People in the past were not fools. When they made something to wear in battle, they made it to be worn in battle.

Later, the Greek soldier of the city-states, the hoplite, wore a bronze breastplate shaped like the muscles of a man's chest, bronze greaves on his shins, a great round shield... and on his head, the Corinthian helmet.

The Corinthian helmet is one of the most beautiful objects of the ancient world. It was hammered out of a single sheet of bronze... with no joins at all... into a shape that covered the whole head and face, leaving only two almond-shaped holes for the eyes and a narrow gap for the mouth, with a long guard coming down over the nose. On top, often, a crest of horsehair.

Wearing it, a soldier could see straight ahead and very little else, and hear almost nothing. When a Greek soldier was not fighting, he pushed it back on top of his head, like a cap. Many Greek statues show it that way... which is why so many ancient heroes seem to be wearing their helmets on the backs of their heads.

Chapter three. Rings of iron.

The third chapter of armour may be the greatest single invention in its history. It is called mail.

Mail is a fabric made of small iron rings, each one linked through four others. It is flexible, like cloth. It moves with the body. It hangs from the shoulders, and drapes. And it stops a cut from a sword very well indeed.

You may hear it called chain mail. Historians wince at this, very slightly. The word mail already means it... from the old French maille, a mesh, a net. Chain mail is a little like saying chain chain. But the phrase is two hundred years old now, and nobody is going to stop using it.

Mail was probably invented by the Celts, the people of Iron Age Europe, about two thousand three hundred years ago. One of the oldest pieces ever found comes from a chieftain's grave in Romania, at a place called Ciumești, along with a magnificent helmet with a great bronze bird of prey on its top, whose wings were hinged, so that they flapped as the wearer moved.

The Romans saw mail, liked it, and took it. For most of Roman history, most Roman soldiers wore mail shirts.

Making mail is slow, patient work. Iron wire is drawn out, wrapped around a rod, and cut into rings. Each ring is linked into four neighbours. Then its ends are flattened, overlapped, and closed with a tiny rivet... about the size of a grain of rice. Then the next. A single mail shirt can hold twenty or thirty thousand rings. Some hold more. A shirt like that could take months to make.

It weighs, depending on its length, around ten kilograms or a little more. But because it hangs from the shoulders and moves with the body, and because a belt around the waist takes part of the weight off them, it feels lighter than it is.

Mail has one weakness. It stops a cut, but a heavy blow passes straight through it, as a bruise, or a broken bone. So under it, men always wore a thick padded coat... quilted linen, stuffed with wool or cotton or rags. The padding and the mail worked together, each doing what the other could not.

Chapter four. The Romans in strips.

The Romans tried many kinds of armour. Mail, mostly. Scales... small plates of bronze or iron sewn in overlapping rows onto a cloth backing, like the skin of a fish. And, for about two or three hundred years, something you will know from every film about Rome.

It is a body armour of broad iron bands, curving around the chest and back, overlapping like the shell of a lobster, with plates over the shoulders, all held together with leather straps on the inside and small bronze hinges and buckles on the outside.

The Romans themselves never called it by the name we use. Its modern name, the lorica segmentata, was given to it by scholars in the fifteen hundreds. What the soldiers called it, we do not know.

For a long time, nobody was sure exactly how it was put together. Pieces of it were found... a buckle here, a hinge there... but never a whole one.

Then, in nineteen sixty-four, at Corbridge, near Hadrian's Wall in the north of England, archaeologists dug up an iron-bound wooden chest that had been buried around the year one hundred and twenty. Inside, rusted together, were several of these armours, along with tools, spearheads, and papyrus. Someone, long ago, had packed up the armour to be mended, and never came back for it.

And in Germany, at Kalkriese, the place where three Roman legions were destroyed in a German forest in the year nine, pieces of this armour have been found among the remains of the battle.

It was good armour, light for what it protected. But it had many small fittings that broke, many straps that rotted, many buckles that came loose. It needed constant repair. By the late two hundreds, the army had largely gone back to mail and scale... which were simpler to keep. Old soldiers would understand. The cleverest thing is not always the thing you want to look after every day.

Chapter five. The knight in mail.

For the next thousand years, from the fall of Rome to the twelve hundreds, the armour of a European warrior was, above all, mail.

If you have seen the Bayeux Tapestry, which shows the Norman conquest of England in ten sixty-six, you have seen it. The Norman knights wear long mail shirts, down to their knees, split at the front and back so they can sit on a horse... a garment called the hauberk... with a mail hood over the head, and a cone-shaped iron helmet with a bar down over the nose.

As the years went by, the mail grew. Mail sleeves reached down over the hands as mittens. Mail stockings covered the legs. By around the year twelve hundred, a well-equipped knight was covered almost from head to foot in mail, with a long cloth surcoat over it... perhaps against the sun, perhaps against the rain, and certainly to show his colours, so that friends could tell who he was.

And over his head, a new kind of helmet. The great helm. A flat-topped cylinder of iron that covered the whole head, with narrow slits to see through and small holes to breathe through.

It is the helmet of the crusader in all the pictures. It was strong. And inside it, on a summer day, it was very, very hot. Knights wore it over a padded cap and a mail hood, and they often took it off until the moment they needed it. Seeing out of it was like looking at the world through a letterbox.

Chapter six. Plates.

Mail had one weakness, as we heard. It does not spread the force of a blow. And as weapons changed... stronger crossbows, heavier lances, axes, maces... knights began to add solid pieces over the mail, where the blows fell hardest.

First the knees. Then the elbows. Then the shins, the thighs, the arms. Then, in the thirteen hundreds, a coat of plates... small iron plates riveted inside a cloth or leather coat, a little like a waistcoat with a hidden shell. Then a solid breastplate.

Step by step, over about two hundred years, the mail was covered, piece by piece, by plate. And by around the year fourteen hundred, the knight was wearing a complete armour of steel plates, from the toes to the top of the head, with mail only in the small places that the plates could not cover... the armpits, the inside of the elbows, the groin.

The men of the time called a complete armour a harness.

The helmets changed too. The great helm gave way to the bascinet, a rounded, pointed helmet, with a visor that could swing up on pivots at the sides. Some visors stuck out in a long point in front, like a beak. They have a delightful nickname now... pig-faced bascinets. In their own time, the Germans called them the dog's hood. The point was not decoration. It made blows glance off.

And the visor had holes in it, many small ones, to breathe through. Sweating inside a closed steel helmet, in battle, men needed every breath of air they could get.

Chapter seven. The armourers.

Where was all this made?

The two great centres of armour making in fifteenth-century Europe were northern Italy, especially Milan, and southern Germany, especially the cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg.

The armourers of Milan made armour of rounded, smooth, strong shapes, plain and polished. One family, the Missaglia, ran workshops that sold armour all over Europe. They kept stocks of ready-made pieces in different sizes... and also made armour to measure, for those who could afford it.

The German armourers favoured a different style, which we now call Gothic... slender, pointed, rippled with long fluting like the folds of cloth, and edged with pierced brass. Some of the most beautiful objects of the late Middle Ages are suits of German Gothic armour.

Good armour was made to fit one man, the way a fine suit of clothes is. A great lord might send his armourer his measurements, or a set of his clothes... or even, it is said, a wax model of his legs. And armour that was made to fit, moved with you.

A complete harness was very expensive. Roughly, it might cost what a skilled craftsman earned in a year or more. A great lord's best armour, decorated and engraved, might cost far more. So most soldiers did not wear complete harnesses at all. They wore what they could afford, or what their lord gave them... a padded coat, a mail shirt, a helmet, a breastplate, perhaps some arm pieces. Full plate was for the knights and the rich.

Before it was sold, good armour was tested.

The test was simple. A crossbow, or later a gun, was fired at it from close range. If the bolt or the ball only dented it, the armour had passed. It was proof. The dent was often left in place, on purpose, to show the buyer. You can still see these proof marks on armours in museums... a small round dimple in the breastplate.

That is where our word bulletproof comes from.

Chapter eight. The arming.

Let us go back to the tent at dawn.

The knight has finished his bread. He has stood up. He is wearing his doublet... a close-fitting jacket of strong cloth, lined, with small patches of mail sewn under the arms. It has many short laces of waxed cord sewn into it at the shoulders and elbows. These are called points. They are how the armour will be tied on.

You kneel at his feet.

The little English book says to begin at the feet. So first, the sabatons... shoes of overlapping steel plates, pointed at the toe. You fasten them over his leather shoes with straps.

Then the greaves, for the shins and calves, two curved halves that close around the leg on hinges. Then the knee pieces, with a little fan of steel on the outside, to guard the joint. Then the thigh pieces. You tie each piece to the next, and to the points on his doublet, and buckle the straps behind his legs. Every strap goes on the inside, where a blade cannot cut it.

Then the skirt of steel hoops around his hips. Then the breastplate and the backplate, closed together at the sides with straps and buckles.

Then the arms. The upper arm. The elbow, with its own little fan. The lower arm, closing around his wrist on a hinge. Then the great shoulder pieces, the pauldrons, which wrap around the shoulder and overlap the breastplate, larger on the left, which will face the enemy. You tie each one on with its point.

Then the gorget, a collar of steel around the neck.

Then the gauntlets... steel gloves, with each finger made of small overlapping plates, so that he can still grip.

And last of all, the helmet, which you hand to him, so that he can put it on himself, when he chooses.

It takes you about a quarter of an hour, with a second squire helping. You have done it many times.

He stands. He rolls his shoulders, bends his knees, lifts his arms above his head. He kneels down on one knee and stands up again. Everything moves. Nothing pinches. He nods. That is your whole reward, and it is enough.

Chapter nine. The squire.

While he waits for the horses, the knight sits on a chest in the tent, armoured, and you sit on the grass at his feet, polishing a gauntlet that does not need polishing. It is a good moment to tell you about yourself.

You came into a great household as a page, at about seven years old. You carried messages, served at table, learned to ride, to behave, to sing a little and to speak properly. At about fourteen, you became a squire... from the old French escuier, the shield-bearer. Now you serve one knight. You look after his horses and his armour, you carry his shield and his lances, you dress him, you ride behind him, and if he falls, you are the one who runs to him.

And you learn. Riding in armour. Fighting with sword and lance. How to look after a horse, and a household, and people.

The old books say that at about twenty-one, a good squire is made a knight. In fact, by your time, many squires never are. Being a knight is expensive: the horses, the armour, the duties, the taxes, the obligation to serve. Many families of good birth choose to stay squires for life, comfortably.

The word stayed with them, and changed its spelling. Esquire. Centuries later, in England, it would be written after a gentleman's name on the front of an envelope... a small abbreviation, three letters and a dot, carrying a little piece of this tent with it, long after anyone remembered why.

Chapter ten. How heavy?

How much does it all weigh?

Less than you would think. A complete harness for the battlefield, in the fourteen hundreds, weighed around twenty to twenty-five kilograms. That sounds like a great deal. But it is spread over the whole body... the legs carry their own armour, the arms carry theirs, the shoulders and hips share the rest. A soldier today, with his pack, his body armour and his equipment, often carries more.

And yet, there is a story everyone has heard. That knights in armour were so heavy that they had to be lifted onto their horses with a crane. And that a knight who fell over lay on his back, like a beetle, unable to get up.

It is not true.

The story seems to come from much later... from nineteenth-century writers who liked to laugh at the Middle Ages, and from a famous film made in the nineteen forties, which showed exactly that: a knight being winched into his saddle. Nothing written in the Middle Ages describes any such thing.

What the medieval writers do describe is the opposite.

There was a famous French knight called Boucicaut, who lived around the year fourteen hundred and became a Marshal of France. A book about his life, written while he was still alive, describes how he trained. He would jump onto his horse's back in full armour, without using the stirrups. He would run for long distances in armour to build his breath. And, the book says, he could climb up the underside of a ladder, hand over hand, wearing his whole armour except for his helmet.

That last part may have grown a little in the telling. But it shows what a knight hoped to be able to do. And modern people who wear well-fitted copies of real armour find that they can run, jump, roll, lie down and get up again, mount a horse, and climb a ladder... the right way up.

There is a cost, of course. In the year twenty eleven, scientists at the University of Leeds put volunteers, trained in wearing armour, onto treadmills, in copies of real fifteenth-century armour, and measured their breathing. Walking in armour, they found, took a little more than twice the energy of walking without it. Running in it was harder still.

Part of the reason was the weight. But part was the breastplate itself. It is rigid, and it stops the chest from expanding fully, so each breath is a little shallower. A knight was not crushed by his armour. He was made tired by it... and that, over a long, hot day, mattered a great deal.

Chapter eleven. The tournament.

Outside the tent, the sun is up. On the field, the lists have been set up... a long wooden barrier, about the height of a horse's chest, down the middle of a stretch of flattened grass. Along it, on both sides, wooden stands, hung with cloth. People are arriving. Somewhere, horses are being led out.

Tournament armour was a special thing. For the joust... two riders charging at each other on either side of the barrier, each trying to break a lance on the other... it was made heavier and thicker than war armour, on purpose, with a great helmet bolted to the breastplate, and extra plates over the left side, which faced the oncoming lance. Seeing out of it was hard. Turning the head was impossible. But in a joust, you only needed to see one thing, coming straight at you.

Such armour could weigh forty kilograms or more. It was never meant for walking, and it was never meant for war. It was meant for a few seconds of violent impact, over and over, all afternoon... and for walking away afterward.

The lances used in the joust of peace were made to break. The heads were blunted, often with a crown of small points that would catch on the armour rather than slide off. And when a lance shattered against a shield or a breastplate, in a burst of splinters, it was a point to the rider who held it. A broken lance was a good lance.

Your knight will ride three courses this morning. You will stand at the end of the lists with a new lance, ready to hand it up, and a cup of watered wine, ready for afterward. And you will count, as every squire counts, the dents.

Chapter twelve. The horse.

Your knight's horse is waiting at the end of the lists, held by a groom. It is armoured too.

A warhorse could wear a harness of its own. A shaped steel plate over its face, called a chanfron, often with a spike or a little crest in the middle of the forehead. A row of overlapping plates along the top of the neck. A broad plate over the chest. Plates over the hindquarters. Over and under them, a great cloth covering, the trapper, in the knight's colours, hanging nearly to the ground.

Not every horse wore all of this. Many wore only the face plate, or none at all. But in a great lord's stable, horse armour could be as finely made as the rider's.

And the horse itself is not what most people picture.

Films often show knights on enormous horses, like the great shaggy-hooved horses that pulled ploughs and brewery carts in more recent centuries. In twenty twenty-two, a team of archaeologists studied the bones of nearly two thousand horses from medieval England. Most medieval horses, they found, were small by our standards... the size of a modern pony or a light riding horse. Even warhorses were seldom more than about fifteen hands high... around a metre and a half at the shoulder.

What made a warhorse special was not its size. It was its training, its strength, its courage, and its temper. Knights paid a great deal for a good one. The best of them were called destriers, perhaps because a squire led them with his right hand, the dexter hand, until the moment they were needed.

Chapter thirteen. Elsewhere.

All this is the armour of Europe. But every people who fought made armour, and many of them made it beautifully.

On the steppes of Asia, and in Byzantium, warriors wore lamellar... hundreds of small rectangular plates of iron, leather or horn, laced together in rows with cords, so that the whole armour is made of little upright slats, like a sheet of tiles. It is light, strong, and easy to mend: if one plate breaks, you unlace it and lace in another.

In Japan, the samurai of the twelve hundreds and thirteen hundreds wore a great box-shaped armour of lamellar plates, lacquered against the damp, laced together with braided silk cords in rows of bright colour... red, blue, white, purple, in patterns that had names, and that told everyone who you were. The big armours were made for archers on horseback, with broad plates hanging from the shoulders like wings.

Later Japanese armour grew simpler and more solid, with plates of iron riveted together, and a mask over the face, made of iron and lacquer, often with a fierce expression... and sometimes with a moustache of real hair.

In Persia, India, and the lands of the Ottomans, men wore mail and plate together... a shirt of mail, with four flat plates over it, front and back and the two sides, called in Persian the four mirrors, because the polished steel shone like them.

And in Mexico, the Aztec warriors wore thick quilted cotton armour, soaked in salt water so that it stiffened. When the Spanish arrived, in their steel, in the hot, wet country, many of them found the Aztec armour so much more comfortable, and so effective against arrows, that they began to wear it themselves.

Chapter fourteen. The last of the harness.

The great age of full plate armour lasted about two hundred years, from around the year fourteen hundred to around the year sixteen hundred. Its peak was in the early fifteen hundreds, when some of the finest armour ever made was produced for emperors and kings.

The Emperor Maximilian, who was called the last knight, loved armour and tournaments so much that a whole style of fluted, ridged armour is still named after him. In England, King Henry the Eighth set up his own royal armour workshop at Greenwich, and his armours survive. As a young man, he was tall, athletic and a fine jouster. His later armours show, very honestly, that he grew a great deal wider over the years.

Then armour began to go.

Guns were the main reason. Not because a gun could always pierce good armour... the best breastplates were proved against pistols... but because armour thick enough to stop the bigger guns became too heavy to wear. So soldiers began to leave pieces off. First the legs. Then the arms. By the sixteen hundreds, many cavalrymen wore armour only to the knees... and then only a breastplate and a helmet.

And another reason was money. Armies became huge. Kings now paid tens of thousands of soldiers, and could not afford to armour them all. Speed and numbers mattered more than steel.

But the breastplate held on, surprisingly long. Heavy cavalry called cuirassiers... from the cuirass, the breastplate... charged at Waterloo, in eighteen fifteen, in shining steel breastplates and helmets with horsehair crests. And in the first weeks of the First World War, in the summer of nineteen fourteen, French cuirassiers rode out to war still wearing them, polished, and covered with cloth so that they would not flash in the sun.

Within a few months, the breastplates were put away. And soon afterward, the helmet... made of steel again, plain and round... came back to every soldier's head. Armour had not disappeared after all. It had only waited.

Chapter fifteen. What armour is.

The tournament is over now. The afternoon light is long and golden. In the tent, you are taking the harness off your knight, in the reverse order... head, hands, arms, body, legs, and feet last. He sits on a stool, tired, his hair dark with sweat, while you untie each point.

There are three new dents on the breastplate, and a long scratch across the left shoulder. Nothing that a day's work cannot mend.

Tonight, you will clean it all. You will rub every piece with fine sand and oil, inside and out, to keep it from rust. You will check every strap and every rivet. You will hammer out the dents. You will lay it out, piece by piece, in order, on a cloth... the feet at one end, the helmet at the other, so that tomorrow, before dawn, you will know exactly where to begin.

From the glued linen of the Greeks to the bronze bell of Dendra, from the rings of the Celts to the lobster bands of Rome, from the knight's long mail shirt to the smooth steel of Milan, it was the same idea, made again and again in new materials: a second skin. One that bent where the body bent, and was hard where it needed to be hard.

Before dawn, in a tent at the edge of a tournament field, a young man is kneeling on the grass, buckling steel onto another man's feet.

The people who wore it had a word for a complete armour. They did not say a suit. They said a harness... from the old French harneis, the gear, the equipment for a man or a horse.

To put it on was to be in harness. And a man who died still at his work, never laying it down, was said to have died in harness. We still say it, of people who have never worn a piece of steel in their lives.

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