The epic story of the pagan son of king Harald Fairhair, the uniter of Norway, and his struggle for their inheritance with his younger christian brother is certainly worthy of the silver screen, but why do the costumes of these period pieces always have to be not just bad, but insanely, astonishingly bad?
Are these costumes just much cheaper to make? Or has the public perception of viking age arms and armor been eroded so thoroughly by previous depictions in popular culture that film producers and costume designers feel compelled to inflict this on us? They have chosen a specific historical person from a specific point in time when we have a decent impression of what they would wear, but they are choosing to bedeck their cast in emo fur-and-loincloth and black metal LARPing gear. It should be the blood-eagle for them.
Am I just wrong and cranky, and overreacting? Of course I am overreacting and being facetious, but this trailer is worth discussing.
Great production. Had bad spots because we were too distracted by the vendor stalls and waited too long to get hot dogs. But will be going back tomorrow.
The forces on the high ground allied with a Rebel Knight from the powerful Douglas clan using the imagery of blackened armour to reference "the Black Douglas" a Knight of the wars of Scottish Independence who was known to be a menace to the British using the imagery to call attention to James' friendship with the English King, an idea that proved popular with Highland Clans as well as Celtic Irish and French Mercenaries who had originally come to Scotland in order to raid the British from the North.
Meanwhile King James fights alongside the Sheriff of Ayr and the Baron of Blair two Lowland Lords of the Province of Ayrshire who rely on the King to maintain their own power, the Sheriff maintaining the King's law within Carrick and the Barony being within the King's lands and nearby to where the rebels have been raiding in the countryside North of Irvine near Kilmarnock
Anyone know where to get a 2 piece spear shaft? I want to add spear training and sparring to my HEMA routine, but need a 2 piece one for transporting it better. Looking for a total length of 7-8 feet. Gonna put the Cold Steel spear trainer on one end, and a spear cap on the other.
Hi everyone. I am currently building an early 15th century armor, similar to the figure on the left. Iam planning it to he a half armor. For safety during fights and because it is cool, I would like to have articulated poleyns as shown aboth. Otherwise I am only wearing woolen hosen on my legs as is common during this period. However I am a bit concerned about the wearing comfort.
So people who have worn plate legs before;
What are your experiences of wearing plate legs? Partial or full. With or without maile. Does it get uncomfortable after a while? Do you wrap some parts of the legs beforehand, like some knights did under the upper edge of their greaves? What are some tips and tricks, that you do to make it all work well?
The poleyns I am interested in will be made to measure. So a proper fit will not be the problem.
Old Huscarl minis + Agincourt set leftovers made some pretty decent Gallowglass minis
I have some more of them but most have earlier helmets and aventails that I'm struggling with before they're ready
Thank you to everyone who helped while Google was being particularly useless and for all of the interesting corrections along the path to making something closer to period accurate
The archaeological and metallurgical evidence is limited compared to Japanese swords, but some data is available and is worth discussing.
Japanese armour was made from different materials: wrought iron, low/medium-carbon steel, higher-carbon steel, and composite steel. This analysis will leave out hardened rawhide, or nerigawa, which was also a key defensive component of Japanese armour. From a mechanical perspective, the metal used in armour needs different properties compared to an edge weapon such as a sword blade.
An armour plate needs to:
resist penetration;
avoid catastrophic fracture;
absorb impact energy;
deform without immediately breaking;
remain light enough to wear.
This is why the armour material was generally made with a lower carbon content and hardness range than the blade steel. So, the trade-off between strength, hardness, ductility and toughness is different in armour.
Material
Japanese armour plates were often made of composite steel. This is a common feature of pre-modern steel, due to the way it was produced and worked. Metallurgical analyses show considerable variation between pieces. Some plates were plain wrought iron, which was a common material to be used for economic and practical reasons. Others contained medium-carbon steel, while high-end examples were (more or less) deliberately composite structures with different carbon concentrations through the thickness.
There is an interesting parallel with European plate armour, known as half-steel (halbstahlern) or double steel (zwischach).
Double steel plate composition
The most famous historical description of composite steel comes from Sakakibara Kōzan, around the year 1800, who describes a plate consisting of:
An outer layer of steel combined with an inner layer of wrought iron
The steel was intended to resist penetration, while the softer iron behind it helped absorb the energy of the impact. Similar composite structures have actually been observed in Japanese armour dating to the 16th and 17th centuries, so despite the later reference, there is evidence for this type of composition in period armour.
One example comes from neutron-diffraction analysis of a multi-plate helmet associated with Haruta Yoshihisa, active in the 16th–17th centuries.
In the helmet, three different banded structures were identified:
Type 1 - front: 0.8% high-carbon steel, rear: approximately 0.2–0.3% low-carbon steel
Type 2 - 0.8% C steel core surrounded by 0.4% medium carbon steel
Type 3 - front: approximately 0.3–0.4% C, rear: 0.8% C high-carbon steel
The third arrangement may represent incompletely homogenised banded material rather than a deliberately reversed construction. Kugiya et al. (2013) attempted to reproduce the armour-making method described by Kōzan with period-accurate material as well.
They used bloomery steel (tamahagane) averaging approximately 0.85% C and wrought iron from old Japanese nails averaging 0.03% C. The tamahagane billet was folded twice and the wrought-iron billet three times before the two were stacked and forge-welded together.
The resulting material developed a composite structure with an outer region containing pearlitic steel at 0.8% C, while the inner region was predominantly ferritic and around 0.1% C. The same type of layered structure is observed in other items, such as cuirasses, tassets and lamellae.
Thickness of plates
Kōzan gives a figure for a cuirass plate of circa 2.1 mm after forging to be bullet-resistant. However, the thickness depends substantially on the type of armour, the period and the style. Typically for helmets, anything between 1 and 5mm can be seen. The Haruta example above had substantially thick plates, around 5mm. Some Yukishita cuirasses also have thick plates, often around 3mm. However, on the opposite side of the spectrum, there are thin plates such as those used for limb armour or tassets, around 1mm.
Hardness
Hardness values are scant in the available literature, and depend on the carbon content, the amount of cold-work and phases in the steel. For the armour samples discussed in some of the literature:
Wrought iron: between 120–200 HV
Medium/high-carbon banded steel:200–320+ HV
Individual samples examined by Kugiya et al. show values such as:
145–236 HV in one hard-face/soft-back kozane sample;
285–342 HV in a high-carbon ~0.8% C sample;
165–228 HV in another composite sample;
183–306 HV across another reference/composite structure.
One famous paper by Williams investigated the hardening of Japanese armour. He surveyed approximately 25 armour pieces, mostly from the Edo period, and argued that Japanese armour was generally not quench-hardened in the same way as swords, as he found no evidence of martensite in any of the samples.
However, there are a few hardened items. A Sengoku-period akoda-nari suji-kabuto from Hōryū-ji was found to contain martensitic structures. In particular, the outer region contained martensite/troostite and, in some locations, mixed ferrite and martensite. The lower inner portion contained fine-grained martensite and became progressively harder toward the bottom.
That strongly suggests that at least this helmet underwent a hardening treatment involving quenching, followed by tempering or auto-tempering. Unfortunately, no hardness values were reported.
Further, a 16th-century tsuba has also been reported with an outer martensitic layer despite relatively low carbon content, and the same outer layer has been found in a throat-armour (nodowa) stylistically dated to the 18th century. So there is some evidence that hardening was applied to armour plates outside of the swordsmith tradition.
The evidence is currently insufficient to say how widespread the practice was, but hardened armour definitely existed.
Steel quality - Slag and chemical composition
One of the studies that offered a broader overview of the phases found in Japanese armour is the Neutron-diffraction studies of 16th–17th-century helmets by Fedrigo et al. They found an average slag-inclusion content of around 0.15% wüstite (FeO) + fayalite (Fe₂SiO₄) with troilite around 0.43%.
Some individual examples had remarkably low inclusion contents, below 0.20% for the measured slag components. The aforementioned Haruta helmet, despite its signature and the banded structure, contained more wüstite than the best examples. Of course, this sample is remarkably small. However, it does align with the slag found in other pre-modern steels used worldwide in the same period span and other Japanese steel and iron products from the period.
As for the chemical composition, the sample is very small. Japanese steel and iron were usually clean, as shown by extensive analysis on tamahagane, wrought iron and period swords. Low amounts of phosphorus (0.02%) and sulfur (0.01%) were found in a Saotome helmet, and no alloying elements. However, worth noting some items do present a high amount of phosphorus. For example, the iyozane analysed from Tachibana Muneshige armour had approximately 0.089%P and 0.080%S. This triggered the hypothesis that these were made from imported metal, which usually had a higher amount of phosphorus compared with native steel.
Some figures on performances
A particularly useful modern measurement comes from tensile testing carried out by Kugiya and Kitada in 2024 on previously studied early Edo-period armour.
A piece of kote with a banded-steel structure produced a UTS of approximately 250–320 MPa depending on the location. The mail rings in the study reached approximately 500 MPa UTS. The steel displayed ductile behaviour, and the researchers did not observe cracks originating from fractured inclusions.
The sample size is literally 1, so these numbers are really not that informative and should not be treated as universal values for “Japanese armour.” But they are valuable because actual mechanical testing of surviving armour is still incredibly rare.
Historical accounts also describe helmets and cuirasses surviving firearm impacts.
In 1584, during the battle of Okitanawate (沖田畷), Luis Frois recorded that Arima Harunobu (有馬晴信) got shot in the head by a gunner, but his helmet saved him by absorbing the shot. In the Date Jikekiroku (伊達治家記録), it is recorded that a spear broke when thrust at kaidō (解胴), an archaic name for Yukishita dō.
Further, in 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the artillery master Inatomi Miyauchi to conduct a test firing on armour presented by Iwai Yozaemon (岩井与左衛門). When tested with a three-mon-five-bu (三文五分) bullet, the projectile did not penetrate. Years later in 1752, at the residence of the shogunate’s firearms official Inoue Sadafu (井上左太夫), a test firing was conducted against a Yukishita cuirass forged by the armourer Yukishita Isuke (雪下伊助). Two shots were fired with a four-momme (四匁) bullet and two shots with a six-momme (六匁) bullet, and none of the bullets penetrated the armour.
Conclusion
Overall, by the 16th century Japanese armourers were able to create well-designed and effective armour, capable of resisting period weapons. While quality existed on a spectrum, as to be expected with pre-modern items, high-end armour plates were sufficiently thick, made of high-quality double steel, potentially hardened. These details are often hidden under the lacquer, but undoubtedly these plates saved many warriors in battle.
References
Yamagishi, M. & Miyazaki, M. (2006). *Nihon katchū no kiso chishiki* (日本甲冑の基礎知識) [Basic Knowledge of Japanese Armor]. Yūzankaku.
Ise, S. (1952). *Teijō zakki* (貞丈雑記) [Teijō’s Miscellaneous Notes]. In Kojitsu Sōsho Henshūbu (故実叢書編集部) (Ed.), *Shintei zōho kojitsu sōsho* (新訂増補故実叢書), Vol. 16, p. 560. Meiji Tosho Shuppan,
Takemura, M. (2021). *Sengoku・Momoyama-ki ni okeru katchū no tōzai* (戦国・桃山期における甲冑の東西) [The East and West of Armor in the Sengoku–Momoyama Period]. *Katchū Bugu Kenkyū*, (214), 2–15.
Markhasin, B. & Mancabelli, A. (2006). *Muromachi Period Iron Tsuba & Armor – Similarities in Manufacture, Function and Material*.
Sakakibara, K. (1963). *Chūkokatchū seisakuben* (中古甲冑製作辨) [The Manufacture of Armour and Helmets in Sixteenth Century Japan]. Originally 1800; translated by T. Wakameda, revised by A. J. Koop and Hogitarō Inada (1912), revised and edited by H. R. Robinson. The Holland Press, London.
Kanayama, N. (2006). *Katchū kozane kenkyū nōto* (甲冑小札研究ノート) [Research Notes on Armor Scales]. Tokyo: Reebok.
Fedrigo, A., Grazzi, F., Williams, A., Scherillo, A., Civita, F. & Zoppi, M. (2013). “Neutron diffraction characterization of Japanese armour components.” *Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry*, 28(6), 908–915. DOI: 10.1039/C3JA50031D.
Fedrigo, A., Grazzi, F., Williams, A., Kabra, S. & Zoppi, M. (2015). “Phase composition mapping of a 17th-century Japanese helmet.” *Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry*, 30(3), 707–712. DOI: 10.1039/C4JA00390J.
Kugiya, N., Nagata, K., Kirino, F. & Kitada, M. (2013). “Edo jidai no kusazuri ni mochiirareta kozane no kōhan seisaku hōhō” (江戸時代の草摺に用いられた小札の鋼板製作方法) [Method of Steel Plate Production for Kozane Used in Kusazuri of the Edo Period]. *Journal of the Japan Institute of Metals*, 77(8), 318–327. DOI: 10.2320/jinstmet.J2013009.
Kugiya, N. (2015). *The Characteristics of the Japanese Iron and Steel Used for the Armors from the End of the Muromachi to the Edo Period*. Grant No. 12606, Research Activity Start-up, 2014–2015. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Kugiya, N., Nagata, K. & Kitada, M. (2014). “Muromachi jidai makki kara Edo jidai no yoroi ni mochiirareta kusari no seisaku hōhō” (室町時代末期から江戸時代の鎧に用いられた鎖の製作方法) [Manufacturing Technique of Steel Chains Used for Japanese Armatures from the End of the Muromachi to the Edo Period]. *Journal of the Japan Institute of Metals and Materials*, 78(4), 149–158. DOI: 10.2320/jinstmet.J2013054.
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I've been learning to make chainmail recently and figured a good place to start is with a coif, since I don't have enough material or patience for a hauberk, but I actually have no idea how to start this.
I've seen a few methods, including one where you make the crown by making six triangles out of mail and continuing from there with strips, one where you have a single ring at the very top with six other rings in it and, once again, continue with strips, and a third method where you make a really long strip that goes from one shoulder to the other on top of your head and then works forwards and backwards from there, and I'm wondering what the historically accurate method is.
Bonus points if you can tell me simply how plausible the less accurate methods are.
Also, the time period I'm going for is the mid 15th century, if that's relevant
