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does leather make good armor? sure! is it what any given fighter would have been equipped with as the most effective protective gear for the time, geographical and economic climate, and contemporary weapons technology?Īrchaelogists aren’t being overpaid dipshits when they tell you they can’t say for sure. it needs to be tanned and cured and oiled and maintained carefully. Leather rots, especially leather that is continuously exposed to rain and sun and blood and stabbing. some could never hope to afford enough silk to let mercenaries have it some mercenaries made a point of wearing gaudy patchwork silks and fabrics as a point of pride, some have historically exported the massive amounts of silk they had. some civilizations don’t have very many cows to spare.
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#BLARGH I AM DEAD FULL#
this was why finding tombs has always been so exciting: it’s a room full of stuff that hasn’t totally rotted away, ideally with paintings on it showing living people wearing perishable goods like fabric.Īrmorers and archaeologists and historians have been debating about leather armor not in terms of was it good at being armor– modern leather gloves, boots, and jackets do a great job!– but whether or not any given civilization would have found it cost effective to use leather for protective equipment. they basically had to just dig up an area and hope to guess what was there from the shape of the rust or the bones or the shards of ceramics. and until fairly recently, archaeologists didn’t have particularly sophisticated tools to check for traces of fibers. Whether from embarrassment or because it was now A Silly Thing, his opponent Lord Barrymore called the duel off…Īlso to stick up for archaeologists: fabric and leather armor doesn’t keep well the same way metal and ceramic does! even metal flakes away. That morning he washed thoroughly all over, then proceeded to the duelling ground in his coach - stark naked, knowing from his experiences as a military surgeon that cloth fragments forced into a wound were the primary cause of fatal infection. Night before combat seem to drive off a lot of infection demons and make wizard healing a bit easier.įinally, a memorable side-note that has literally nothing to do with fabric armour or indeed fabric of any kind: in 1806 (or ‘08) MP and ex-military surgeon Humphrey Howarth was challenged to a duel. Your characters may interpret it this way: those who boil their under-tunics the Linens inherited from my Mum, so fabrics like hemp or nettle certainly won’t come to harm. That’s how its laundry labels say to treat top-quality Irish damask …and finally to a couple of painted antique scutching-knives from Sweden, one marked 1918, so the shape hadn’t changed much in 300 years….Īny fabric where the washing instructions are “ boil until clean” will be OK as bottom-layer armour.
#BLARGH I AM DEAD MANUAL#
Compare this illustration from a fight manual ca.1570… * The wooden scutching-knife may be and IMO almost certainly is an ancestor of the “Dussack”, a German / Central European training weapon (the real thing would have been a Messer, a large fighting knife). This is where linen, hemp or even nettle (no, it doesn’t sting) comes as the next-to-skin layer comfortable, hard-wearing, easily washed and not even unusual: “linens” was period-speak for “underclothes” for centuries.Īll three are made the same way, more or less, involving a technical vocabulary of retting, beetling, scutching, hackling etc.
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#BLARGH I AM DEAD SKIN#
Something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for