Starting with their display of items relating to the Battle of Visby. This took place on the 27th of July, 1361, between a professional army (largely German mercenaries) of perhaps 200 or a bit more under the Danish king Valdemar IV Attedag, and a local peasant army of about 2000 men. The city meanwhile simply barred its gates and did not intervene.
What followed was a good illustration of why at the time you wanted professional armies and not peasant levies. The Danish losses are estimated to have been about 300 killed, and the Gutish losses about 1800 killed. The surviving locals then fled into the countryside with the Danish army in hot pursuit, before returning two days later at which point Visby surrendered.
This pursuit turned out to be a stroke of luck for modern days archaeologists. Normally the bodies of the fallen (save for a few bigwigs) would have been stripped all all valuables (including arms and armour) and dumped into mass graves. But after the bodies had been left lying around in the summer sun for two days a lot of the armour was so thoroughly second hand that the corpses got to keep it. As such this is one of our major sources for knowledge about mid 14th century armour and battlefield injuries.

First out one the the veterans of the battle, likely a local for reasons explained above. I suspect he may have gotten hit a few more times than absolutely necessary to render him combat incapable.

The most commonly seen armour in the mass graves is the coat of plates. These consist of an outer shell or fabric or leather (the former likely being far more common at the time), with a number of iron or steel pallets attached to the inside. It would eventually become a more closely fitted garment with mostly smaller but more numerous plates, turning into the brigandine. In either case the shell was likely of negligible protective value, but rather just there to keep the plates in place.
A local craftsman has made reproductions of every single one found, and a few of them were on display. This one was left out for people to try on.

Modelled alongside period clothing. IIRC rather few helmets were found in the mass graves, whether this is due to few having them or that kettle hats were something that could be extracted from a quite ripe corpse without all too much vomiting...

Nice km. I'll wait for all the pics. Thanks

Alongside the coat of plates was one lamellar cuirass (and IIRC at leats coat of plates that appeared to re-use the plates from one), which would be a few centuries behind the times in 1361. But, well, peasant levy.

>>63943202
You're welcome.

One of the excavated CoP's, with one missing plate having been replaced.

Who gives a fuck about europoor "history".
This Is an american board, you eurofaggots can't even own guns.

What one of the soldiers in the Danish army might have been wearing.

Contrary to helmets there's a decent number of mail coifs found, again perhaps because that's what was used, or perhaps simply because peeling them off the corpses was a much less appealing prospect.

Rivets still visible.

I've had bad days at the dentist, but...

Ulna, severed at the wrist.

>>63943253
My tiny village has existed for 3x longer than your nation lol

Three tibia.
A majority of the injuries seen among the skeletons are to the limbs, which seems to match with a lot of CoP's but little limb armour.

>>63943307
Look at this goober, how happy he must've had been.

Three tibia.
A majority of the injuries seen among the skeletons are to the limbs, which seems to match with a lot of CoP's but little limb armour.

>>63943326
Basierter Schofseggel

Various crossbow bolt heads. Plenty of these were found just outside of the city gates, suggesting groups of peasants trying to flee into the city, being denied, and then having to stage a bit of a last stand/shooting gallery in front of them.

>>63943307
Reminds me of the skull from the battle of Towton with the cleanly bisected chin/teeth that got whacked off, probably by an axe.
Puts a lot into perspective about just how bloody and horrendous a melee really is.

>>63943195
very nice, reminds me of the Bocksten man who also died in the 14th century and was found with his clothes perfectly preserved in a bog.

Makes you wonder how many more bodies could be out there waiting to be discovered.

>>63943416
IIRC a military recruiter, fittingly enough. And, well, I doubt the archaeologist will run out of things to dig up any time soon.

>>63943178
jebus those arrows in the back of the head are fucking savage
I'd normally associated coat of plates with more the renaissance era than the early middle period prior to it. Was more under the impression most of the well dressed medieval professional murderers would still be rocking the maile and stuff like that.

There were no weapons found in the mass graves (well, apart from crossbow bolt heads stuck here and there), and so instead a number of weapons found elsewhere on Gotland from kind, a sorta the right-ish time period were shown. Many quite old for the time IMO, but then again, that lamellar cuirass...

>>63943454
Well equipped solders started to add various reinforcements on top of their mail in the 13th century (with perhaps some examples even earlier). Note how the Danish/German soldier in >>63943258 wears a mail hauberk underneath his CoP.
A for the coat of plates itself it's really a 14th century thing, with the 15th and 16th century stuff being brigandine instead, ie the CoP's direct descendant.

>>63943154 (OP)
Impressive, very nice

>>>/bant/22898673

>>63943154 (OP)
those are some really nice teeth

A quick intermission with some fossils as we leave the Battle of Visby, Gotland being just about the only region in Sweden with any amount of such thanks to the bedrock there being sedimentary and relatively young, instead of the pre-skeleton magmatic&metamorphous rock that dominate the rest of the country.

Statue of St George, second half of the 15th century. Possibly modelled after governor Ivar Axelsson Tott.

Something to fight over instead of with. having a pretty strategic location in regards to both trade and war in the Baltic Gotland has seen both plenty of treasure and plenty of violent men to hide your treasure from. As such quite a number of buried hoards have been found, in particular Viking age silver ones, the one here being buried ca 1000 AD.

Note the scabbard tip.

Items from the 14 sunk warships of a Danish-Lübeckian fleet that was hit by a storm just outside of Visby harbour in 1566.

Cool thread. The peasants seen to be decently equipped.

Sickle blades and spearheads, examples of Gutish (14th century?) export goods.

Heading over to the Viking exhibit. (Which, I discovered afterwards, I had photographed at ISO 100 instead of Auto, luckily my camera's stabilisation system managed to save most of it.)
Partially reconstructed knife sheathe, 10th century. From the grave of a young woman )(estimated 16-22) and a baby, in which was also found a horse, a carriage, a cat and a dog.

>>63943636
Yep, they didn't have a full kit of the latest and greatest, but they were certainly a far cry from just everyday clothes and pitckforks.

Intentionally bent swords, for sacrifice and/or burial goods. Maybe so they wouldn't get plundered, maybe so the "dead" weapon would follow its dead owner into the everafter.

Decorative amber axe heads and "fish head shaped" ornaments. Dunno if the bit about being fish head shaped is what they intended at the time of it it's a more modern label, but it's a shape that pops up every now and then with Viking age stuff.

Whetstone, 1050s.

11th-14th century

Sword and pommels.

The pommels were found together, suggesting a cutler's workshop.

Note the copper and silver overlay on the socket.

Head of a mace or a seeress' staff.

Stone age axe head with medieval rune inscription "OLOF SAUDIN".

>>63943527
>>63943525
People apparently just scroll past this crossguard like it fits in the Oakeshott typology.

And a photo of the city wall to round it off (original construction started ca 1250).

Zip archive of the photos (and some extra, mostly rune- and picture stones): https://www.mediafire.com/file/3zf82zxskncju10/Sverige_-_Gotlands_Museum.zip/file

Previous such archives: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/4v4c0uwexuyo7/My+Photographs

>>63943789
Well, Oakeshott himself never though his typology would cover everything (as shown by "Records..." including a number of swords labelled Unclassified)... but isn't that just a stubby type 6? Compare with the guards on XVIa.3 and XVIa.5 in RotMS (labelled as XVIa.2 and XVIa.3 here: http://myarmoury.com/feature_spotxvi.html ) the guards of which Ewart classified as "a rather exaggerated 6" and 6 respectively.

>>63943823
Are the two ears massive or bent sheet? Hard to tell from the photo.

>>63943865
I would assume solid, but I guess the corrosion could hide some types of welds quite well.

Thanks for the uploads and commentary
>>63943178
I wonder why it took so long to develop coat of plates as a thing, since it's a seemingly very easy to do process/concept. Functionally just the scale armor that's been around forever without lace. It's possible some Egyptian art shows it but you'd think it'd have been a thing much sooner.

>>63943242
That quality is really good, too. Like it looks like something I'd see a re-enactor make today.

>>63943326
Das porto

>>63943402
>melee
I used to think that bit by Livy(?) about romans drowning in blood in the field was BS, then you see how much people bleed from knives, make that tens to hundreds in a compact mosh pit area and yeah it makes sense.

>>63943865
I seriously doubt they would be bent sheet, that would have corroded away long ago.

>>63943781
As in they found an old axe head and engraved it? I was reading something in the comments section of a youtube video (I know I know) a few days about about ancient stone axe heads being collected as relics/curiosities by northern europeans waaay past their date of practical use. The speculation was that they inferred some special legitimacy to the owner. Like "this is great great great great granpas ax" etc. Not sure how real that was, but sounded plausible.

>>63943160
>>63943154 (OP)
Crossbow bolt volley as they were fleeing? War crime?

>>63944076
>As in they found an old axe head and engraved it?
Seems so. Back in the Viking age it was apparently believed that these stone axes were lightning bolts having struck the ground, and thus associated with Tor. Dunno how much of that belief remained at whatever point in the middle ages that was engraved, but it was probably seen as an item of some power regardless.

>>63944097
Quite dastardly, yes.

>>63944076
I have family in Denmark, they live right next to a large farm. Every time they plow the field my family goes and looks around and they've found a few axe heads, one stone knife, and several scrapers. It's well known that digging around in a field has a small chance of finding artifacts like that, or perhaps old coins.

>>63943195
>Modelled alongside period clothing. IIRC rather few helmets were found in the mass graves, whether this is due to few having them or that kettle hats were something that could be extracted from a quite ripe corpse without all too much vomiting...

My first guess is that the peasant army would have to ration what they could afford, and they picked chest armor over helmets.

My second guess is that the battle started okay for the peasant army, which is where they inflicted the majority of the casualties for the professional army. However, they start to lose momentum and then everyone starts to panic, then there's a collapse of cohesion, turning into a rout, and the professional army fires crossbow volleys into the fleeing army. The majority of peasant army deaths occurs during the route.

>>63944076
Huh, kind of funky to think, but their version of antique collection very much would involve stuff from the bronze to stone age, where's things from 200 years ago that hadn't rusted away like >>63943206 would still be seen as practical to use.

>>63943889
Plenty of early saber hilts were found intact enough, and those are usually made from sheet.

>>63944141
The association of stone tools with a thundergod goes far beyond Scandinavia and even Germanic cultures. The Romans and Greeks both referred to prehistoric stone axe heads with a word meaning "thunderbolt." It seems to have been a universal tradition across Europe to place them in buildings to protect against lightning strikes.

>>63943883
>I wonder why it took so long to develop coat of plates as a thing
I may be entirely wrong but I believe it was largely because maille was just better. If you could afford armor you wanted maille. You can get much greater coverage, no limit to your flexibility. It probably cost more, but I imagine people who couldn't afford maille either weren't fighting or weren't buying armor. Then as that began to change, so too did armor.

Also when you're fighting in a shield wall you're most susceptible to hits to the limbs, maille protects your arms, a coat of plates can't. The plates might have better protection for your torso, but you've got a shield anyway and it's not like busting through maille and any kind of padding is easy.

>>63944251
Those weren't hollow boxes with cavities inside to trap moisture.

I feel quite hungry!

>>63943772
Check them for clipping

>>63944567
Traded by weight.

>>63944578
any idea why it was drawn into wire rather than cast as ingots?

>>63945226
This is just me guessing, but the spiral ones look to me like they might be bracelets; the wire bits therefore might just be other bracelets that got broken.

>>63945226
easier to clip a piece off to trade, probably also prevents concerns of fraud (can't hide a core of a different metal with a cladding of silver)

>>63943883
>I wonder why it took so long to develop coat of plates as a thing, since it's a seemingly very easy to do process/concept.

industrial infrastructure and ease of mass-production.
the idea is simple. the implementation of it is really fucking difficult.

effectively, yes, you could make steel - or steely iron - plates as far back as the roman era, but its limited in volume. and that problem of supply in volume re-appears in the post-roman migration period as there's disruption to trade and infrastructure needed for larger-volume production. simply put, europe was splintered into lots of little kingdoms, the trade was small individual merchants, you dont have the infrastructure for heavy industry trade.

so you prioritised production volume. first priority is the head - so you get helmets. starts off with small plates, because there's still limited supplies of plate, then larger helms to cover the head and face. then you get the mobility kill areas - knees. most of your fighting in the region is horseback, knees are at "swing a weapon" height, and have boney bits close to the surface that make impact though mail hell. Then you get couters- the elbow, and early gauntlets, and then greaves in rapid succession.
by the time you're able to make plates big enough for greaves, adaption of volume to body plates is almost immediate - a few years, a decade or so at most, and then its not much more after that that you're starting to see plate get made for everywhere. And at the same time, you have massive growth in trade, better ships, more cargo, more structured groups of traders, in levant, the hansa, etc, all of which enable the distribution and spread of the products, enabling its use.

>>63943154 (OP)
Excellent thread. Thank you.

>>63943730
>>63943737
I wonder what the runes say
>Under no circumstances are employees to use this whetstone for the sharpening of personal blades, unauthorised use of the whetstone will be met with disciplinary action

>>63943154 (OP)
I thought you were in hiding ever since you stole Durandal from that big wall.

>>63943684
>maybe so the "dead" weapon would follow its dead owner into the everafter.
I really like the idea of "killing" a solider's weapon in order for him to take it with him.

>>63946057
WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

>>63943454
>>63943481
Shouldn't COP be cheaper and more effective than mail, at the cost of increased weight and less mobility and ventilation?

>>63943253
Russian post is obvious.

>>63946057
Left: "Ormika Ulfair greker Jerusalem Island Särkland"
Right: "Rodiaud gjorde mig för sin son. Liknvidr äger mig. Bardakir (?)"

Picture stone, 8th-9th century.

>>63946430
Cost seems likely (to purchase, mail may have been re-used for considerable periods of time), weight is more uncertain (wire thickness vs plate thickness), dunno about mobility.

Excellent, excellent thread OP. 10/10

Thanks for all the great pics and info!

>>63943481
>a mail hauberk underneath his CoP
That's a fairly exceptional amount of armour for the time, not just in terms of protection but the cost wouldn't be inconsequential either. No wonder the poors got their arses kicked, someone like that would have been very resistant against cutting weapons, quite a lot of arrows and probably only left the battlefield when they ran out of cardio to continue beating the shit out of people.
Is this is sort of the equivalent of someone wearing a lot of money?
Sort of thinking at least the mid-level money of nobility, but if that was commonplace on high end mercenaries its a bit of a wake up call to some of my amateur-hour conceptions of that era of battlefield

>>63946430
Kind of hard to say, mail is very expensive in terms of man-hours to make it, in terms of a material cost it'd not be inconsequential but people had been making this in some amounts since the Romans had nicked the idea off some migratory celtic peoples.
Plates should be much easier on the technical ability to produce it and much quicker, but it'd be subject to just how much iron you had around to make them with. That can be an issue in some parts of the world off the beaten track when you have to turn entire forests into charcoal to smelt enough ferrous metals for armour, weapons and tooling.
I don't see it being very cheap either way

Gutish picture stone, 5th-7th century.

>>63946548
High end mercenaries (as well as patricians when they took part in the city militias) often had whatever the "full knightly kit" for the time was. So quite a lot of the people looking and fighting like knights on the medieval battlefield could be neither knights nor nobility, which is why the term "men at arms" has popped up to cover the lot of them. (And sometimes I think high end mercenaries were knights and/or nobility.)

>>63944287
You're wrong. Coat of plates was superior to mail torso protection in every way, if he could afford one a professional soldier would be a fool to stick with mail. The reason why it took "so long" to develop is down entirely to how large a piece of steel armor smiths had the technology to reliably forge & temper. Mail is easy to make, but time intensive, large (relatively) armor plates are much harder to make to a consistent protective standard.

>>63946582
I guess in that era of professional soldiers their 'bonus' was whatever they could cart off or got divvied up amongst the troops, so if they had 10lb of hack-silver from knocking over some villages for the fighting season it'd probably soon mean the next trip back home would get you kitted up.

>>63946057
Let's see if I can find out
>>63943730
I managed to identify this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece_runestones#G_216
>Ormika, Ulfhva[t]r?, GrikkiaR, IorsaliR, Island, Særkland.
>"Ormika, Ulfhvatr(?), Greece, Jerusalem, Iceland, Serkland."
>although the interpretation of its message is uncertain, scholars have generally accepted von Friesen's analysis that it commemorates the travels of two Gotlanders to Greece, Jerusalem, Iceland and the Muslim world (Serkland).
Serkland is apparently the land of people called the Serkir, interpreted as meaning the Saracens.
>>63943737
I couldn't find anything about this one (it would help if anyone happens to know the inventory number), and my attempt at translating it myself was a total crapshoot because I'm a complete amateur who doesn't really even know basic norse let alone old gutnish, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm correctly recognizing ᛆ runes in it or (assuming it's supposed to be distinct from ᛅ/a) what sound they're supposed to represent in this case (e? æ?)
Here's what little I managed, anyway (note that any or all of this might be wrong):
>ᚱᛆ(:?) ᚦᛁᛅᚢᚦ : ᚴᛁᛆᚱᚦᛁ : ᛘᛁᚴ : ᚠᚢᚱᛁᛦ :
>re (:?) þiauþ : kierþi : mik : furiyr :
? (:?) people : ? : me : ? :
>ᛋᚢᛁ : ᛋᛁᚾ : ᛚᛁᚴᚾᚢᛁᛅᚱ : ᛆ : ᛘᛁᚴ
>sui : sin : liknuiar : e : mik
his/her/its/one's own : ??? : ? : me
and that one bit on the top:
>ᛒᛅᚱᚦᛅᚴᛁᛦ
>barþakiyr
Absolutely no idea. It could also potentially be ᛒᚴᚱᚦᛅᚴᛁᛦ / bkrþakiyr, in which case they presumably left out a few vowels.

>>63943160
Clearly a suicide.

>>63946867
A coat of plates can't cover your arms retard, try reading you subhuman illiterate.

>>63943195
>I wish I was at home tilling the field.

>>63947414
Guy's not Russian tho.

>>63943296
A mail coif was cheaper to make that a helm, since you just repurposed whatever wire ends were left over from hauberks.
And, as long as you wore it over a thick/padded felt cap, it would've provided moderately adequate protection against slashes. Of course, you wouldn't want somebody hitting you with a mace, an axe, or shooting you with a crossbow.

>>63943258
Wouldn't they have also worn splint vambraces?

>>63947920
Of course not, he didn't fall from a window.

>>63947354
I don't care what (>THEY) christian monks) say, runes are peak aesthetic and the latin alphabet is gay

>>63948168
I don't know about elsewhere, but at least regarding English, it seems the church didn't really attempt to suppress them and actually used them too (two notable surviving examples being the most decisively Christian inscriptions on Saint Cuthbert's coffin and the Franks Casket); to my understanding they just got organically phased out over time, not just because of religious reasons but also because it's what everyone on the continent was using.
There was actually a transitional period of several centuries where English texts used a hybrid system, retaining thorn/ᚦ (th) and wynn/ᚹ (w). Examples also exist of runes being used in latin texts as ideographs for whatever their name was, such as writing mann/ᛗ (m) as shorthand for "mann" rather than writing the whole word out.

On a tangent, I'm 100% convinced that written English would greatly benefit from reintroducing thorn/ᚦ and ing/ᛝ, because their respective sounds (both very commonly used) take multiple letters to represent in the latin alphabet, making it less efficient with time, effort, and space.
An extreme example of what I mean is the title of John Carpenter's 1982 film "The Thing", which could be condensed into just "ᚦe ᚦᛝ".

did anyone report the thread yet how is this still up? its clearly not ukraine jewish propaganda and has no business on this board

Swedes still to this day enjoy whining about this battle
t. dane

>>63947354
Serkland isn't China(Serica, aka where silk comes from)?

>>63946430
Coat of plates would be cheaper if you can make it but offer inferior coverage and mostly similar protection. With streamlined production the cost could be reduced to very reasonable level.
>>63946548
>Is this is sort of the equivalent of someone wearing a lot of money?
Yes, although doubling up armor like this is mainly a cavalry thing, to resist lance charges and such. That's how coat of plates was developed. For other stuff simpler armor was generally sufficient.

There are cases where you'd wear very light mail or no mail under plate armor but it's mostly the case for a full harness of the 14th century, especially the second half.

>>63948168
Who are you referring to

>>63943154 (OP)
>perhaps 200 or a bit more under the Danish king Valdemar IV Attedag
>The Danish losses are estimated to have been about 300 killed
Uh...

>>63951295
They meant 2000, not 200

>>63947414
sprinkle some herring on him and book it as clan violence

>>63949079
TIL

Very cool

>>63943154 (OP)
>>63943556
>those are some really nice teeth
Either he died young, or he wasn't too rich. Or then he just didn't like anything sweet. Peasants often had better teeth back then.
Because back then, many kings and other people with enough money spent all their days eating sweets, honey, drinking sugary wine and mead and whatever they felt like snacking on. They really had no idea about dental hygiene back then, so by the time they hit their forties, most of their teeth were rotting or gone and the rot might have gone even beyond that.

The Swedish king Gustav Vasa was reportedly rather irritable, and probably for a reason: He must have been in absolute agony pretty much all the time. When his grave was opened in 1945, doctors quickly noted that most of his teeth had obviously rotted, and the rot had spread into his facial bones and possibly his inner ears. When he spoke, everyone in the room could probably smell a rotting corpse, and that's basically what his mouth was.
He also had an infected wound in his leg that just wouldn't heal. We know today that persistent infections in the mouth can seriously affect one's health elsewhere in the body, too; if this man wasn't affected by that, I don't know who would be.

Brush your teeth, everyone.

>>63943369
How do you even get close enough to shoot someone at gates without getting shot yourself from the wall?

>>63951715
Didnt they have those shields that existed for that.

Cool thread, thanks OP.

>>63951715
As the OP noted
>The city meanwhile simply barred its gates and did not intervene.
I'd assume that includes not shooting at the Danes from the walls.

>>63943597
The graffiti is particularly interesting. I think I recognize some of those scratchings

>>63949079
>understanding they just got organically phased out over time,
There's a place in Sweden where they mainly used runes up until very recently, the last 100 years or so iirc, they have their own language that is more like Icelandic or old norse than it is swedish.
It's dying out fast though, think there was maybe 300 speakers still alive.

>>63951917
I believe you're thinking of Älvdalska. They used runes up until the first half of the 20th century. It's, as you point out, unfortunately on the verge of disappearing completely.

>>63946867
>The reason why it took "so long" to develop is down entirely to how large a piece of steel armor smiths had the technology to reliably forge & temper.
You can make a CoP with lamellar-armour-sized plates (one of the finds at Visby appears to have been a CoP made by recycling the plates from a lamellar cuirass, pic shows the reconstruction of it) something that they were making long before, and actually hardening and tempering armour hadn't really become a thing yet in the 14th century. Even swords may not be properly hardened at that point. Hardened armour is largely a 15th-16th century thing, and even then it's only the high end stuff (and not all of the high end stuff).

>>63947354
>I couldn't find anything about this one (it would help if anyone happens to know the inventory number)
https://digitaltmuseum.org/0210213417925/bryne

>>63947970
IIRC we do see various arm defences in this period, possibly up to basically proper plate, but I'm not sure about how common various variants would have been.

>>63949734
The silk may (largely) have come from China, but that wasn't where the Vikings saw it.

>>63951541
I made an error of nothing whatsoever there, which is to say slap on an extra 0.

>>63951715
The people in the city took no part in the battle whatsoever, they just kept the gates closed and watched. Overall the city of Visby and the rest of Gotland didn't get a long very well, there was even a war between them back in 1288.

>>63943154 (OP)
>Battle of Visby
This ole boy got one to the face.

>>63952677
Bro couldn’t find a toothpick, huh?

I'd just like to add to this great tread with a little primer on medieval cities.
Being a city in the middle ages wasn't just a designation or having walls. A city had to have charter giving it it's rights and creating in effect the legal person of city x.
Cities would barter for and buy more rights from the monarch, exceptions from taxes, the right to impose certain taxes, more land under their control/rule and just about anything else you can think of.
As a city you obviously don't want to get sacked but you also don't want to lose any of those rights you've paid good money for.
So if people that aren't under your authority rebel you close your gates to them. It's their revolt it's their problem. If you let them in it's now your problem, you are harboring them, you are now also in revolt. So you will at best lose some of your rights and worst get sacked.

>>63944199
Historically it seems head armor was prioritized over just about everything else when there was choice in the matter. Which makes sense, really. It's the most important and vulnerable part. Imagine going to war in a plate carrier but leaving your helmet at home

>>63944199
>>63953203
a helmet was the third item on your shopping list. Mainly because of the cost, a simple helmet simply was more affordable than body protection. Getting hit both would fuck you up so protect what you can as soon as you can. But they'd get one thing before they'd get their helmet, you know right after their weapon, a shield.
you can protect your body with your shield so protecting it further wasn't as important as getting head protection.

>>63952677
Damn, not even a lethal wound either. He was obviously not in fighting shape after that, but he was still alive after the blow, possibly still conscious.

>>63952498
>https://digitaltmuseum.org/0210213417925/bryne
Thanks for the link!
>A whetstone with a runic inscription of grey-brown sandstone (claystone?). Inscription, translated: "Rodiaud made me for his son. Likeness (?) owns me. Bardakir (previously interpreted as Byrding)." The inscription is quite well preserved, although all the runes in the upper row are slightly worn at their tops.
>Rodiaud was a woman, and thus carved the whetstone for her son. The ship carving is interpreted as a Byrding, or Börding. A type of merchant ship that existed during the Viking and Middle Ages. The word brevid skeppet has been interpreted as an explanation of the ship, but in recent years the reading has been interpreted as Bardakir, which we do not know what it is.
So apparently the mystery rune I interpreted as ᛆ/e is supposed to be an O (unlike any O that I was previously aware of), and those things I thought were ᚦ/th are actually just Ds? Clearly I'm way out of my depth here.

>>63949134
Wish this was merely a joke.
Anyone else get the 120 second wait over and over and over as well? Only work around seems to be to report someone, then captcha actually appears.
Doesn't happen on /fit/, only on this POS, propaganda compromised board.
Apologies for sullying a quality thread.

>>63943883
If you think about it the general gist of it is the same as the lorica segmentata. The protection is basically the same, just the specifics of how to hold it together is different - rivetted internal straps vs a rivetted outer covering. It's clear that the Romans were capable of making huge laminae for their segmentata (obviously). Anybody arguing that post-Roman countries were incapable of forging plates the size the width of their own swords is just an idiot.

It's likely that coats of plates existed long beyond Visby, it just so happens that plates are very recyclable and Visby represented a rare event where recovery of these valuable raw materials wasn't a priority. Of course, the Romans were a cut above the post-Romans. Segmentata were made by rolling, representing the advantage of economies of scale and being able to churn out plates instead of having to hammer them all out by hand.

As for why they don't seem to be represented in art despite being very obviously in use by a massive amount of militia, who knows?

>>63953269
>many (or potentially even most) of the injured on a battlefield wouldn't have died instantly or even quickly
>plenty of people with potentially survivable injuries would have been killed not by the wound that incapacitated them, but by trampling under feet or hooves as the battle continued around them (or by passing cannonballs in later centuries)
>in addition to all the other already unimaginable stresses of a battlefield, soldiers in combat would be feeling bodies under their feet and having to hope they were already dead
>even if an injury is treatable, and their army has means of treating it, they would first have to get off the battlefield to receive that treatment: if they're not in good enough condition to make their own way back to camp, and the situation isn't comfortable enough for a few comrades to be spared helping them get there, then all they can do is pray they'll survive long enough for people to come back and collect the bodies afterwards (which depending on circumstances likely won't be the same day), and pray even harder that it's their own side that returns to do so

>>63953302
>Segmentata were made by rolling
where did you get this idea, retard? It was made with trip hammers or manually, just like medieval armor was.

>>63953269
Depending on how badass he was, he could have kept fighting. There was that Finnish soldier that managed to keep attacking and save some comrades after he had to dig pieces of his own jaw out of the back of his throat to be able to breathe after he took a grenade to the face. IIRC he said one of the guys he saved threw up when he saw his face.

>>63954016
Both segmentata and the punched rings of hamata have a consistent thickness and a linear microstructure that is unequivocally from being rolled. It is impossible to produce such a perfectly straight microstructure by hand or trip hammers. This knowledge is something like twenty years old by now. Surely if you have an interest in Roman armour you should know this?

>>63944287
>>63947885
There's nothing stopping the torso being protected by a coat of plates and the rest being covered by mail.

>>63952677
>>63953203
Helmets are probably the most important because being chopped and bonked on the head or neck is just all bad.
Lots of blood loss, chance of blindness, going into shock and concussions are the immediate problems of being hit in the head before we even get to the potentially life changing and ending injuries themselves. If you've got a hard bonk on the noggin like this guy 100 years later at Towton, pretty much fucked.
Everything else sort of falls in the 'fuck this sucks' ticket of traumatic injury, but there is a chance that you're not falling down, bleeding, blind and looking at the stars everywhere. You might actually survive being chopped, bonked and skewered in other parts of your body to live and fight another day, especially with decent body armour like the coat of plates, mail, gambeson and so forth could reduce a lot of those severe injuries into something superficial. Bashing people to death even with all the axes, swords, spears and maces took a fair while to do, they're capable of killing people but you're going to be going at it for a while because unlike on tv shows and movies where 'zee armour does nuffink', armour in the real world is really very good at stopping quite a lot.

The nasty side of it all of this is a long lasting, traumatic beating that is a mix of pain compliance, exhaustion, dehydration and shock before someone goes down, then you bash them on their head and take their stuff. Not that being shot and blown up in the modern era is a great result to your military adventures, but its really only medical technology and expedited stabilisation that makes it mean you might have a chance, otherwise being shot and blown up means you're probably dying fairly quickly compared to being repeatedly stabbed, bashed and cut by other people and then trampled on.

>>63943154 (OP)
Welcome back Museum anon. I’ve been to some museums in Poland recently and feel inspired to post what I found

>>63954449
Certainly; but if you have to choose one or the other, the answer is maille. And as I said, extra torso covering was likely quite redundant for a good deal of the middle ages. Everyone knew about lamellar, scale, even breastplates, but they didn't seem to be used much at all in Europe to supplement maille for a long while.

>>63954741
There's no reason to have to choose one or the other.

This is uncanny. I just ordered a bunch of mild steel plate and heavy duty linen canvas to make my own coat of plates, albeit the late 14th-century kind with a rudimentary globose breastplate. Way to go KM.

>>63954625
Yeah, medieval battle is basically mass murder by slow degrees. You can't just thrust your weapon at the guy and have him go AUUUUGGH and fall over like in the action movies. Unless you get him in the armpit or the crotch or the eyeslot, you have to break him down. It's pretty damn gruesome, and takes a lot of the romance out of it if you think about it.

>>63953302
>It's likely that coats of plates existed long beyond Visby
At the battle of Bouvines in 1214, there are a couple of references to 'the armor which warriors of our time wear, and which is invulnerable.' So you know they were wearing something besides the plain Jane mail hauberk. Pic related is probably the most famous example, and that predates Visby by almost a century.

>>63955278
Thinking a little bit about it earlier in the day, the only real way I can contextualise it is if you've ever done boxing its a fair bit of strategy to land shots to wind an opponent and few hits to the face to maybe rattle their can a bit. Enough so that they either end up fending somewhere you just hurt them a lot or feel at risk that they'll get another punch in the head.
>Except there are no rules
>You have 2-3lb of murder in one hand
>Maybe a shield in the other
>Armour to soak up some hits
But then, you also have to factor in that like now and most probably back then is that fair fights are for losers and mugs. So if you and some mates drag them down in the shit and start beating the ever living fuck out of someone in the mud, you can probably get that 'knockout' with a shank to the tender bits. The real horror starts as well because in your boxing ring, not only are you dealing with essentially a maybe sober street-brawl, greasy bum fight with no rules, but the crowd sometimes throws things like rocks, arrows, crossbow bolts and spear shaped objects.
To sum it up
>fuck this nonsense, I'm going home

>>63953273
Runes can be a bit tricky, given the multiple different futharks in use, local variations, utter absence of standardised spelling...

>>63953471
Not a very nice affair overall, no. Now of possible interest to that subject is that a lot of the skeletons in the Towton graves had, in addition to frequently massive and unhealed head trauma, signs of well healed cuts to various bones. Suggesting that medical treatment of the time was good enough that it was quite frequent for soldiers at the time to have suffered cuts to the bone and healed up well enough to return to service. (Things got a lot worse in that respect once guns became common.)

>>63953302
>As for why they don't seem to be represented in art despite being very obviously in use by a massive amount of militia, who knows?
The outer shell of fabric or leather would tend to make them somewhat discrete, and some manner or arming coat/tabard may have gone on top of the CoP as well. Though that said, note the bloke on the right in this painting from 1369.

>>63954676
Good.

>>63955794
>Suggesting that medical treatment of the time was good enough that it was quite frequent for soldiers at the time to have suffered cuts to the bone and healed up well enough to return to service. (Things got a lot worse in that respect once guns became common.)
Yeah, many kinds of blunt trauma, cuts and fractures can heal with very primitive treatment, even if the wounds seem nasty at first (and in the absence of antibiotics would likely go through a bad infection before healing). Anyways, potentially survivable if the person doesn't die from blood loss or infection.
A narrow but deep piercing wound can easily cause much more complicated injuries, the kind you'd need surgery to fix. Probably not happening on a medieval battlefield, at least with any decent survival rate.

>>63955843
>and in the absence of antibiotics would likely go through a bad infection before healing
The impression I've gotten is rather that they could get things to heal up largely because these wounds were relatively easy to clean up and keep from getting infected, whereas guns would drag bacteria-laden material (dirts on the skin, bits of clothes) into the deep puncture wounds they created and thus set up for a lot more life-ending infections.

>>63955859
>keep from getting infected
Oh, they'd probably have some degree of infection anyways. You can give yourself a moderate skin infection by just scratching too hard (t. got terrible dermatitis from something once and had to take antibiotics).
The human body's pretty good at dealing with relatively shallow cuts & infections, so it might just manifest as the wound oozing, itching and healing slowly. Being able to clean it would likely help.

But yes, a stab or shot straight into the insides is much more likely to cause a systemic sort of infection, with a high fever and rather poor prospects if the person was already on the brink.

>>63943416
IIRC one time they found a woman in a bog and treated it as a missing persons case for weeks before they figured out she died thousands of years ago.

If anybody wants to see what the elite were wearing at almost exactly the same time period, Schola Gladitoria has a detailed breakdown of an English effigy circa 1360-ish.

Cliffs notes version: articulated plate harness on the arms, splint and brigandine on the legs, fully articulated sabatons on the feet, coat of plates on the body with possibly a globose breastplate and mail skirt and voiders rather than a full haubergeon. Makes some interesting points about how a breastplate (a) creates a crumple zone for your innards, rather like an automobile bumper, and (b) allows room for your chest to expand and contract, making breathing in all that heavy iron much easier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ob3RLoiSQ&t=30s

>>63955254
And yet for a very long time they chose only maille, it seems.

>>63956921
People don't do what's optimal but what's adequate. Historically, the military has tended to be resistant to change and stick to tradition. It's not worth risking your life just to test if something works better. That's why historical military equipment is typically long periods of stasis followed by sudden change in the face of a threat, and why the transition period of plate and mail started with the excessive step of adding plate over mail, and then only removed the mail under the plate once they felt confident it worked.

>>63956921
Mail is user friendly. It's cheap; it's democratic. You can make it out of wire; you can don it in twenty seconds.

>>63958569
I would imagine a coat of plates is much cheaper. It is infinitely faster to make.

>>63958569
>mail
>cheap

>>63958569
>cheap

1. Cut down a lot of trees
2. Make a lot of charcoal
3. Get some good iron ore
4. Smash it up and bake it for 12 hours
5. Make large clay bloom furnace
6. Wait 2 weeks for it to dry and fire cure the interior
7. Make a set of large bellows
8. Throw iron and charcoal into furnace
9. Run it for about 12 hours
10. Extract bloom and consolidate the gooey mess
11. Refine iron with repeated folding
12. Turn iron into steel by repeating steps 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 but with a crucible + carbon and about 2-3 days of bellows and heat
13. Consolidate the steel and lots of beating with big hammers and dedicated strikers
14. Hate being a labourer, we need slaves for this shit
15. Hot cut billet steel into chunks, manually hammer them into rod stock until very thin
16. Obtain drawing die and yank on steel to form steel wire, many, many times to cold form it
17. Create rings with long rod stock by winding it around, cold cut it
18. Hot form flat parts on ring, punch holes in flat parts
19. Tie someone down for months on end to assemble and rivet the links, expect 1sq/ft a day at best
20. Collect bill from local noble that ordered it...

>>63943154 (OP)
>What followed was a good illustration of why at the time you wanted professional armies and not peasant levies.
the danish professional merc army got beaten by peasants in the arguably most one-sided battle in history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hemmingstedt

>>63943154 (OP)
>Danish/German force of 200
>Lost 300 in battle

WHAT?

>>63955859

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die

>>63958967
>21. Payment received is not being not being murdered and having your wife violated only for the weekend

>>63958646
The plates themselves are much more difficult and expensive to manufacture, which is why they come along later.

>>63959146
Making a plate of iron or steel is much older than chain links. The individual pieces are more expensive, but you still need a large amount of iron to make anything out of maille.

And the time expenditure is absolutely incredible. I advise anyone who wants to talk about maille to fucking make some, it will shatter every notion about it you have. It is vastly simpler and quicker to make a plate. We're not talking full articulated plate armor, a coat of plates isn't any more complex in reality than lamellar or scale armor. It's the exact same concept executed differently.

>>63947885
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones - If you go back and read my post again you'll see that I specified -TORSO- protection in the very first line, in fact the superiority of plate -TORSO- protection is the premise of my entire post, I make no effort to argue the effectiveness or lack thereof in the case of plate arms, because simply because that has nothing to do with the superiority of plate when it comes to protecting your -TORSO-. I chose one point and I stuck with it because I know for a certainty that I am correct. Looks like the subhuman illiterate here is you.

>>63959146
Plates took of after the plague ravaged the population of unskilled labourers. With limited manpower it was cheaper to have an apprentice help hammer plates rather than half a dozen playing with wire.

>>63943274
Man, how often do Euros come across shit like this and just toss it? I live in a country with minimal metal archaeological material, I would have no fucking idea that was valuable if it wasn't on a skeleton.

>>63943359
What happened here, war pick?

>>63959185
actually plates took off even the black death, namely in the 13th and early 14th centuries, connected to improvements in matallurgy and spread of hydraulic power

if you can make them en masse plates would be significantly cheaper to make than painstalkingly constructing mail links one by one. only if you have high rejection rate and/or craftsmen/workshops capable of making it are scarce does this begin to even out.

>>63944556
Henry's come to see us!

>>63954328
I didn't. Thanks for the info. That's fascinating.

>>63958980
>Following the battle, the Dithmarsians buried the bodies of the enemy's common soldiers, but in their contempt for the nobility, the bodies of the nobles were left to rot in the fields.

Based.

>>63959054
Clerics used to be a thing.

>>63959054
>>Danish/German force of 200
>>Lost 300 in battle
>WHAT?

>>63959375
>Clerics used to be a thing.

So 100 clerics joined the 200 soldiers?

>>63962038
He's making a retarded gaming joke (where clerics are able to revive the dead).

>>63943154 (OP)
Oh shit, this thread is a massive coincidence as I was here on sunday. The picturestone hall is amazing.

>>63943154 (OP)
Great thread OP. Medieval /k/ is best /k/.

great thread, OP

>>63959054
Camp followers maybe? A large number of workers followed armies and would occasionally be caught up in messy retreats and raids.

>>63963797
Camp followers even included women in many places, which explains the odd female skeleton here and there in battlefield sites.

>>63943154 (OP)
Bump for later

>>63952677
>that face
what a whore.

>>63951917
>>63952206
https://www.sciencenordic.com/language-linguistics-runes/isolated-people-in-sweden-only-stopped-using-runes-100-years-ago/1418110

>>63943462
Is that a Type XII ? .Bit late for the XIIIth century , though I imagine it would have remained in use from long before .

>>63943636
Too bad they were not better trained .They would have likely fared better .

>>63959372
Nothing made me loathe Nobility and support Kings , Peasants and Burghers more than learning about History

>>63958980
>6000 peasants vs 12000 mostly professional Soldiers
>the peasants only suffer 60 dead vs the other side's 7000

My word , that is what we call being turbo fucked in the ass .

>>63972437
>My word , that is what we call being turbo fucked in the ass .
I mean, good on the peasants and all but that's some African-tier incompetence on the part of the nobles.

>>63959054
Some of them respawned.

Cool thread, thank you for sharing

>>63972510
Admitedly , that type of terrain maneuvering , to the point of flooding the area , was a bit unexpected .

>>63972437
It's crazy how fights can snowball, but it's usually the less disciplined less well trained side that collapses and gets "defeated in detail"

>>63962093
poast

>>63943326
The only correct way to write the date is YYYYMMDD.

>>63958980
>Memorial in Epenwöhrden reciting the battlecry: "Wahr di, Garr, de Buer de kumt" (Beware guard, the farmer is coming)
top kek

>>63980646
If you don't write it like you say it you deserve to be beaten in the street and anyone who responds to the question "what's today's date" with "2025 July 14" is a fucking retarded psychopath.

>>63982447
Written language has more numbers and less context than spoken language. It makes sense to do them differently.