Archaeologists: “Uhhhh, there’s still a lot of debate about how effective leather armor really could have been on a battlefield. Alas, we shall never know.”
Punks: “Hey, fresh cut, the boneheads carry knives sometimes so make sure and lift a good leather jacket. It’ll save your life.”
Layers layers layers! Slashes won’t do shit even to most t shirts but a stab will ignore the shit outa your leathers. Layers will keep the blade from getting as deep as it otherwise would and gives more for it to snag on if it serrated.
Armour has always been about layers.
Example 1200s minor noble: linen shirt, gambeson (layered and quilted linen with wool insulation), chain mail, surcoat, arming cap, helmet, coif, bigger helmet.
Another example Alexander era Macedonian hoplite: linen tunic, greaves, 1" of tightly pressed and laminated linen, helmet (probably with some sort of arming cap/padding inside), big ass shield.
Layers save lives.
Yes! Cloth is hard work to cut with a knife. When they were trying to ban (sword) duelling in Europe, they banned people from carrying around shields/bucklers, so your defensive tool was a cloak wrapped around your non-sword fist, with plenty of loose fabric to catch your opponent’s blade. You might get your cloak torn, but you’re less likely to get your skin sliced up, and that’s the important thing.
You know what is a surprisingly amazing material for armor?
Silk.
Silk.
The Mongolians used silk vests because silk isn’t broken by an arrow, and you can use the silk to gently pull the arrow back out, even if it’s barbed. They also often used silk as the backing for leather armor.
The first bulletproof vests were made in Japan and Korea. Out of, yup, silk. Silk could stop black powder bullets, but was rendered obsolete by higher powered modern firearms. A combination of silk and metal was experimented with, but dropped because of the expense of silk.
Franz Ferdinand was wearing one such vest when he was assassinated, but it didn’t help because of where he was hit.
The US military is now looking into something called Dragon Silk, which is spider silk made by GMO silkworms, to make body armor that might be more comfortable than the current kevlar vests.
Silk, people.
You want proof about silk being able to stop an arrow? Try sewing it with the wrong machine needle in place. I have shattered – literally shattered – needles that were too thick. They just will not pass between the tightly woven fibers, even when in a machine that can go through your actual fingers. And that was just a lightweight taffeta, not something woven to be intentionally impenatrable.
It is horrible at stopping slashes, though. Whether by the blade of scissors, roller cutter, or well honed dagger or sword, it just falls to pieces like it never meant to be whole in the first place. This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for slash damage, a dense silk for piercing. You probably want to put something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly sticky. It *clings*. Eww.
Useful things elementary school neglected to teach me, exhibit #5839
This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for
slash damage, a dense silk for piercing. You probably want to put
something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly
sticky. It *clings*. Eww.
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.
All three are made the same way, more or less, involving a technical vocabulary of retting, beetling, scutching, hackling etc.; look it up.
*****
* 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). Compare this illustration from a fight manual ca.1570…
…to a couple of modern repro dussacks…
…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….
*****
Any fabric where the washing instructions are “boil until clean” will be OK as bottom-layer armour.
That’s how its laundry labels say to treat top-quality Irish damask
linens inherited from my Mum, so fabrics like hemp or nettle certainly won’t come to harm.
Your characters may interpret it this way: those who boil their under-tunics the
night before combat seem to drive off a lot of infection demons and make wizard healing a bit easier.
Finally, 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.
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.
Whether from embarrassment or because it was now A Silly Thing, his opponent Lord Barrymore called the duel off…
also to stick up for archaeologists: fabric and leather armor doesn’t keep well the same way metal and ceramic does! even metal flakes away. and until fairly recently, archaeologists didn’t have particularly sophisticated tools to check for traces of fibers. 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. 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.
armorers 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. some civilizations don’t have very many cows to spare. some have plenty. 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.
leather rots, especially leather that is continuously exposed to rain and sun and blood and stabbing. it’s not so easy to patch. it needs to be tanned and cured and oiled and maintained carefully. 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?
archaelogists aren’t being overpaid dipshits when they tell you they can’t say for sure.
I am still watching the icarly videos whenever I have a free night I am halfway through the second victorious video right now and he just uploaded a sam and kat one I’m going to die here
Anyway this is your reminder to STOP BUYING SMART DEVICES THAT AREN’T NECESSARY.
Your soap does not need to connect to the internet. Your fridge does not need to be able to track the temperature in other countries. Your stove shouldn’t talk to you
This is not “technology bad” this is “these corporations are tracking you and your movements at ALL TIMES OF THE DAY.” They know your every move down to when you wash your hands after you take a shit. Alexa and Siri were the first introduction to this, and once people got used to them on their phones, they put them in their own little gadgets for your house.
And then they connected those gadgets to the lights. To the doors. To the window locks. To the thermostat.
You should be TERRIFIED at how many things are becoming “smart” these days. It’s yet another way for companies to sell to you, and, in a worst case scenario, it can be the thing that puts you in harms way.
Imagine you’re running a little late on your electric bill, and your fridge is a “smart” fridge. And because you’re running late on your payment they just….lock your fridge. Not shut the electricity off. Lock your fridge. Because fridges can now be locked remotely. You can no longer access your food until you pay them.
Cops want to know if you’ve been to any protests recently? They can track that handy dandy smart watch you decided to wear, even though you left your phone in the car. They can tell if you were home all day or lying.
Abusive partner or family member? They can shut off your support systems everywhere. Decide when you get to eat, if you do. Decide how hot or cold the house should be to make you suffer. Turn off the oven in the middle of you cooking dinner bc you upset them. Lock you in. Lock you out.
Your appliances, your LIFE, should not be surrounded by smart tech. Buy normal clocks. Get normal soap dispensers. Keep a pen and paper on the fridge to write down your grocery list. Set a manual timer for the oven. Wear a normal watch that only tells time. Get a step counter that clips to your belt.
Phone, laptop, TV. Those are the only things that make sense being “smart.” Everything else is one step closer to a dystopian novel that you don’t want to be in.
Your phone already tracks your every step. Don’t give every other thing in your life that ability.
And here’s the thing! It’s not only something that can cause you problems if you’re late to pay bills or have abusive partners/family or are doing something the government may not take kindly to!
Let’s say, hypothetically, you do literally nothing. Well, turns out there’s a bug in the fridge software that sets the temperature to 60 degrees when it receives some unexpected input from your fridge app. Or the manufacturer pushes out an involuntary fridge update and now, while the update is downloading, sorry! your the fridge doesn’t open until the update is done.
And these are only the issues that affect you. Generally, Smart Device manufacturers do not think for even one second about the security of their devices. So, this means that hackers will see well known and publicized security holes that have been easily available for literal years but the manufacturer is simply too lazy to fix, use those holes to get into devices, and use those devices as bots to attack whoever they please (and, as a bonus, it look like it’s coming from your home!)
You’d think that this sounds like something out of a horror movie but this is the reality we live in RIGHT NOW. Many of the largest botnets (e.g. the Mirai botnet) in the world consist largely of compromised smart/IoT (internet of things) devices.
So uh just give it some thought before you buy the SmartChair3000 – it’s probably not as cool as it sounds :P
A few “fun” smart device things I recall off the top of my head:
The smart grill that had an automatic update pushed out on Thanksgiving so this guy couldn’t start cooking dinner.
A smart washer a reddit user found was consuming 1GB of data a day due to a bug.
Ring devices enabling police overreach by creating a surveillance network that allows police to circumvent warrants and spy on people who have committed no crimes.
for years it used to be that the only funny media reference to lawyers you could make was Phoenix Wright. now we have Better Call Saul, which makes 2 funny lawyer references you can make
