A thread about plate has got me curious.
Why did full armour go out of favour ?
A few things came up
From first hand experience a number of Dopers have said that it is not particularly restrictive.
A curious problem.
It was the crossbow.
The Normans had those.
This article seems to indicate it was bullets, rather than crossbows, that were responsible for the decline in plate armor.
True, but improvements in triggers and drawing mechanisms made them much more effective and deadly as the Middle Ages went on.
Sua
Yes, yes, no. I’m not a military historian but IIRC plate did not fall relatively out of favor until a large percentage of casualties in combat were caused by gunpowder (sometime in the 1600’s?).
After that it was so expensive for relatively little benefit, and some disadvantages, that it wasn’t used hardly at all. But I, too, wonder why the change was seemingly so sweeping and fast (although not as seemingly sweeping and fast as the replacement of the longbow with the musket, as longbows were as good or better in the right hands, but we’ve had plenty of threads about that in the past.)
One thing I did think of was that as armies got bigger with the advent of cheaply-trained musketeers, the strategic aspect of modern warfare became more possible, rather than the rare set-piece and castles sieges of the middle ages. So mavouvre became more important, and the majority of the soldiers were on foot. Plate mail definitely slows you down, or wears you down, on a long trip.
But sufficient armor could still stop a slow bullet, so there were still armored cavalry (in breastplates) until the ascendancy of the rifled musket which could pierce through anything.
Even through the 18th century (and the 19th in places), military uniforms were designed for identification. As best I know, the use of battle dress uniforms for concealment didn’t see significant use before the 20th century.
Yes, my understanding is that we learnt that during the Boer War.
However I am struck by the similarity between Cromwell’s Model Army and the Romans.
I can see that the advent of the field gun makes any sort of armour useless, but it looks as if it died out earlier.
There was an overlap of old-fashioned armor and newfangled body armor, when in World War One the French and German cavalry rode into the pre-trench Battle of the Frontiers wearing breastplates. A few months later individual soldiers were making steel skullcaps to wear under their kepis, and other soldiers were fashioning ad-hoc anti-ballistic armor.
Meanwhile, back at HQ, the staff officers were wearing lapel tabs that were the last vestiges of where the gorget plates had once been attached, themselves remnants of breastplates.
BTW - the ad-hoc body armor of the regular troops wasn’t exactly new in 1914:
Going back to my argument about cost in the other thread, I will point out that while plate of varying kinds (without mail) existed as far back as the bronze age, only a tiny elite could afford it.The amount of bronze in one plate was probably more than some villages held.
Which is why in “The Iliad” everyone is so keen to strip the corpses of the enemy warriors they kill. The bronze in the armor was an enormous amount of wealth.
Truth be told, I’ve heard it estimated that in classical times, there was something like less than two pounds of metal for everyone. Considering how much went into things like ploughs and craftsmen’s tools, there probably wasn’t much left over. Much less after the nobles took their share.