How much did medieval suits of armor weigh?

Factual Questions
101

I remember seing a show of the Cadre Noir, which is a prestigious equestrian school where they still train “war” horses in Napoleonian fashion… man, those things were fearsome. Tall and lean, black as charcoal, and all madder than a roomful of chimpanzees on nitrous oxide. Biters, kickers, gougers… I really, really wouldn’t have wanted to be near one in battle. The word “berserk” came to mind.

One rider showed how horsemen caught in the fray (as opposed to a quick charge and retreat) would make the horse spin around on the spot, trampling, kicking and headbutting all the while.
Seeing that made me understand very vividly why a knight was in for a world of hurt when the peasants finally managed to gore the horse and gang up on him on the ground :slight_smile:

102

The History Channel did a full hour on this exact topic recently. They actually created a suit of armor for the guy who does the show, and he put it on and went through some paces with a sword and other weapons. He said that since the weight was distributed so evenly over his whole body (about 50-60 lbs) that he was able to move quite freely in it. He actually DID do a somersault with the armor on, while holding his sword, in a very quick and coordinated way, as if in battle, and came up with his sword at the ready. Very interesting show.

103

My impression was that what changed more than anything was the re-introduction of heavily disciplined infantry. The musket and crossbow were much, much less influential when first introduced that the simultaneous rise of importance of a very ancient weapon - the massed pike formation.

Someone once said that generally speaking all things being equal undisciplined cavalry beat undisciplined infantry every time, and the reverse is also true - on the battlefield disciplined infantry have the advantage.

The economics of this are that a pikeman cost much, much less to train and equip than an armoured knight, and was, if properly trained and motivated, a match for the charge of heavy horse. This did not mean the end of heavy horse on the battlefield, but it certainly meant the end of the absolute dominance of the charge of heavy horse. They became just part of the mix of arms which successful generals would use.

The intital significance of gunpowder lay, not so much in the musket, but in the use of cannon as siege weapon - rendering obsolete almost overnight fortifications that had taken centuries to build. Also, cannons and gunpowder were very expensive, generally only the king could afford them.

104

Actually, the knights were likely taller than the average person. A gentleman ate better, with more meat, which certainly adds inches of height.

105

I concur with all this.

Re: cannons – from Encyclopedia Britannica:

Mind you, that’s not doing in 8 hours what used to take 7 years – that’s doing in 8 hours what previously could not be done in 7 years; the fortress withstood that 7 year siege.

This is why it’s called the gunpowder revolution.

106

I was there a few weeks back. I believe they said the tall skeleton was 600 years old. I’ll see if I can find the brochure at home and what it says on the matter.

107

I must disagree somewhat. Gunpowder changed things, but not nearly so much as we like to think. (While stroking our guns and whispering, "There there, my precious!:slight_smile: Rather, they accelerated the evolution of military development.

Siegecraft was particularly affected, but it tended to go back and forth. First it favored the offense, then defense, then offense again, ad nauseum. I men, as late as WWI, people were still using fortresses, some of them based around old Roman sites! So it was a a Revolution, but a much more complicated one and one which tended to favor one side or the other at different times.

108

haveing read a fair amount of whats on here about armour weight soforth and such like i was left asking the question what if any experiance has these guys had with this stuff. many of you are well read and i have no problem with what you have said and found a great deal of it inforative. but on the matter of armour, its weight and flexability. please cheack your facts first. Agincourt, or Azincourt as it is called in france is an anomily the soil is unusual in its properties and that is why the french knights ahd such a problem with it.
properly made plate armour is flexable enough to do a forward roll. go on you tube you will see a demo of a man in full plate getting up in less than 3 seconds from the flat of his back. As to weight i have seen referances of anything up to 80lbs. Jousting plate was a great deal different than battle plate and the additional protection was added, only once the knight had mounted his horse.
why am i in a position to say this. I make the stuff to historc patterns. I wear it on a regular basis like once a week to fight in. the restriction on speed is not considerable till you have been at it about 20 mins. And my personal HARNESS, the correct term for what most call a suit of armour, is 70 lbs. I appologies if any one takes offence nun was intended.

109

Hell, even as late as World War II (although not successfully): Fort Ében-Émael - Wikipedia

110

I disagree: fortress technology changed radically (and became radically more expensive) as a result of gunpowder.

The pre-gunpowder fortress was based on the old vertical curtain wall. While many movies and such depict these as being battered down by catapults, in point of fact this rarely if ever happened - the eneny had to either batter down a gate, undermine the wall by digging, or climb up the wall on ladders - all seriously time-consuming and/or risky - or more likely, starve the defenders out.

That sort of fortress was relatively cheap and easy to build.

Contrast with the fortresses designed to withstand cannon fire, stereotypically the “star forts” built by Vaubagn.

While these were often based on earlier fortifications (when improvised rather than built from scratch), they were vastly more time-consuming and expensive to build.

In short, gunpowder’s main effect (until relatively recently, with the multiplication of the power of fire-power) was one of centralization of power. The reason: cannon could easily knock down the sort of fortifications cheap and fast to build. Cannon could not easily knock down a (vastly expensive) ‘star fort’. Both cannon and defences were horribly expensive and thus only the resources of the early modern state could afford them - giving the early modern state a very significant qualitative advantage over city-states, overmighty earls, robber barons and the like.

111

And the average height of an adult male in the UK is now 5’9.7".

Are you seriously suggesting that 5’6" is comparable to 5’9"? The average height for Japanese men is 5’7". So the crowds in Tokyo are just as tall as the crowds in London? That’s just silly.

ETA: A big ass table of average heights: Human height - Wikipedia

112

Actually, in the SCA, House Bloodguard used to have at least 6 or 7 marine reservists in it and a few actives, and my champion was retired airborn. what was funny was at one pennsic, Andres told a couple guys to dig me a sump and they ended up with the classic marine 6 foot by 6 foot by 6 foot fighting hole =)]

http://www.housebloodguard.org/

There are a lot of people in the SCA who make and wear very accurate armor. If I were to go weigh my helm, it would be upwards of 5 lbs of steel and that is just one part of the armor I used to wear when I fought back in the mid 80s. I have hefted guys armor bags, and I would say that they are definitely loading out in teh range of 40 to 50 pounds of armor and padding and that is not counting weapons or shields.

113

kph1971, there were a good many of us defending this exact position in this thread - I can’t recall exactly but I believe I was the first to mention Agincourt, and that was to support that a fellow in full harness was not helpless off his horse. However, that argument was presented in a misunderstanding of the usage of unhorsed, where I took it to mean “someone not on a horse” when the poster meant “someone knocked from their horse in battle.” As I stated then, a man knocked from his horse in the fray of battle was in a tight spot, regardless of what kind of harness he wore. Oh, and howdy from a fellow armourer :smiley: What period is your harness?

114

1.7 m is not significantly shorter than 1.75 m. Shorter, yes, but the men back then were not dwarfs.

“He’s not talking about you, Sweetness. smooch” [/Stephen Colbert]

115

What about zombies wearing armor?

116

…riding dinosaurs.

117

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General Questions Moderator

118

Weight varied greatly. Earlier suits were 35-40 pounds when they were mostly made of mail and leather.

The transitional period packed on a bit more weight.

“Full Plate”, or cap-a-pie, head to toe, plate armor would have weighed 55-75 pounds depending on a number of factors; size of the wearer, the style it is made in, and thickness of the pieces/quality.

Tournament jousting armor could get close to 100 lbs, as there are grandguards and other reinforcing pieces which are added on top of already existing plate armor for more protection.

However, immobility in that armor is nonsense. I used to do heavy armor fighting. You can stand up, sit down, do cartwheels, or a number of other things. The better suits of armor that were custom fit allowed for an almost unlimited range of motion and mobility. You’re more limited by your own athletic ability (or lack thereof) than by the armor itself.

As for weight; it’s heavy, but it’s very well distributed. It’s not carrying a 75 pound dumbbell. It’s 75 pounds of gear spread across every surface of your body. Vaguely similar (vaguely) to jogging with arm and leg weights, while wearing a heavy coat, heavy pants, and a bucket on your head. It’s a poor reference, but the point is that the weight is not borne in one brutally heavy area.

As to height - armor is NOT a single piece. The same suit of armor can fit someone in roughly a range of 6"; there’s adjustment to the height by the fit of the breastplate (which actually goes to roughly your navel, NOT your waist), as well as some other factors. I’ve been to england and scotland and seen authentic armor in person. The largest one, which I can’t find a link for at the moment, was for “the giant”, and was either the Tower of London or Warwick Castle. He was over 6’ 6". Pardon the hazy memory; it was over a decade ago.

(running and doing pushups)

(doing cartwheels in plate armor)

(forward rolls in an 80 pound harness)

(falls off a horse and onto his feet in seconds - myth? BUSTED)
Credit to: “Weapons that made Britain”

Yes, I really did register just to post this. :slight_smile: While there was good info in the thread and some people made great points, the plethora of misinformation was absolutely staggering. :smack:

119

Which misinformation are you talking about? The problem with this thread is that there are a set of people saying that wearing armor is almost no burden whatsoever, and that knights were nearly superhuman athletes that were in excellent health. Their cite is their SCA experience, which I don’t think is particularly valuable, like experience at paintball doesn’t make you an expert on life as a Navy SEAL.

Then there is a group of people claiming that people during the middle ages were shorter, many had health problems, and that armor does create a penalty to mobility and endurance. All of these points are backed up by reputable historical sources and modern investigation.

No one is seriously asserting that people in armor were like turtles or couldn’t walk, or were useless on the ground. What some of us are saying is that there were significant drawbacks to armor, because it is hot, it weighs a lot, your vision is restricted, and it’s easier to get encumbered because of mud or someone sitting on you or being knocked off of a horse by someone trying to kill you, or whatever other sorts of bad situations you might get into.

And I am still waiting for someone to explain how there weren’t STDs during the middle ages.

120

I find it highly amusing that this thread has been resurrected, as I have spent the seven months since I first started it exhaustively studying armour. (So much so that I now instinctively use the British spelling of the word without even thinking about it.) In the time between then and now I’ve read at least ten books on armour and on warfare during the Renaissance and Middle Ages; I’ve also written one very long feature article on the armour of the Thirty Years War era, which will eventually be published online.

What I have learned is that plate armour was fairly light and easy to move around in, until about the late 1500s when it was made ever more heavy and thick as an attempt to stop the increasingly powerful gunfire. Suits like this one might have weighed 80 or 90 pounds, though it was well-distributed and articulated. It was successful in stopping pistol rounds (Sir Arthur Hasselrig, a Parlimentarian general during the English Civil War, was wearing a suit of full plate and survived being shot several times by two or three different soldiers during one battle.) But musketballs would generally go right through it.

It fell out of use entirely when battlefields had become saturated with cheaply-equipped, easily-trained, but powerful musketeers.