# Modern Armour, Medieval War **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 17, 2008, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641 "2008-12-17T21:45:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2008, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641/41 "2008-12-18T23:45:50Z")
Knights were not invulnerable to peasants because of their armor. I remember reading the same myth in “The Once and Future King” about how a knight’s armor meant he was invulnerable to peasants. But that’s not what gave the knight his edge, it was that a knight spent his whole life fighting and training and a peasant spent his whole life farming. That means in a fight between a knight and a peasant, the knight wins every time, which means that the knight can take the produce of the peasant’s farm and doesn’t have to work for a living, which allows him to spend his life fighting and training. And there’s the feudal system. Yes, the knight’s equipment is much better than the peasant’s. But that’s not his primary advantage, his primary advantage is his lifetime of training and his martial attitude. Peasant levies mostly got slaughtered when they ran away, which allows mounted troops to run them down and kill them in detail. And peasants run away because they don’t want to fight, they want to live. But running away is the worst thing you can do. And this is why ancient armies had what seems to modern eyes a fanatical emphasis on raw bravery and honor. An army that stands and fights will win and live, an army that runs away will lose and die. And so a culture evolved where running away was the ultimate shame, because armies that have this culture win and armies where soldiers believe you should run away at danger will lose. Anyway, the whole point of this is that what seem to us to be a nonsensical emphasis on personal honor and mindless courage were war-winning attitudes until rifled musketry and then machine guns made them suicidal. But you can’t train fighters since birth to disdain physical danger without also getting some unwanted side effects, like troops who will make suicidal charges. And modern troops don’t have this attitude. They have the wrong instincts. When a modern soldier’s buddy gets hit, his instinct is to take cover and yell for the medic. A medieval soldier’s instinct is to continue to march forward ignoring the incoming fire without breaking formation. The modern soldier’s instinct wins wars in the modern era, the medieval soldier’s instinct wins wars in the medieval era. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 6:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641/42 "2008-12-19T06:47:00Z")
> [@Valgard](#): > > I am no expert on medieval arms and armor but your link very specifically refers to tournament jousting armor, stating: > > “Because tournament armor was worn only a short time for a specific purpose, it was thicker and heavier to provide maximal protection for the participant.” > > That’s the only mention of people having limited mobility off their horses or needing aid to mount their horse. I’ve seen seen video of men in recreations of historical plate armor running around, doing somersaults and so forth. > > As far as 50lb shields go I have a hard time accepting that - that’s a plate 1/5" thick, 2’x3’. Nobody is going to strap that on their arm and go into a fight. I just did a quick bit of googling and found a table showing the weights of actual historical shields in a collection - not one of them is over 11lbs (that’s for a steel shield) and the majority are several pounds less. Another link mentioned the same thing as **Kinthalis** did - shields became less popular when well-built plate armor came on the scene and made the protection of a shield less necessary. > > Linky: > > [Cariadoc's Miscellany: Shield and Weapon Weights](http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/shield_and_weapon_weights.html) > > (Yes it’s for the SCA but please note the section on “Shields” and Table 2, this isn’t something that a D&D player came up with) > > I do know that swords are far lighter than most people imagine - think something on the order of 3lbs for a broadsword. Speed rules. That is correct. Plate armour was not extremely heavy (in fact, it was significantly lighter than a modern soldier’s full kit), the good ones were designed specifically so that the weight would be distributed across the whole body, and battle armour offered as much mobility as possible. The desired effect is a second skin one doesn’t even feel he’s wearing. Jousting armors didn’t need to be either mobile (you don’t dodge in Fight Club !) or lightweight (you’re not going to carry the thing for days on end), and smiths went for protection & safety over maneouvrability. The myth of knights having to be hauled onto their horses with cranes, if not 100% apocryphal, possibly stemmed from those safety-in-sports versions. Chainmail however is a different story, as even with a wide, tight belt to put some of the weight at the waist, most of it will rest on the shoulders exclusively. I’ve worn some modern lightweight chain shirts and a full hauberk once. Very tiring, and I got shoulder aches that lasted for days afterwards (but then, I’m not exactly what you’d call ripped). What needs to be understood is that plate armour wasn’t \*meant \*to take the hits head-on and absorb them, the way a bulletproof vest stops a bullet. The desired effect was to deflect swings and make them glance off, through the use of curved surfaces mostly. There was little need for thickness, except to make the armour harder to bend & deform through brute force or repeated hits. Same goes for shields. The British historians who tried to prove that their beloved longbows could really punch through armour found that out really quick into their tests, and in the end they quit firing at historical suits of armour. When they fired at flat steel plates perpendicular to the arrow’s path, the bodkin did go through at close range - but that’s cheating :p. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641/43 "2008-12-19T13:40:00Z")
Not far from where I live we have the Royall Amouries, with all the related exhibitions and stuff. > **[Homepage](https://royalarmouries.org/)** > > The Royal Armouries is a national museum dedicated to arms and armour, housing the national collection of arms and armour. They hold various practical demonstrations, you can watch a knight being dressed, and you can watch various types of rehearsed combat. You get something of a surprise when they clobber each other with war hammers, can make quite a sound, and you think that there must be at the very last some nasty bruising, or worse.Then after pummeling each other with oversized cutlery they just get up and walk off, with few signs of impacts at all. One thing that is striking though, is the mobility, you’ll see full armoured knights doing cartwheels, running, jumping somersaults and the like. Most folk have an idea of the armoured jknight as a lumbering juggernaut, when the truth is that the agility and mobility is such that the armour is hardly any sort of hinderance to movement. The main restrictions appear to be lack of vision, and endurance, although movement is not affected that much, endurance certainly is, they can usually only fight for a few minutes at a time. Medieval battlefields probably worked rather differant to the pitched melee we think of, the build up of heat and exhaustion would have been significant factors. Knights must have worked in teams, either with each other, or in specific roles where the armour was used to take the main blows whilst less well armoured but specially equipped individuals would carry out certain tasks. There would have been people pacing themselves, with groups making attacks in turn rather in one lump, someone to watch your back, someone with spear or hammer, others with shorter weapons to finish off an fallen opponent, and others - the armoured knight - to knock them down. There might even have been specialist ‘snatch’ squads whose role was to identify valuable enemy assets, to grab them for ransom or make more strategic kills. Modern armour that could provide better vision, and lighter would allow for an advantage, but it might well also leave some issues unresolved, such as equipping some combatants for specific roles. ---
**Author:** ![Rapier42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/90db22/32.png) [@Rapier42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rapier42)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2008, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641/44 "2008-12-19T15:05:54Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Interesting discussion - my original question was not about the capacities of medieval vs. modern soldiers, though … I’m assuming purely for the purposes of this exercise that our hypothetical warrior has the same martial skills as his opponents, and no access to machine-guns and the like. Only the armour is different. > > I take it that the general consensus is that the stuff could be made lighter and offer marginally better protection than say a good suit of plate, but would not be really decisively better? Yeah. The thing is, in any given historical era, armor quality moves in lockstep with weapon capabilities. Your prototypical "knight’, a horseman in the best articulated full-plate harness, is already proof against most weapons weilded by most users. There’s only three things he’s scared of - being trapped and mobbed by a group, meeting up with another knight who is better than he is, and random chance. So, yeah, there’s things we can do now to improve on his harness, make it lighter and stronger. We could probably come up with something flexible and tough to help cover the joints better, the one weak area. But even with that, it’s not going to be a huge improvement, because a well-trained warrior wearing the best armor he could get was already practically invincible. If we expand the hypothetical to include jump jets, power-assisted exoskeletons, and maybe some offensive capability (flamethrower? electrical shock capability?), then you’d probably see a serious improvement in survivability. But at that point, you may as well be driving an Abrams or piloting a mech, and I don’t think thats what you had in mind. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2008, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641/45 "2008-12-20T04:51:49Z")
> [@ivn1188](#): > > Ok, a couple of problems with this. First, harder metals don’t make better armor. Highly hardened steel is so brittle you can shatter it by dropping it on the floor. Tougher metals are what make better armor… Up to a certain point, yes, tough is better. The thing is, steel still has a better combination of properties than anything but the most exotic titanium alloys. There are examples of differentially hardened plate that show that at least some smiths of the time knew how to balance the virtues of hard vs. tough. You need at least some hardness, however, to protect against penetration and cutting. If mild steel or iron was all they wanted, they would have stuck with that. > [@](#): > > The best armor system against low-energy impacts and piercing trauma is a layered system, with a shell to prevent penetration and spread the strike out, and a buffer layer to prevent blunt trauma from energy transferred through the shell. No argument here. In fact, if you look back at what I wrote earlier, I did say that modern materials could make lighter and tougher armor if you used the right stuff in the right way. What I dispute is that it would be a game-changing difference in combat. > [@](#): > > Even polycarbonate is tough enough to withstand several blows fairly easily. I guarantee you that you can’t drive a sword or spear through a ceramic or plastic trauma plate, and those only weigh 4-6 lbs. Uh, no. Several blows doesn’t cut it. Like we discussed before, you’ve got waves of arrows coming down on you, people trying to hit you, and if you get extremely unlucky (or are one of those modern soldiers with no skills for this kind of combat) spears in the face at cantering speed if you’re on horseback. You’re probably going to have several blows to that spot in less than an hour. Battles can go on all day. While ceramic works for a hit or two, it is prone to breakage. Ceramet composites would do better, but would still be prone to chipping, and would be impossible to repair or replace once damaged. Soldiers who use body armor trade out plates that have taken hits (if they survive) and actually getting shot is relatively rare on a modern battlefield. You can’t swap out plates under these circumstances and you are virtually guaranteed to take some hits. Besides, did you try to work out how much scaling up that kind of protection to the whole body would work? Let’s take a mid-size plate. That’s about 6 lbs. for 10 inches by 12 inches of protection. And most trauma plates are about half an inch (12–13 mm) thick. Compare that to 1.2–1.4 mm for 16 to 18 gauge steel, which is about what most plate used. Your armor is going to be on the heavy side, and it’s going to be bulky. Even using the same materials with a different design, instead of taking stuff off the shelf as it were, you’re still going to have to get pretty creative to get something that works better than the materials they used for historical armor. It’s not that you can’t do it — I think we could make some kick-ass armor with modern stuff used the right way — but your examples so far have all been based on flawed thinking. > [@](#): > > As far as arrows go, your ideas are completely backwards. Arrows have a kinetic energy of about 60 foot pounds for a modern arrow fired from a compound bow. A regular .30-06 round has around 2600 foot pounds of kinetic energy. Even so, arrows can in some cases penetrate better than bullets, because they have a much higher sectional density… You’re actually right here. I was mixing up momentum and kinetic energy. The heavier but slower moving arrow retains more momentum at impact than a bullet at the same range, but does not have more kinetic energy. I should have referred back to [this page](http://www.stortford-archers.org.uk/medieval.htm) that I found a while back when I was looking for information on exactly how powerful war bows were. Modern archery doesn’t map well to historical equipment, by the way. However, your value of 2600 ft/lbs. is presumably measured at the muzzle. At 200–300 yards, it would be lower, somewhere between 2040 and 1700 ft/lbs. Two hundred yards would be about the range archers would engage. Ranges closer than about 100 yards would be problematic for tactical and practical reasons, and much farther than 200 yards they start losing effectiveness. You should compare like to like, so you have to take distance into consideration. That’s sort of a side issue though. No one disputes that firearms were the factor that led to the abandonment of armor, or that modern firearms could penetrate medieval armor. I don’t even dispute that modern fabrication techniques and materials could provide great armor that would be lighter, stronger, and easier to use than historical armor, though I do think it would be a lot harder than you believe. The problem still comes down to training, skills, and mindset. You cannot teach any of those things in a month. You might be able to do it in a year or two. Possibly. I don’t know why people have this blithe assumption that the skills, knowledge, and intelligence of people of the past was inferior to our own. They were people just like us, living in different circumstances. The fighting men of the time were experts in their field. To say that a modern soldier can learn in one month what they spent their lives doing is like saying that the difference between one field of study and another is trivial. If someone said, “Oh, he has an MBA already, so it should only take a month for him to learn what he needs for this engineering project,” you’d look at him like he was insane. It’s even worse than that, actually, since it’s not just knowledge but skills that need to be acquired. Fighting is like any other athletic pursuit; you need proper training and lots and lots of practice to get better at it. A hobbyist fencer will completely destroy a novice with only a couple of months of practice under his belt. Someone who has been riding horses since childhood is a far better rider than someone who just mounted one last year. These are just two of the skills you’d need to fight in an historical battle. It’s really more like picking up a sport like the decathlon and expecting to compete in a couple of months. Yes, teamwork would matter, but individual skill would play a much larger part than you’d think. Moving as a group in formation is also a difficult skill, which would be complicated by psychological factors on the battlefield. If all you wanted was infantry, I’d say to get a bunch of guys who played football and spend about 6 months to a year training them. You’d probably have some decent foot soldiers by that time. Well, at least they _probably_ wouldn’t get killed in the first rush. Knights on the other hand… If you’ve watched the Lord of the Rings movies, you probably noticed that the actors didn’t use their shields and were generally just waving their swords around, or were charging forward with their spear points bouncing around all over the place. In the extras for the extended version, they related the difficulty a group of experienced and enthusiastic riders had just in learning to ride in formation. They practiced it for weeks, and it still looked pretty ragged even on what were presumably the best takes used for the film. Learning to deal with a shield, sword or spear, and ride in formation at the same time would have taken them months at minimum, and probably years of practice. And they already knew how to ride very well. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-armour-medieval-war/477641.md?page=2)