Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Study Impact of Wearing Medieval Armor
FoolishOwl writes "Scientists at the University of Leeds tested the effects of wearing heavy medieval armor by monitoring volunteers, who were experienced medieval reenactors, as they walked and ran on treadmills, while wearing accurate replicas of 15th century armor. While the suits of armor weighed between 30 and 50 kg, comparable to the weight of gear carried by modern soldiers, volunteers who carried equivalent amounts of weight in backpacks had an easier time with the weight. Volunteers in armor burned more energy and had difficulty breathing. The scientists speculate that much of the additional effort was due to weight of armor on the legs — leg armor was one of the first things dropped in the shift towards lighter armor in the 16th century. While it has long been assumed that heavy medieval armor limited mobility, and that this contributed to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, this was the first study to quantify the impact of wearing heavy armor."
While it has long been assumed that heavy medieval armor limited mobility, and that this contributed to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415
Nonsense. It's well established that being French contributes to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt. The effects of armor is minor in comparison.
There's a reason why good-quality backpacks have a strap that wraps around the waist - the pelvis is capable of comfortably supporting a large amount of weight, and that is why the weight of backpacks is best supported there. Medieval armour supports it all over the body, causing body-wide muscle fatigue. From the article: "We were interested to find out why that was - and one of the main reasons is that if you wear a suit of armour, a lot of the weight is carried on the legs - about 7-8kg of it."
ne miles on a treadmill are you effing joking".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdfx7l4z5cQ
Who knew scientist suffered from too much game of thrones.
didn't seem to help the Black Knight much.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I though that knights rode horses. I doubt that they did very much jogging.
No sooner do I get over one, then you put a better one right next to me. Bastards.
Well, I am going to turn on my brain ( you forgot to, it seems ), and apply logic and reasoning.
Being an experienced medieval reenactor means that person is experienced in wearing and moving around in, medieval armor. If you were going to study the effects of wearing heavy armor, would it not make sense to use test subjects who know how to use said armor, in the way it was used, in the 14th century?
See, how hard was that? Using your brain is not as difficult as you thought, stop being lazy and use it.
Scientists study the impact of wearing a wizard hat while yelling "Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!"
Japanese samurai armor looks much more comfortable, with the joints being unhindered and the armor plating hanging loose, while still offering a comparable degree of protection. Then Roman and Greek armor look increasingly comfortable while protecting less, but that must have been vital given the climes of those locales.
Maybe interest level. "Volunteers wanted for research, wear armor and run on a treadmill!" got no takers at the local McDonalds, wheras they got all the volunteers they needed in 2 mins at a rennisance festival.
Also it probably helps to have people who have worn armor before are familiar with how they're supposed to fit, how they can move in them, how they put it on.
At the -very- least, it's an important methods note. You wouldn't publish a drug trial study and leave out the fact that you used mice.
Disclaimer; the SCA does medievalISH combat with rules and equipment for safety; it's not authentic medieval fight styles, and there are other groups (like WMA) that focus on things like 15th century German fechtbuchs and who have more authority to speak on authentically historical modes and styles of combat.
That said, the SCA does swordfighting at full speed and often with full power (depending on the area), and there are some strong similarities with historical combat. The sticks used (for safety reasons) are roughly the same weight as the historical swords, and there's a strong social pressure to wear armour that is both save and as authentic as possible. Thus, there's a couple things I can comment on from personal experience. First, metal armour on limbs *noticeably* slows down shots. We accept plastic plates as long as they're covered ("best effort to look good" is the standard), so people will fight with plastic covered in canvas or leather, and there is a well-known tradeoff in the SCA between "looking good" in shiny metal armour and having the best possible speed.
I just finished building a fairly close replica of 14th century coat-of-plates armour. I had been using (poorly disguised) plastic before, and the difference when wearing 25 pounds of overlapping plates is quite noticeable. I look much better, of course, but I also work harder, sweat more, and need to take more breaks. The weight's all on my shoulders, so it's not wearing my legs out, but there's a noticeable weight when I'm moving. I recently got metal gauntlets, and they're noticeable as well; the hands move slower when there's a pound or two of metal on them. I hate to reference anime, but you know how Goku wears the heavy arm and leg weights in Dragonball Z? There's some truth to that; even the fat SCA fighters have bulkier shoulders and larger arms. (actually wearing weights around all day will just screw up your joints, by the way; it's the holding-heavy-things-out-from-your-body that does it)
There's a reason armour was attached where it was in the middle ages; suspending legs from a belt takes at least some of the weight off the legs when moving.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Now, let's test the impact of backpacks versus suits of armor on surviving a barrage of arrows.
...they just need more points in Athletics.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Speaking as an ex-"reenactor" (Society for Creative Anachronism, http://www.sca.org/ I can offer the following firsthand observations:
1. The quality of fitting to the individual is probably the single most important factor in how burdensome a given suit of armor is, from the point of view of the ability to move quickly. Leggings are by far the hardest to fit correctly; they also tend to shift around the most in response to movement, so a good fitting can become a bad fitting very quickly.
2. In melee combat, the legs are hit far more often than any target other than the head. Leg armor may be encumbering, but when it comes to hand to hand combat you can't do without it.
3. When faced with archers, an unshielded fighter takes it in the arms and torso more than anywhere else.
4. Breathing difficulties are usually caused by poor ventilation in a closed-face helm, or a side effect of heat. Which brings us to:
5. Overheating is what is going to exhaust you. You're wearing not just armor, but heavy padding as well. The number one factor an SCA medic sees at a large battle is overwhelmingly heat exhaustion/heatstroke/dehydration.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
In theory, at least, the weight and unwieldy nature of the armor may have mattered less to the nobles who were most likely to wear it, simply because they rode into battle on horseback. As such, they didn't need to support themselves the whole time. The problem of the leg armor in particular largely disappears when on horseback (assuming of course that the horse itself can manage the weight).
If and when they fell off their horse, or said horse was put down, *then* they could be in trouble. But my understanding is that foot soldiers were usually more interested in capturing nobles and holding them for ransom, rather than killing them outright. It was probably far more important that they be able to weather the rain of arrows and the attacks of other horse-bound noblemen.
Doubtful that full suits of armor were issued to the infantry. For one thing, they were extremely expensive.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No I meant the Napoleonic Wars where France had the whole world on the run for almost 20 years.
"Napoleon was born in Corsica to parents of noble Genoese ancestry", so he was actually Italian not French. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon
Corsica was ruled by Genoa (part of Italy) for 400 or so years, had a 20-something year rebellion, 15 or so years of independence and was then conquered by France shortly before Napoleon was born. Its constitution was written in Italian and Italian was the dominant language long after Napoleon's death.
Before commencer à la flamme please note the ":-)". Yes, Napoleon was born in French territory and was therefore a French citizen.
What's interesting is that modern sports combat based on western martial arts -- meaning sword and shield, full metal armor, but using modern materials -- has shifted over to using things like 6061-T6 aluminum to keep things light. Also Underarmor sweat wicking clothing (seriously). For instance, the SCA, which is interested in individuals or groups meeting in competitive combat rather than a specific battle from a particular time or place. A good deal of effort is put into finding lightweight armor that still protects your bones.
Now comes the twist: It's actually thicker and more durable, because nobody likes to hammer out their armor each week after (or during) fighter practice. So it actually lasts much much longer under a barrage of blows, but is still roughly the same weight. Apparently it's a reasonable weight to fight in, and what you can now take out with modern materials, people are adding back for durability.
Check out http://www.zoombang.com/ for really out there modern armor designed for medieval non-edged combat.
obSemiOffTopic: Deep bruises are just part of the sport -- my wife is very careful to point out early in doctor visits that she's involved in full contact martial arts. Especially as she's 5 foot and petite and I'm 6'3" and huge; we already had one nurse freak out and send me out to have a talk with her about reporting domestic violence. She now carries photos on her phone of herself in armor, holding her helm and grinning happily, just to fend off people who get the wrong idea.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Since we don't have medieval knights these days, I would say those who have had some experience wearing armor would probably be better at this exercise than those who have no experience.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
[better_off_ted] What? Everyone knows that war is coming! [/better_off_ted]
I thought this was going to be about the socio- and psychological impacts.
I somehow doubt that you can make a representative study of how knights in the Middle Age (you know, the ones whose almost only duty / job was to fight for his lord and who trained during his life for that) by using some modern people, who might be fit but will need a serious training to get used to it. Not to mention all of the know-how about using the armour lost during the centuries.
As a sidenote, the simplest explanation to the fact that the first armor to be eliminated was the armor of the legs may be just that there are no vital organs in the leg, so an injury there is less likely to be lethal.
Why can't
In theory it means that they are used to the weight of the armour. I call BS, though. A medieval knight would train to fight in armour for 6-8 hours a day since he was old enough to spit. These guys put it on and stand around doing nothing much for a few hours a day. The whole idea that we can tell how well a medieval person supported armour weight by using modern untrained people is very suspect.
While an actual medieval knight would surely have outperformed a modern re-enactor that is not terribly relevant. An actual medieval knight would still have improved his personal performance by switching to a modern backup. The modern backpack doesn't rely on muscle, it relies on a physiological structure that has not really changed in the last few centuries - well perhaps scale has changed but not essential structure.
Scientists Study Impact of Wearing Medieval Armor
And, this being slashdor, I expected to see a story about global warming and the effect that armor had on it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"It's like bringing a longbow to a sword fight!"
The entire premise of the war was a lie, and you got your ass handed to you as a result. Man up and admit it for once.
Incurable virginity.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Slashdor is right between Gondor and Mordor...
It's somewhat sensible to use reenactors instead of random people from the street, but reenactors are hobbyists, and not real medieval soldiers. A knight trained to fight in armour would probably be quite a bit stronger and tougher than your average reenactor.
Except that China will manufacture it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
you can not just take, random geeks. even ones that "quote" play at mock combat. and test them, and compare that to a medieval warrior Knight. Form almost, all of these warriors it was a full time job, meaning they where in shape for it. otherwise, they would have died in combat....
It controls for experience. Random people off the street might be more or less able to move around in armor, all depending on how quickly they take to it. It could have been possible that wearing armor which distributes weight evenly is no more tiring than wearing a backpack, but because the volunteers weren't familiar with armor, they would expend more energy for that reason.
Also, it's not possible to go out and get real knights, because we haven't finished the time machine yet. Reenactors are the best next thing.
The medieval blokes wearing the bespoke armor fared much better than the poor bastards wearing that cheap outsourced shit from War-mour Mart.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Ah. I always wondered how the English won at Bannockburn, and why the Duchy of Burgundy extends from Belgium all the way down to Italy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One does not just walk in Armor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
....back then?
A friend is a history professor and he has a story (apocryphal?) about a history professor who had an exact-size copy made of some 13th century king's armor from his teens (Richard the Lionhearted?), and the armor was a good fit on a modern football linebacker.
Anyway, the idea is that the elite soldiers -- from nobility, raised to fight from a young age, the best possible diet for the era (high in protein) -- were in outstanding physical condition and very, very strong. The armor the football player put on was for a teenager, so the thinking is the adult sized armor was even larger and the actual adult who filled it was bigger than a football player (who are all really huge).
My friend has told me this story more than once, I need to pin him down on facts. But it's an interesting story.
I'm pretty sure that the motivation for this experiment was to settle a long-standing argument about D&D encumbrance rules.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
While it has long been assumed that heavy medieval armor limited mobility, and that this contributed to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415
Nonsense. It's well established that being French contributes to the outcome of battles, such as the Battle of Agincourt. The effects of armor is minor in comparison.
Actually, the English won at Agincourt (despite being outnumbered) because they had longbows. The battle signals the end of the era of the mounted knight and the rise of the infantry revolution, one of a few fundamental shifts in warfare. (Basic Training [Romans]; Infantry [Longbows shoot through armor]; Gunpowder [major infrastructure required], Modern [Machine Gun, Mechanized Warfare, WMDs]). It also made nationalism more important--you needed the loyalty of the people with the longbows, not just of the people wealthy enough to own armor.
Agincourt is also the battle Shakespeare wrote his "Band of Brothers" bit for--in a play which Data performed on the holodeck for Captain Picard. (The scene where the King is going hidden among his subjects.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
'The US wasn't scared of France then.' no they where too busy repainting the White house to care.
Interestingly, US Schools teach that the British torched the White House, but they usually omit that it was done in retaliation for the U.S.'s burning the houses of Parliament in Canada--which is why the Canadian capital was moved to Ottawa.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
reenactors are hobbyists, and not real medieval soldiers...
I feel a great disturbance, as if millions of SCA fans reached out in terror...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I believe that the knights were required to buy their own armor. And if you could afford that, you could probably afford a horse too.
Generally, but there were many times they did not have horses. For example, during one of the crusades it is estimated that tens of thousands of horses left Europe and effectively none made it back alive. The knights who survived, if they kept their armor, walked in it.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Besides the Battle of Agincourt, which proved that armored knights on horseback was no match for large formation of well-train longbow archers, I think another battle nearly 100 years later--the Battle of Cerignola in southern Italy--proved that full-body armor of the time was useless against the then-new gunpowder firearm, the harquebus gun.
Modern medieval armor wearers cant get laid.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I never would have thought wearing around 110 pounds of pot metal and swinging a 10 pound metal sword like your life depended on it would cause fatigue. Fascinating, no really!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
So the weight on the legs didn't matter.
It is a known fact that plate armour and leathers were only worn when in hand-to-hand combat, and chainmail was worn to stop arrows or bolts.
That'd be silly. Mail is awful at stopping arrows, but pretty good at deflecting sword blows.
Also, it's awfully inconvenient to change your armour in the middle of a battle.
Against a piercing weapon like an arrow, bolt or war pick chainmail is just a whole load of holes held together by wire. You'd be better off not wearing it at all - you'd at least have a chance of dodging behind cover.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
It also controls for people who are going to fall on the floor and scream like a little girl the first time they feel the weight of the armour on their back muscles...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
A knight trained to fight in armour would probably be quite a bit stronger and tougher than your average reenactor.
There is actually quite a bit of debate about this. The question is actually quite complicated (involving diet, modern athletic training techniques, medical science and a few other factors). The conclusion generally reached is that you are correct. Most knights were stronger and tougher than your average reenactor. However, it is unlikely that they used average reenactors for this study. More likely they used guys from ARMA (Association of Rennasiance Martial Arts). There are a significant number of guys in ARMA who are equivalent to the highest level practitioners of eastern martial arts. Some of them even do it professionally. Those guys are probably comparable to your average medieval knight.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The saying is "If you can't get laid at Pennsic, you can't get laid." (Pennsic is an annual gathering of SCA members from all around the world).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Does ARMA train in period armour? Most HEMA schools (including mine) tend to train without armour, and spar with modern, lighter armour.
So I suppose the Soviets didn't lose in Afghanistan either then?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I am not sure on this. However, I do know that many ARMA practitioners study the training manuals that can be found from the time period and use the training methods described in them (they, also, study other writings from the period that reveal training methods and fighting techniques from the period).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I think someone like Richard the Lionheart was probably the excepion to the rule. If you look at most suits of armour in museums they look quite small by modern standards.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it