Differences Between Scale and Lamellar Armours

Users who are viewing this thread

Redstone Knight

Grandmaster Knight
Yes laminar armour has shoulder guards and scale armour is like chain armor but both of them was produced with small plates and I could confuse them. Maybe this is happening due to my searches ? I couldn't find any real pictures (high resolution or drawings) about scale armors. Everything is fictional.

Welp.
 
They differ by the way the plates were attached, with scale armour working like fish scale, with each plate being perforated in top part, creating overlapping rows, and requiring something you sew them onto (leather jacket or something), while lamellar armours were created of plates perforated top and bottom, so top plates were attached to bottom without need of a padding underneath to hold it together.
 
ZBCAQrP.jpg
 
It depends. Lamellar was used a lot in medieval central Asia and Iran (who had to deal with central Asians). Lamellar was better at deflecting arrows and could be placed away from the body, like on shoulderpads and leg sections, while mail has to be close to the skin, which required a lot of padding -- not ideal in Iran or on a horse

Plate armour is unviable in a lot of places anyway due to cost, difficulty of production, lack of resources and other things, and tended to get replaced by mail in many cases. There's a reason the romans gave up on lorica segmentata.
 
Scale and Lamellar armours are effective, it just depends how well the equipment is put together on the person and the quality of the piece. People tend to like chainmail better because the armour is produced as a one-size-fits-all mesh. Unlike properly made Scale and Lamellar pieces which require the owner's measurements. If you look around Druzhina's sources, there are some bible pictures of soldiers clad in scale.
 
so only difference is bind points. Also could you sent some pictures if you have (I understood nothing on biblical picture) ? I have found something but most of them are replica ones or different (some of them is like mail shirt and some of them is like lamellar vest).

Thanks.
 
jacobhinds said:
Bible characters also wore gothic plate, accoring to medieval illustrations. It was the fashion at the time to depict people in the past with "modern" equipment. Didn't mean it was anything they actually wore at the time.
It was because of fashion? I thought it was ignorance, kinda like the movie industry.
 
No, for example, they had a general idea of what bronze/iron-age warriors would have worn and what their warfare was like, because some more adventurous artists did a kind of exotic hybrid between the two time periods. For example, here's Alexander the great fighting a dragon (lol) with those roman leather shoulder strap things and a weird helmet that looks vaguely boetian:
Alexander-fighting_2044318b.jpg

And heres goliath wearing some weird bronze armour with a scale skirt:
06d598319774d402e5d0b620ab8523ab.jpg

I reckon many of these assumptions would have come from existing roman sculptures and archways.
 
Redstone Knight said:
Also could you sent some pictures if you have (I understood nothing on biblical picture) ? I have found something but most of them are replica ones or different (some of them is like mail shirt and some of them is like lamellar vest).
Here are some useful links:
Georgian Soldiers on an Icon from Shemokmedi, 11th century, in lamellar armour
attachment.php

Hidden Church (Sakli Kilise) c.1070, Cappadocia, Turkey, showing Byzantine Costume & Soldiers, by Steven Lowe
A soldier in scale armour in 'Scenes from the life of St. John' in an Apocalypse, England, c. 1250-1260
attachment.php

Emperor Maximilian I's "The Adventures of the Knight Theuerdank", 1517 includes scale helmets in Theuerdank Image 79.
Lamellar armour in Armies of the Dark Ages 600-1066, by Ian Heath

I will gather some more, but I can only access the Taleworlds Forum from a different computer now that Cloudflare is being used, so it may be a while.

Druzhina
Illustrations of Costume & Soldiers
 
I think it was indeed ignorance of fashion which lead in many cases to anachronistic depictions of warriors - especially in the Early and High Middle Ages. Of course not everyone was as ignorant to progress and development.
First of all it is important to consider that the Middle Ages are a period (roughly 1000 years!) of great innovation and progress in technical but also in intellectual and spiritual thinking. Depictions of ancient warriors in the late Renaissance are much more likely to be influenced by a concept of armamental (real word?) development than depictions in the early 14th century.

Another point would be the information given to the artist. The best example would be indeed Goliath whose weapons and armour are explicitly described in the respective passage of the bible. The armour of other heroes like
Lechfeld1457.jpg
isn't described as well or not at all. So an artist in the 15th century would more likely depict contemporary warriors.

An artist first and for all was an artist and not a historian. He worked with what he knew and created what he was ordered to create. So when he had a few patterns for knights he wouldn't hesitate to use them for every chivalrous character he seemed them fitting to (and this is btw. a serious problems for historians when working with pictorial sources ...). 
 
I would imagine that a stabbing attack with an acute point againt scale armour could get caught between scales and penetrate the layer of material the scales are attached to, where it would simply glide off lamellar. I do believe that given the lacing lamellar armour is more difficult to maintain, especially after a good beating or wet/bad weather.


An additional and very important asset mail has over plate though is ease of transportation and equipping it. To store mail you need a relatively small box, preferrably with some oiled cloth around it. To store plate... Well, large coffers! Additionally to don mail armour you put on a gambeson, lace it, and put on the equivalent of a heavy and clumsy t-shirt. It takes a couple of seconds, but bam, you are fully armed. To get dressed in plate armour quickly you need a helping hand or two with the dozens of straps and laces, and you won't be ready in a minute or two.

Now imagine an army on the march which is ambushed. Everyone gets into his armour as quickly as possible, or something at least (if you weren't prepared for hostile contact, and not marching in armour, that is). People with mail are ready in under a minute if they are alert, and are ready to fight. People with plate armour need a lot more time and will fight with an incomplete suit most likely.
 
RC-1136 said:
And this is why armies often marched fully armoured when in enemy territory. Be it Roman legionaries or late Medievel men-at-arms.
That sounds highly uncomfortable and tiring for those with better armour, especially in particularly good or bad weather. I think you might've travelled prepared to armour up, arming coats already on, weapons and armour at hand, and that you would use your scouts, vanguard and rearguard to buy you time to get dressed for battle.

Only rarely did an army march in full battle gear. It's very, very bad for the equipment itself (as Henry V at Agincourt would know, he'd been marching his men in armour for a few days/weeks given that they were actively chased) and it also tires your men dramatically.
 
That's the downside - and evidence for such a practice. Scouts alone don't always work well against ambushes.

I have done some academic research regarding knighthood in the Late Middle Ages (late 15th c. to very early 16th - HRE and beyond) and as far as I can remember from the sources the armament before battle is very seldom mentioned. When on campaign fighters always seem to have been in some kind of equipment. Sometimes it is even considered strange when an army is approaching without having armoured infantry at all. In other cases men-at-arms (in German "Reisige") even downgrade their (leg) armour when unhorsing and joining the infantry.

The best known example for being armoured on the march would be the Roman Army. I'm a living-history-guy myself and have had my share of armoured (legionary - hours) and unarmoured marching (celtic auxillary - three weeks). See it this way: Modern soldiers carry even more equipment than medieval knights or even Roman legionaries and they are just fine :wink:
The greatest difficulty for us were the shoes and not the weight of the equipment.
 
I suppose it depends on how dangerous the army felt their location was. Perhaps also on what the alternative to wearing the armour was- if you don't have carts on which to dump it, every soldier would have to carry it somehow, and then the only benefit they would get to not wearing it would be that it wasn't exposed to the elements or sweat (if indeed those are really significant problems; the Romans obviously were able to get away with it. Was that because they had ways of cleaning mail or keeping it clean in the field?).

Roran 13 said:
I would imagine that a stabbing attack with an acute point againt scale armour could get caught between scales and penetrate the layer of material the scales are attached to, where it would simply glide off lamellar.

The thing is, how is the blade going to get between the overlapping scales? You would have to be stabbing from almost a 90 degree angle to the ground, which just wouldn't happen in combat. Besides, at such an angle I think the upper scale would get punched off the material rather than the blade hitting the fabric (if it was the type of scale attached to fabric; there seem to have been some where ovoid scales were linked by a backing of mail).
 
Back
Top Bottom