12-11-2009, 12:03 PM
Quote:It does make one wonder just how it was used on a shield for I'm sure it would not have taken much of a blow to have completely destroyed it, might we then begin to think along the lines of removable parade items. This begins to open up a new line of thought about the infantry also having parade kit similar to the cavalry soldier.
The evolution of the 'parade' shield boss continues apace from highly decorated into undecorated and very thin! There is an explanation for these seemingly impractical items and that is lamination: the thin copper-alloy boss is an outer skin for another one underneath. Sounds daft? I would have said so until I saw one of the sets of scale armour from the Carlisle Millennium site (not the famous one with neatly shaped scales, mostly ferrous but some of copper alloy) but one with only crude shaping attempted and which had additional thin (0.5mm) copper-alloy scales attached over the front of some (can't tell if it was all, originally) of the ferrous (1mm-thick) scales. No attempt was made to fasten the copper-alloy facings to the ferrous scale other than the usual wires you would expect of semi-rigid scale armour, so they would have rattled around loosely on the front (and of course been an instant cause of bimetallic electrolytic corrosion, since you could not take the things off to clean them or reach underneath them very effectively.
This chunk of scale is reminiscent of the alternately tinned scales of the Ham Hill armour, a measure that was decorative rather than practical - incidentally another of the sets of scale from Carlisle, still wrapped around a breastplate, alternated one complete copper-alloy scale with every three ferrous, so again a purely decorative effect. So putting a copper-alloy facing over an underlying ferrous boss would not be surprising and can explain such thin bosses without any recourse to 'parade' armour.
Mike Bishop
