Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Matt Lukes]

Oh of course, nothing precludes it save for serious lack- I doubt if the North American plains native peoples used much fish glue, for example, but the Greeks- surely! The thing is that swim bladder glue is used for bows because it's quite elastic while being strong- the swim bladder expands and contracts quite a lot, so has very elastic collagens and elastomers- not because it's waterproof. I understand bows were covered with birch bark, various skins, etc. to protect them. But then a composite bow is a very complex object and that's what makes it work as it does- armour doesn't necessarily have such need. Armour is the last line of defense afterall- moving out of the way, one's shield and one's own weapons parrying all come first and constitute the vast majority of defense. Considering body armour to be necessarily complicated and sophistocated is not necessarily reasonable. Note how many peoples fought with virtually none or even naked- clearly armour wasn't the end all be all. I have no trouble with composite armour- but the glue?

The problem seems to stem from the observation that in many depictions the shoulder 'flaps' are up, thus suggesting the armour is flexible, which seems perfectly reasonable, and indeed multi-laminar glued linen is very good defense- but only when dry. Why then has it propogated as 'fact'? Because, like so many theories, it's described as fact in some books, and then later on TV, etc. It amazes me how much fairly far-fetched or dubious theory is stated factually in print...

And there are no pictures- there's nothing to see, just delaminated linen LOL I simply wanted to see if it would happen as I expected and it did.