Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Dan Howard]

This is going to sound repetitive, but the results from the testing I have done along with Prof. Greg Aldrete over the past two or more years were completely opposite to everything you claim.

<snip> How bizarre. I find it hard to believe that simply varying the quality of the cloth could produce such disparate results. FWIW I used 16 layers of fairly expensive tablecloth linen. I'll have to dig up the type of thread and weave. What glue did you use?

I realize there is no explicit evidence for laminated linen armor thus far, and you have also made it clear that there are precedents for quilted cloth armor in other cultures, but as far as I know there is no mention that the Greeks or any other ancient Mediterranean peoples wore textile armor that was quilted.

So? Cloth armour has been used for thousands of years and I can think of two passages from any culture that actually describes its method of manufacture. One is in Arabic and the other is in French. It is hardly unusual for a passage to neglect to tell the reader how a type of armour is made.

For our tests we have also found every artistic representation of type IV armor found in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (nearly 1,000 examples so far). Many have used what looks to be a kind of quilted armor on the vases as evidence for its existence, but when the entire body of vase paintings from the CVA is examined the number of the so-called 'quilted armor' examples is a tiny fraction of the smooth-looking, 'not-quilted' types. Though this is admittedly a featherweight argument, it does add another slight bit of weight for the argument against quilting.

It is no argument at all unless you can demonstrate that all the illustrations were done by the same artist. Every artist has his own way of illustrating things. Some might choose to show the stitching, others may not.

....two Dozen references in the literature? Could you list these please?.......

Yes please.

Edit: didn't we just have a big thread about the likelihood of at least some of these type IV's being made of leather/rawhide?