The title says it all; in the courses I took I was taught that Lorica Segmentata was more effective; but common sense that we know what Romans called mail armor, what they called their gambesons and the fact that mail dominated before and after segmentata and that it may have been the majority armor during it's two centuries of use tell me that there is more to it.
So here goes the main question; how does Lorica Segmentata do against the weapons available to Rome's enemies and is Lorica Hamata a better armor?
How do you define "better"? LS would have been cheaper and faster to produce than mail, which is probably why it was developed in the first place, it is lighter than mail, and it provides better protection against blunt trauma. Against other types of damage there likely wasn't a lot of difference between any of the metal armours that the Romans wore. But mail has a lot of other benefits: easier to fit to a range of body sizes, easier to store and transport, easier to repair and maintain both in the field and in the shop, less spare parts are needed, it covers more of the body, it seems to be more comfortable, it is faster to put on and take off, it has a longer lifespan.
Quote:The title says it all; in the courses I took I was taught that Lorica Segmentata was more effective; but common sense that we know what Romans called mail armor, what they called their gambesons and the fact that mail dominated before and after segmentata and that it may have been the majority armor during it's two centuries of use tell me that there is more to it.
So here goes the main question; how does Lorica Segmentata do against the weapons available to Rome's enemies and is Lorica Hamata a better armor?
Hi - have you done a search of the previous posts before asking this question? There's a lot which has already been discussed about this.
Moi Watson
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, Merlot in one hand, Cigar in the other; body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming "WOO HOO, what a ride!
Lorica Segmentata provided better protection in the shoulders. It uses lower quality iron however. Against blunt trauma or an arrow strike, it probably does better.
Lorica Squamata and Hamata provide better coverage to the arms and thighs. They are more flexible so they don't dent apart to something like a Falx but absorb and reform a piercing blow.
Quote:Lorica Segmentata provided better protection in the shoulders. It uses lower quality iron however.
Not sure what the justification for that last statement is, but David Sim's metallographic analyses of original segmentata plates shows them to be of very good quality steel with few slag inclusions. In fact, he rates it more highly than Renaissance plate armour :-)
Mike Bishop
You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles
Remember equipment was standardized like a factory. Factories centralized by governments only existed in the 4th century(Fabricae). In the 2nd centuries, arms making was made in Legion forts in a privatized form. That is the primary reason why the Galea went out of service. The rivited Ridge helmet was simpler to standardize. Segmentata was harder to repair and standarize to the level of comfortability of the individual soldier.
My assumtion is most Hamata was better quality because the process of making wire is harder with low quality iron.
I'm not sure that Roman mail was ever made from low quality iron. It seems that a lot, if not all of their wire was made with the use of a drawplate. You can't pull low quality iron through a drawplate without it constantly breaking. The iron has to be highly refined so that the slag is finely distributed throughout the metal. The other problem with making mail from poor quality iron is that it can delaminate when you try piercing the link with a drift.
The Lorica Segmentata is mostly made of soft steel right? David Slim says some are case hardened steel however. The Lorica Segmentata is no means small plates. Like Mail it needs to be rivitted as well. All that overlapping in perfect articulation needs a lot of plates and would be costly. Also creating such plates needs the infrastructure. The reason why plate armor didn't come in till later.
For all the discussions of the effectiveness of one armor over another, the general assumption seems to be that things are equal for all the vast logistical, technical, administrative, accounting, and financial support issues. Plate iron/steel takes larger chunks reliably mined, processed, paid for and supplied logistically. You could punch tiny rings out of scrap, for instance. Skill levels and labor supply also factor in. Shame we don't have copies of invoices and contracts for this stuff.
Richard Campbell
Legio XX - Alexandria, Virginia
RAT member #6?
Mail was made from highly refined bloomery iron. It actually takes more work at the smelter to produce low carbon iron than it does to get high carbon steel, and then you have to get pretty much all of the slag out and finely distribute what is left. Then you have to pull hundreds of feet of it through a draw plate multiple times (the last few passes are over two thousand feet each). The amount of labour required just to produce the length of wire to make a hamata (around two and a half thousand feet of highly refined iron) exceeds the amount of labour required to make a completed segmentata. Then you have the labour required to produce tens of thousands of links and then you have the labour required to assemble all of those links. Mail armour was by far the most expensive and time consuming type of armour ever invented in the ancient world, yet the Romans used it continuously before, during, and after the relatively brief time that segmentata was in use.
Quote:Remember equipment was standardized like a factory. Factories centralized by governments only existed in the 4th century(Fabricae). In the 2nd centuries, arms making was made in Legion forts in a privatized form. That is the primary reason why the Galea went out of service. The rivited Ridge helmet was simpler to standardize. Segmentata was harder to repair and standarize to the level of comfortability of the individual soldier.
My assumtion is most Hamata was better quality because the process of making wire is harder with low quality iron.
Galea means helmet. Are you stating helmets stopped being used by Romans? When was this?
There seem to be quite a number of statements made in this discussion for which no definitive sources have been given. There is a great deal that we do not know about Roman armour - there is an ongoing discussion still concerning precisely who wore the various types. So far as I am aware, only David Sim's work has shed any real light on what might have been the case. He has made and tested replica armours and the results thereto have been published in a number of academic journals, e.g. Britannia. One of the things he discovered was that the plates used for the armour were of a remarkable consistency as to their thickness - suggesting to him that they plates were either rolled, or flattened with hammers with larger surface heads. This would have speeded up production to a serious degree. David also did a "time-and-motion" study of the ring-mail armour and came to the conclusion that the effort needed to equip a full legion with this type would amount to several million man-hours!
What is certain is that lorica segmentata armour was used from the last decade of the 1st century BC to the last quarter of the 3rd century AD - very near to three centuries of continuous use and development. If the gear was not effective, then I doubt very much that the Roman army would have bothered with it at all. It was used in all theatres, from Britannia to Germania, Dacia, Raetia, Pannonia and the north African provinces, to name but a few.
It should also be remembered that the armour was used in conjunction with the helmet. It seems clear that there was a gradual change in the shape of the Imperial Gallic type of helmet in that the rear neck guard because steadily larger and more angled downward, culminating in the 'G', 'H' and 'I' types. This was accompanied with an increased slope of the brow guard, so that neck and brow guards remained parallel. I think it was the late Peter Connolly who first suggested that this indicated that the Roman squaddie fought from a crouched position and that these increasingly sloped helmets' neck guards added a further layer of protection over the shoulder area. Mike Bishop has pointed out that the main function of the segmentata type of armour was that it provided excellent protection for the shoulders of the soldier.
Mail armour was certainly heavier than the plate armour. It seems to be generally accepted that this type of armour had Celtic origins and that its primary function was to protect against slashing blows, not the stabbing action that Roman infantrymen were trained to with the gladius Hispaniensis swords. The loose hamata armour would serve to spread the force of the blow. It would still hurt, but at least the wearer would survive. A stabbing action, however, could easily punch through a butt-joined ring, whereas the curved surface of the plate armour would serve to deflect such a blow.
What would be really neat would be for someone to do a proper scientific study of the effectiveness of the different types of armour, using identical weapons under exactly the same conditions. Remember that effective science is done where the experiment has only one independent variable (here the type of armour). The different armours would also have to be accurate reproductions of the Roman ones - not the over-engineered versions used by re-enactors. Anyone?
Mike Thomas
(Caratacus)
visne scire quod credam? credo orbes volantes exstare.
Quote:David also did a "time-and-motion" study of the ring-mail armour and came to the conclusion that the effort needed to equip a full legion with this type would amount to several million man-hours!
It certainly would take a long time but Sim's figures are probably overestimated. The steps to making links and weaving the mail are: winding, oiling, cutting, normalizing, flattening, normalizing, lapping, piercing, inserting into the weave, rivet setting, and rivet peining. Erik reckons that he can do around 1000 links per day (10 hours?) if he has to make them from scratch. If the links are premade then daily production is closer to 3000 links per day. On top of that, Roman mail was made from alternating rows of solid and riveted links so you can insert two links at a time and only have to rivet one of them. This increases assembly rate to over 5000 links per day. So a 25,000-link hamata would take one person five days to make if the links were premade.
If there were no economies of scale and one person made the hamata from start to finish (1000 links per day) it would take over a million hours to equip a legion of 5,400 men. But Roman factories and mass production would have produced the links a lot faster than a single person switching from one task to another. In medieval Europe, each stage of the process was done in completely different workshops with 3-6 workers in each. The metal is smelted at the foundry and is sold to the wire drawers and the plateners. The wire drawers produce the wire and sell it to link makers. The plateners produce thin plate and sell it to washer makers. The link makers produce the open links and possibly the rivets and sell them to the mailleurs. The washer makers punch solid links out of metal plate and sell them to the mailleurs. An apprentice mailleur weaves most of the mail (5000+ links per day) while the master tailors it (it is possible that sheets of pre-assembled mail were sold to a different workshop where it was tailored into armour). Then a leatherworker/tailor is contracted to add trim, straps, ties, padding, etc. In Roman fabricae it could be assumed that many of these processes were taking place on the same site, but there would still be a very distinct separation of labour where each worker was responsible for a small part of the process. In Medieval Europe there were entire towns devoted to making nothing but mail. We have records of orders for up to ten thousand mail shirts and they were expected to be delivered in one-two weeks!
Quote:Mail armour was certainly heavier than the plate armour. It seems to be generally accepted that this type of armour had Celtic origins and that its primary function was to protect against slashing blows, not the stabbing action that Roman infantrymen were trained to with the gladius Hispaniensis swords. The loose hamata armour would serve to spread the force of the blow. It would still hurt, but at least the wearer would survive. A stabbing action, however, could easily punch through a butt-joined ring, whereas the curved surface of the plate armour would serve to deflect such a blow.
Romans never used butted mail. Every example that was initially claimed to be butted has turned out to be riveted on further analysis. Properly riveted mail of the Roman style can easily withstand the hardest one-handed thrust that a human can deliver - even with a spike that was optimised for the task. The only way to punch through it is to use a heavy bow or some kind of force multiplier like a warhammer (or perhaps the point of a falx).
The only change I would make is that the Cuimesti mail was probably butted. I relied on Williams in that essay but I finally acquired Rusu's original report, which says it was butted and the accompanying photos look butted to me. But this was a couple of centuries before the Romans started using mail and other examples of pre-Roman mail are riveted.
