So armour is heavy, cumbersome and very restrictive, right? False. Forget Aragorn the last heir to the throne of Gondor who waltzed members and heads of a battalion of orcs caparisoned in the Lord of the Rings. Forget the powerful blows thrusting that impale right through enemies protected by a metal breastplate. Finally, remember these urban legends according to which a unhorsed knight, he was crushed by the weight of his armor could not face it alone. Daniel Jaquet, Deputy Assistant Professor of Medieval History Unit at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, slays all these pictures in the video below, broadcast during an exhibition on the theme of the sword at the National Museum of the Middle Age in Paris in 2011. This video was filmed as part of my doctoral work, explained Daniel Jaquet at Sciences et Avenir. It is divided into two parts. The first shows the mobility of the armored knight, and the second explains the different fighting techniques, reconstructed from a corpus of 52 manuscripts dealing with combat armor, covering the end of the 14 th century to the first half 16th c The armor compels little mobility Most medieval armor you can buy are more aesthetic than functional replicas, the researcher begins. The proof I borrowed some friends and they all ended up breaking says Daniel Jaquet. But I needed a really functional armor as part of my work of archeology experimentation. And as no museum has accepted that his precious models on display again suffer the bite of the sword, the young researcher has had to resort to a more radical technique. I managed to raise funds to build the armor that I wear in this video, using the closest possible techniques than the time, says Daniel Jaquet . This metal shell has been made of steel soft ie without treatment and with a carbon content comparable to that found in antique armor exhibited in museums. Then, this steel was beaten cold before being heated and tempered. In the end, the armor and the mesh fabric and clothing worn underneath weigh 35 kilos, the researcher figure. But as this weight is extremely well distributed all over the body, the burden this is not very different than wearing a fireman with his fire suit, or that of a soldier with his protective vest -balle on the battlefield, recalls the researcher. And as we see in the video, the knight in armor had no trouble getting up from a lying position and was quite capable of climbing a ladder.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 19:45:00 +0000
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