Brewer Mary. The Art of Mail Armor: How to Make Your Own

Boulder: Paladin Press, 2002. — 159 p. — ISBN: 1-58160-306-1The study of arms and armour construction techniques has, since the Middle Ages, been the purview of a limited fraternity of metalworkers. Guarding their secrets with fervent ardor, armourers and metalworkers left us next to nothing besides limited examples of their work. Anyone captured by the mystique of the knight in shining armour will likely find the tools and expertise needed to craft a harness of plate beyond his budget both in terms of time and money. Similarly, the complex armours of padded and stuffed cloth — also less than evocative of the knights imagery — are surprisingly complex. But not all armour was of plate or cloth — for many centuries the knight of Europe was clad not in the brightly polished iron plate from Excalibur but in mail, the armour of linked rings adopted by the Roman cavalry that persisted as a cost-effective, functional, and very comfortable defense well into the 17th century. The reasons for mail's persistence as an effective defense against bladed weapons lie in its relative ease of construction. Once the wire was extruded into suitable diameters it could be easily rolled into links using a variety of methods. European mail after the fall of Rome seems to have almost always been riveted or perhaps welded together, but the 4-in-l pattern that predominated is easy enough that local production would have been possible throughout Europe both in highly efficient
production centers and in smaller, localized operations.Some Terminology and Comparisons,
Ancient and Modern
Wire Sizes
Cutting Links
4-on-1 Mail Pattern
Joining
Extending