How Medieval Armorers Made Flexible Armor

[Music] thank you hey everybody Adam Savage in the armor conservation Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art along with its curator Pierre how are you sir good it's good to see you again pleasure uh you have brought out some things to show me and I know nothing about what you're planning to talk about fortunately I've been given some thought about what I wanted to prepare and I'm thinking all the time about what the armorer had to solve problems in making armor okay we often think that armors of sculptors what they make in the end is very beautiful it's shapely maybe to an extended tailors it has to fit but really they also have mechanical problems to solve how things fit together how they fit the body when the body's in motion yeah and they came up with some ideas and I thought there are some ideas that are pretty nifty um the beginning of armor in medieval times they have mail which is very flexible and then they need to reinforce it and they put like heart piece is attached to leather textile of course it's flexible yeah then they start having plates and they need to combine them and I brought in this German breastplate from the early 16th century that demonstrates two kinds of solutions that they adopted to create Mobility so torso defense right over here yeah it's got a flexible waist oh nice all right right so that's pivoted with just two rivets one here and run there and that's enough to create this kind of flex then when you use your arms in combat you need to be able also sometimes to reach over your torso so here they use what we call sliding rivets so these pieces have a little slit yeah right and then they can move in and out so it can contract and expand on the best armors there are Springs to push them back automatically right so as soon as you're done it comes back into place so those are pretty basic techniques yeah that create a pretty basic type of flexibility so we're here in the 16th century go back in time where the beginning of the 15th century and we have this incomplete van braceord defense for the arm it's hinged so you can get in and out yeah we know about hinges um but what they did which is perhaps one of the earliest examples is they use a system of slits very similar to allow the lower arm to rotate right so you have the sits in the uh in the actual arm and then you have rivets on the plate above it and there's just enough to create a rotation wow okay so we now have things that flex and we have things that rotate bit later at the same time this arm is made they have a new way of doing rotation you want to try it so it sticks a little bit you have to because oil it a little more yeah but that is actually impressively smooth it's pretty smooth it's flush you don't see how it's done yeah right and on the inside you have a system of a plate that axes uh acts like a catch and then the other one is caught by it and then they just grab each other a bit like like this the root one rotates into the other so they use the same system we have here to cover the inside of the arms right this is almost always a gap in arms right and here they decided to completely close it and it's still very much like a lobster tail in terms of yeah functions right it's pretty straightforward so now I'm introducing a mystery piece a piece that puzzles us puzzled us for very very long time so it's kind of unwieldy yeah yeah it's light you're welcome to hold it now I mean the only place I can think of is right here you're into something you're on to something right it's it's a um it's a piece of armor came in 1927 as a gift of Prince Albert radzville and when it came we said this is not articulated the way we used to you have a scissor oh look at that type of articulation so instead of the basic thing we have here yeah now we have smaller Lanes they're placed strategically with sliding rivets some inside so it can really be compact this but it also has a familiar now rotating movement so things can happen in all kinds of Direction and we had never seen anything like this no so we were wondering well what is it so I've been producing here drawings I've done in the 60s of what this looks like so this is a view right like you have it here trying to understand it and we came up with the theory which were very very few horses had articulated legs and this might be oh a piece for one of them so these are drawings or sketches based on late 15th century examples of armors made for maximilating the first of Austria and the thought was maybe it fit it's designed to fit one of the horse's legs because it's so strange yeah and we went as far as publishing these pieces with the idea that it definitely fits the right leg of the horse the rear right leg and we came up with these the designs to explain it so you went you actually took these over to a horse or took a simulation we in the file we have anatomical drawings of horse bones and muscles and then it was suggested well it could fit exactly that part of the leg and obviously this is a fragment it was part of something much bigger right and maybe the horse leg does need all of this business wow that would be a huge horse it'll be a huge horse it would be a huge horse and we knew that they were legs made for horses and the armorers who made those horse armors they asked their clients to never show the armor to anyone okay you can have one but you must not show it please because if you show it somebody's will copy it and so these were like State Secrets they were state secret they would say circuit we know for example that the um Marquee of of Mantua or presented with a opportunity to buy one of those horses from Germany and the armor said I leave it with you and if you don't want it I just take it back and you must let no professional Walk Into Your Arsenal and see what it looks like and um maybe three or four of those articulated um leg armors for horses were made so I mean three or three or four horses and we never saw there's not one that survives really so we don't know maybe we're on to something here so this may be a unicorn of a piece it would be a unicorn piece as humble as it is right it's from a point of view of Technology probably one of the biggest design challenges that an armor had to solve which is this is not your human anatomy so how do you make this work right and the other thing is it still moves well enough that it feels like like it was a mature process like they had solved this problem it's not a prototype right it's not a prototype um one of armors here actually made a replica oh because this one it's a historical piece he's got the share of issues yeah so this is giving you a better sense of how it would have functioned you don't want to have it in here so this was hammered in our department as I totally see a way of replicating okay so if it can do all these things then what is it wow and it looks to me like this is the centerpiece of a of a piece of a piece and perhaps it was completely symmetrical right right so it's in 1970s we came up with another new answer and yeah you were right it goes It goes onto the crush it does it's a crotch it's a piece of crotch armor so in terms of contextualizing this we have a very strange type of armor that is done for the foot combat right so combat is a dual originally to death yeah the participants one of the person has to die and it's part of the legal process when you appeal a decision at some point God will decide and you let these two gentlemen fight it yeah out and one of them is killed and then obviously God designated the one who was telling the truth yeah so they created these armors originally for this type of judicial duels by the 16th century hey look this is the one that was in the last night it's more of a violin sport you do not need to kill the adversary but it is one of the most dangerous kinds of tournament you can be in yeah and therefore every part of the body has to be the arms the gauntlets that like inside the arms so you cannot lose your Gauntlet the trunks they're like clothes in the front and then the legs are completely encased there's not one one air of the body except the inside the palms of the hands are visible that raises some questions of how you would actually design these things yeah and we did an exhibition here in 1991 where we borrowed armors from Madrid from the Royal Armory of Madrid including this foot combat armor made for Charles V this is the catalog of the exhibition it comes with this big skirt yeah that is called a tunnelt and it's designed to prevent attacks on this area of the body but it's a pretty short one the early medieval ones are going all the way to the news right and it came we have a 16th century inventory showing in watercolors all the pieces that go with it it came with a piece like this that goes somewhere that goes with it goes somewhere these are shoulder reinforces what are these for and there are other views of this armor who doesn't answer this so when the armor came here our colleagues immediately just asked if they could take it apart yeah and they did and this is one photograph of the back of what we have here of the full piece look at that so you have this this line you have these Lanes here they would have continued all the way to cover the inside of the legs and then on the front it's obviously open right and this is where you have the beginning of this embossing for the card piece for the card piece wow and it has the same types of articulation as you can see here so these armors were made in very limited series right these very special tournaments and even though there are a few left those are not the pieces I've called like attention so yeah we believe that what we actually have here is one of the earliest examples of this type of design and an interesting piece of engineering for any armor in terms of achieving all that the inner side of the leg had to do yeah well especially with the with the replication here showing that you can actually these can be made to tolerance oh sorry that that won't do what I just did that allow it to stay it's fine it's it just popped out because we don't have the internal Leathers right right so um but that like yeah this this makes it really clear how viable this is um so it took from 1927 to 1974. to figure it out 50 years to figure it out and um it's um it shows a different type of activity for armors we think of them also sometimes as like metallurgists right like how to heat up and temper the armor but this is more maybe the work of a locksmith right right moving parts and how they fit with one another practical you had some of those things like the bills from maximilian's clock maker for Designing The Shield the shields exactly and it's possible that this was also outsourced to a degree that's amazing so um it's um you go for something rather straightforward and then you have with the same toolkit an armor trying to make something that rotates flex and uh um is sort of a natural way but you know I I love talking about spacesuits and I spacesuits and armor are very closely Linked In My Head because they're hard things we fit on our soft bodies and the hardest part about designing a spacesuit is that every human is different and this is also true of armor is doing this kind of work like every single one of these would have to be bespoke to its owner especially this one this is made for a boy it's too small it's too small this is too small to fit an adult so this must have been intended for the practice you know training yeah the Young Prince no question it was custom made and they had to be delivered on schedule otherwise oh right because he's going to grow to it a true mechanical luxury of sorts yeah amazing what that is a thrilling story I'd love that I just I this blows my mind thank you so much for breaking this out and telling me the story it's amazing [Music] foreign

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 183,372

Keywords: tested, medieval armor flexibility, medieval armor mobility, adam savage, tested adam savage, adam savage tested, adam savage (tv producer), metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum of art, metropolitan museum of art tour, Pierre Terjanian, arms and armor, MET, tested adam savage armor, adam savage knight armor, adam savage armor, metropolitan museum of arts arms and armor, plate armor flexibility, adam savage met armor

Id: IVBrEdCmCNA

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023