Mail Coifs - not as simple as they seem

I've been meaning to make a video about coughs I would call it something original like a point about quois IV we need to make it for years there was something I wanted to say about them but I thought it would be better if I actually had a corpse I could put it on and show it to you and and and talk about it as I wore it rather than talk about it in the abstract you see um there coif is something which is a bit of a mystery and i think is not really brilliantly understood why a lot of people certainly filmmakers get it wrong now one of the things I was going to say was that the coif really doesn't work unless you put padding underneath it and so what I did is I got some paper and I made up a pattern like this - I think okay that'll do it right and then I cut out material and I got something like this and I'm the mark one I remember I made it so well when I pulled it onto my head when Shh like that it fitted so precisely I made if anything too good a job a bit and I thought right terrific that's great that's the inside of the coif made and now I'll pad it and I stuff loads and loads and loads of padding in there because I wanted a really really well padded thing to show you and I ended up with this yes let me show you it it's certainly well padded I think what I've actually created here is something like a medieval boxers head guard it's very thick and yet it does affect my hearing somewhat but you know it's tremendously effective you're just no way there's just no way that you would in one blow cut through this with a sword it yeah absolutely possibly it's this thick of dense padding in fact when I was making this I broke about five needles and bent a few pins a pin a really really thin very very sharp thing like a quilting needle I was trying to push them through and rather than go through the padding they quite often prefer to break now one of the reasons that I had to make this first is that if I was then going to make my mail it had to go over this so I had to make sure that it did it wasn't too small because if I'd size it for my head rather than my head whilst wearing a padded coif well you can see the problem anyway I I started to cover this with mail and this isn't finished yet and you'll get to understand why this isn't yet in the moment so the mail went over this and I'm gonna have to use this as a sort of mirror amusingly the camera now as a mirror and so that's about as far as I got when I ground to a halt because and it doesn't look right does it it's too big and also it doesn't feel right now you're just gonna have to take my word for it as I turn my head like this move it around the fact that the coif the weight of the mail is so far from my head yet the distance it's that far away from my head it actually hugely increases the strain on my neck if I want to move my head from here to here I'm moving all the weight of this mail from out here up there if the mail were tight on my head but weighing the same it will be much less encumbering um I thought no this is wrong it doesn't look right now whereas it's true that if you look at pictures of Knights of old they do seem to have strangely large heads it gives them a slightly childlike look right now here we have a scene from the Morgan Bible and hang on to that are there any women here no no no no all right and you're not a woman are you no okay right anyway this some very butch chap here is clearly wearing a padded coif which the artist has shown as really very thick but then how much do we trust the artist when he has this good a grasp of perspective it's still this is this is going too far isn't it so I thought right okay let's let's stop and start again so so this is the beginning of my mark to coif and the mark 2 is going to be padded using layers of wool and canvas and now I got a piece of wool and I followed it to and I fold in two again and felt the thickness and kept doing that until I thought that seems about right to me and I thought about 12 layers of this blanket will be about right and I did this pad first this is the one it's going to go on that part of the head and this is actually only eight layers of blanket and I was thinking actually even eight layers is looking a little bit thick now I don't want to repeat that mistake and so I've got here the side piece each layer is slightly larger than the one further to the inside so that's got a an angle to the edge and if you can see that and this is going to be the side of the head padding piece to go into this coif and I'll end up with a still pretty padded but but much thinner coif and then I can perhaps carry on but even that might be too thick ah there is very little evidence for how thick these things were looking at artwork isn't very accurate extremely few male coif survived in fact I know of one for certain it's from around the period of the Battle of Visby good old battle is be it was found this I think it's called too tough to coif and and here it is and you'll see that it's not really exactly what you see in the pictures of Crusaders and so forth it's got a slightly different design to it but it's not huge it doesn't seem to be designed to go over vast amounts of padding now I've written to the museum curators of the the Visby stuff and the people who did some of the research unfortunately of the research is published in Swedish but I I talked to the people who wrote the stuff and and just to cut a long story short they don't reckon that the padding was very thick the only bit of padding that has survived is fragmentary and seems to be just three layers of blanket although they didn't tell me how thick those layers were if you look at some of the skulls which were found still in there corroded mail Kois that the mail is also corroded into a lump so you can't actually flex this mail anymore and have a look at it and find out how big it was but you can look and see that there is this corroded lump of of what was once metal is now largely rust and there's a gap between it and the skull but in a photograph such as this how accurate is that as a measure of how thick the padded coif was probably not very but going by it it's not a very thickly padded coif which is a bit of a mystery because a really thickly padded coif would work really well now if I had to go into battle excuse me wearing either this or this but not both this absolutely instantly unhesitatingly this will protect me from a blow from pretty much anything you're not going to cut through it seriously you are really not going to cut through this and if I get a bash then the percussive force as well is is lessened quite considerably by the padding of this so if you hit me with a mace it still be pretty bad but you know I won't die whereas this is almost totally ineffective on its own what is this going to do how is this going to stop the percussive effect okay yes if you if you try to slice me with a knife yes it'll keep me safe yeah fine but then so will that if you hack at me with a sword yes the sword is not actually going to enter my head but the sword is essentially a big iron bar and if you're a big strong bloke and you've hit me on the head with a big iron bar then this is going to do me very little good it this there's there's no stiffness to this at all so give me with an axe or a mace I'm finished whether I'm wearing this or not it's going to be no good at all against an axe or a mace so why would anyone wear these on their own well they didn't but in the movies they do oh yeah in the movies people just drape one of these over their heads and they're just evolved all to all no forms of attack if they can be bothered okay pull the thing up that is so that's one of my a point about choice that was going to be the fact that you must wear padding underneath them otherwise they're flipping useless and it pains me to see even people in live-action role play costuming themselves with sometimes a real metal are very nicely made Koya just fits over their head because they made it themselves and they would have used the minimum number of links but there's no room for padding in there and I'm sorry but you just you could still just punch the guy and it would still hurt a male coif on its own is flipping useless but maybe I had discovered something by making this maybe I've discovered why they didn't have a huge amount of padding under there is just it becomes too unwieldy on your head that that floppy mass that's away from your head is just too encumbering but I wanted to make one that looked like you know like the guys do in on the effigies in in the the Morgan Bible and things like that and if you look at those pictures you'll find that they don't look like the sort of wife's that reenactors wear today now one of the things is that re-enactor today typically comes up with a spiral not a dust by a load of concentric circles around the top fine comes down to about here fine and opens out creates a gap for the face yep and then then was he do well it usually carries on down and links up underneath the chin here and then spreads out into something similar to an aventail on the shoulders but that's not what we see in all the pictures of the Knights they have their chins covered with mail the point of the chin is protected by the coif and what's more you don't have mail going straight down from the chin down onto the chest instead you have a very definite undercut coming underneath the chin and down which makes a huge difference because if you've got a load of mail particular if you like me and I got a long neck and possibly a larger chin than the standard so I would have a huge weight of mail here hanging from my chin every day I turn my head all of this would have to be turned hanging it would be really heavy on my head and would would get interfere with the movement of my head Here I am wearing a corset oh so definitely does not cover the point of my chin but look at the great weight of mail after drag every time I try to turn my even phrasing my head up requires my dragging a great dead weight of mail up my chest no this is an inefficient design much nicer to have an undercut like that that everything's tight on you you can turn your head more freely much less encumbering so that it seems is what they did and yet that's not what reenactors gets so I'm going to this is my next project I'm going to change tack and I'm going to create perhaps a second series of concentric things here to form a second cup that goes over my chin and I will I will tailor an undercut there are some problems with this of course I have to be able to get my head in and out of the thing so I'm gonna have to think about that maybe some part of it will have to have a flap or lace up or hooks and eyes or something I might not be able to do it as just one simple piece of mail but I want it to look you know like the effigies and pictures of the time did even though I'm fairly sure they're not accurate every time the Morgan Bible shows a male koi directly from above it has concentric circles like this and some other pictures show horizontal rows of mail which would be compatible with that but the same pictures show the rows going the other way entirely going around the face and ooh I don't think that's very likely nor does this arrangement of rows seem kosher and what is this tuck that so many of them have and and what is this lace doing here it looks as though it's to stop the male falling in front of the face here we have a sudden change of direction in the rows is this two pieces of mail how seriously should we take the accuracy of any of these costumes take this chap for example who do you think ears Ketel hat mail heater shield cruciform sword and he's standing on his own foot for here he is again being beheaded by this little chap called Dave and here's Dave again with his little hockey stick and his sling yes that's right he's Goliath these are biblical stories and so all these costumes are just made up I will be coming back to this subject when I got a little bit further so you see the mystery of it I do have a theory as to how courts actually worked but this is not the time to talk about it until I've got a bit further with this so there you go there is a mystery of the coif one of the mysteries is why the hell did they wear them at all think about it they already had helmets in the in the early medieval period they had helmets then in the crusading period a lot of people went to wearing coif and then back to the helmet again it wasn't as though the helmet was invented later they had helmets they went to coughs from helmets how is it coif better than a helmet

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 992,642

Rating: 4.9452496 out of 5

Keywords: coif, coifs, mail, crusader, crusaders, chainmail, maille, knight, combat, warfare, battle, armour, armor, padded, quilted, protection

Id: mbmd-kVgc2E

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/WhiskeyMadeMeDoIt]

Now I'm wondering if the chain mail coif would be worn under the padding. Padding providing defense against heavy blows but the chain mail for cuts. If that's the case it would make sense that the outside would be hot and removed while not in battle leaving only the chain behind. It would also explain the bodies found. The mail is still in place but the outside fabric could would have rotted away.