# Making Medieval Armour for Joan of Arc

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Bernadette Banner
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

When we enter the 15th century, it's super important to think of armor not just as utilitarian equipment for fighting, which it is, but it's also an expressive work of art. — Cool. — Sometimes you have to fiddle with things and okay, that strap needs to be tighter, this looser, but when it works, oh, you feel so powerful. When interpreting a Jon of Arc look of my own earlier this year, I knew that incorporating real plate armor was going to be a crucial part of this design. But I quickly discovered that the world of armor was a lot more vast than I previously thought. It opened up a whole lot of questions like what would Joan actually look like when she was fighting battles in the year 1430. I talked to two experts, medieval and Renaissance armor specialist Tobias Capwell and armorer Matt from Lancaster Armory to help me understand what her armor would have looked like. historically and what goes into making armor in the modern day. — I'm Toby Capwell. I've ridden in armor for 30 or more years. I helped found the modern historical jousting world. The Middle Ages is harder to identify with for most modern people. You know, it's like if you see a BBC drama, they take the early 20th century very seriously. The clothes are right and the carriages table settings are right, but the further you go back, the harder that becomes, and by the time you get to the Middle Ages, it's all kind of abstract. And people are just running around thinking about women in pointy hats and isn't this about dragons and like castles? And people even cease to be able to think about it as a period in which real human beings just like you and me actually lived. Jonavar's kind of a funny one because she's one of the very few medieval people that gets taken seriously somehow that people are interested in and you she's had a tremendous number of films made about her but the techniques for reconstructing or understanding her period are just you know bananas. So you get a lot of very strange ideas about what Jon of Arc looked like. — Plate armor construction and decoration changed a lot throughout its circa 400year peak in popularity. So one thing I was really keen to focus on was to learn about these changes and to try and highlight as many 1420s and30s specific details as we could. The idea was to have a full set of plate legs. So, I enlisted the help of Matt of Lancaster Armory who would be in charge of making up the actual metal parts. — I'm Matt from Lancaster Armory and we specialize in making reproduction medieval armor. There's a great books of course I mean you've been working from Toby's book as we have we for this project. But yeah, always better to go back to the original source whenever possible. Nothing really beats going to museums and seeing it in person to kind of understand its shapes and obviously just really start to breathe it all in. If you look at earlier periods, 13th century, 14th century, the armor is made out of a lot of different materials with different physical and protective properties. Parts of your armor are made out of textile. Parts of them male, hardened leather, bone, baine, copper alloy, as well as iron and a bit of steel. And you layer them, and you create a much more effective defense that way. The effigy of the black prince was made in the 1380s. And that's one of the earliest depictions where you can be sure that all those articulated plates had grown over the whole body to the point when you can say, "Right, this is a full armor. " — By the end of the 14th century, you would see the wealthy people who could afford it starting to now be what you'd consider the full plate armor. And it had some crazy experimental stuff going on back then. And it was a really great way to decorate and ornate armor as well and show your wealth. Like in Germany, you are starting to see a lot of fluting coming in. But where we're looking with the Jon of Arc project, you don't see this fluting that a lot of people might think of when they think of armor and like the Gothic armor that's maybe another 50 to 60 years. So where we've started to land now is close to where those start to really overlap. The surfaces of the armor though pretty much mostly quite clean. — We landed on this effigy as our main reference for the plate legs which is a style that's in our very specific 1430 period so it would work for this design. Now it's time to get to work. — I like to do physical measurements either 3D scanning it or plaster cast. They did have plaster. To what extent it was used to make body casts, I couldn't 100% say, but we know they had it for like bronze castings and stuff like that. So it did exist. Freedom.

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

Wow, that is like a leg. — Then that gives me something to do a pattern draft from. Much of what the project been with for yours is taking that original IOG and then proportionally scaling it. Everyone's bones a bit different and the tendon placements are different and like how much muscle they have. It makes a huge amount of changes cuz you can't just scale it down. you know that doesn't always work, but you still want it to look as close as possible to the source material. From that, we started sculpting our 1. 2 mm steel just to make two halves, a front and a back as we were expected to do on the artwork that we have been working from. I tend to just start in a big rectangle and do a lot of material removal because we do make things differently to how they would have done historically where they may have started in a much thicker piece of steel and I'd theorize that they draw it out quite a lot. I've seen some of them like half a mil thin in those areas which is very light. They might be about half a mil around here. — Oh, — so quite thin but then maybe about 2 mil down here because you don't want this getting crushed, — right? cuz there's a lot of people who would be wearing full greaves are going to be cavalry and when you're up on the horse the greaves up here that's kind of like a good hitting zone. — Oh, right. — So, these actually be quite thick. A lot of modern ones won't be made like that for like convenience and cost sake. And because we're not under the same conditions as an actual war, — the modern approach though ends up you have a bit more of a uniform thickness for the whole thing in reenactment hobby. It has to have a lot more durability than it might have had back then just for modern safety. like people want to go to work the next day and not have broken bones as best as possible. So for that reason, we end up often wearing some parts of it thicker. They just start to look bulkier at times, but it's necessary for modern safety. SO — we get noise complaints, — right? — Yeah. Yeah, I bet we could hear you down from the station. — Quite a tube looking grieve at the minute. It's why we got this fitting session with you to start fine-tuning it, see where we can cut back and check a lot of the other anatomy around the knee joint so we can get the rest of the quiz and the pol to all behave. — Amazing. — So I mean straight away you can see just from your cast we've got a pretty good following shape. M. — So that's always good to see the medial ridge going down the center here — is actually lines up with kind of the center. — It's not quite the center of the foot, but it follows to the tip of the foot. So that ridge is going to flow into that, — which is when that's on the sabaton gives you a really good look. And again, we want that ridge to pick back up again here — and follow up the straight of the leg. — Ah, okay. — I'm just feeling for the ankle bones at the moment — just so I can mark them on the outside. And you want to have little uh raised areas on the gre — that protrude further around those points. — Okay. — So, I'm going to trim off the excess on the ears there. — Some more — the back's a bit more complex. Um, see the tendon here, — especially with your one, you got a really pronounced tendon there. So, I'll end up cutting these ones a bit lower back to account for that. — [snorts] — just to see what we can start removing on the crease. Obviously, when you look at effiges like these, they're wearing all the aroma over the top that we don't get a good look. So, you have to really look at what existing ones we have. — Also, these are very hard decisions to make as well cuz you don't get to make it again. — Yes. [snorts] What is the hardest like generally the hardest piece of armor to make? So — actually a grieve is probably considered one of them cuz there's so many angle changes on a grieve. — Um you got a lot of planishing, curling, you got a lot of raising rolled edges over such a tight curve. — If you a bit hasty with it, you're going to split it, — you know. So it's a difficult shape to get control of. — So the early greaves tended to be much more form fitting. So it would look a bit more like the anatomy of an actual leg. Whereas an actual grieve that we kind of started working on for your project, it's had this ridge put through the center that gives it greater deflection and almost like a weapon in its own cuz it has lifted away from the shin and if you did kick someone with it, it's going to hurt a bit more. So it started to deviate away from actually just like the pure anatomy of the sculpt that it's now actually got a design. the pollen here um which is the name of the whole thing and then we break down

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

to have the wing on the side as it acts as a shield to the back of the tendons essentially. — Yeah. — Which is going to have the decoration on it with the ridges that we call flutes. — Okay. — Fluting is now becoming more popular and that's a place where you start to see it first before it starts to then spread out on further parts of the armor like the breast plates. So that's just a aesthetic choice there that it just gives it a bit of a different character. When we enter the 15th century, it's super important to think of armor not just as utilitarian equipment for fighting, which it is. It did its job at the same time as it was taking on new artistic significance. And that's where Jonavar steps into this. Women being involved in the military process hadn't been totally unknown. Noble women had commanded sieges and been involved in the military process. But wearing armor as a knight and being there in the front ranks of an army was pretty unprecedented. You know, the English had kind of dominated northern France. And France was also in the middle of a civil war between the Burgundians and the Armenyak. So two very distinct French factions that are fighting over the throne and political dominance and territory. So Joan had this extraordinarily powerful potential to be a unifying influence of a military society that was kind of in shambles at that point. Joan met the DOA of France and convinces him to allow her to lead the armies and to take this extraordinary role. And he had an armor made for her by his master armorer as it says in the documents. And it's said to be a white armor arm bloun. It doesn't mean that it was plain or undecorated or not very good. It means it was polished. So the whole body is now in mirror polished steel. And when you have something so extraordinary as this teenager leading an army and being the kind of moral impeller, I'm sure they're aware of the incredible kind of PR shock value of seeing this teenage girl in an armor on a white horse carrying a white banner. I mean, you don't have to be, you know, a genius to work out the power of that image. Um, but he also says for her own safety, she was right in it. — So, we know Joan was a bit of an unusual case, but what about the rest of the army? The process of designing and fitting bespoke armor, I have realized now after standing for 5 hours just for one fitting, and the realization that I would need to be back for yet another fitting, how was an army of potentially thousands of soldiers dealing with fit? Surely, there was a market for armor beyond just the super wealthy or divinely chosen clientele. We know there's a bespoke market for armor where things are being fitted and being commissioned, but any business always does well by having an in stock product and certainly for raising armies, you need to kind of be able to get them armored quite quickly. You don't have time to wait for everybody to have fitted armor. We know there's workshops that are just delivering suits in the thousands per year. Um, especially from the Italian regions, which is like the dominant armor manufacturing area. It was definitely getting a lot more affordable as technologies for the bloomies and actually forging iron is getting more advanced and some of the design of the cheaper items are they're bit softer on the harder curves. Although this is a later piece of armor, the curves on this are pretty flat. So, it's going to fit a lot wider range of people's arms. So, this is something that you would imagine is like a stock piece, but it's still going to protect you from being cut. You could have helmets, pretty standard sizes, and you can just try them on is how I imagine it would go. You could afford probably to make a few different sizes and you know someone's going to fit it as or close fit as possible, but it does make you think like, okay, yeah, it has a little bit of discomfort, but at the end of the day, you're a professional soldier potentially who wants to live. That discomfort is often worth it potentially. They do obviously start to make choices though. There is a limit to like visibility versus greater amount of protection for the face. — Oh wow. Oh my god, it's heavy. — What's the vision like for that? — Oh my god. The neck pain that you must be in. — Most people tend to go being able to see is going to keep you alive longer. So, we know on certain helmets the visor gets discarded — um or it would stay up for most of the foot combat fighting because you will last longer if you can see. — Yeah. — Um that little bit of extra protection you get around your face is not worth that trade-off for most people. — Yeah, — you must need some serious PT after this. — Fortunately, they're quite easy to assemble cuz there's only about 12

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

rivets across the entire piece. — So, just assembling the pre-formentioned lane into the col. And this is what provides us the movement in the joint. It's probably suspected they would have used just actual rivets when doing it, but obviously modern day of course a modern 3mm nut and bolt. — Uh-huh. — That's going to be what gives our motion there. — So then we can see the motion that we get from it. — Wow. — And that still needs to be improved. This has just got us ready to fitting stage today. Yeah, the side of the wing here is being flared away. So that as the thigh moves back in this direction, this is going to be increasing in diameter, — right? — So you have to have it coming away from the leg there to accommodate for that. — Oh, that's gorgeous. — Any discomfort anywhere? — No, it feels great. could you just lift this leg up backwards? — You want to be able to at least do that. — Okay, — that's digging in there on the tendons. That's the bit we still got to like roll the top back for. — Okay. — She's so cute. It's a Timmy. — So, yeah, that has stayed — pretty accurate. Wow. — I'll have to extend it on here and we'll trim it there instead. — [panting] — Give me a thumbs up if you can hear me. What? Cool. Safety achieved. I just want to dance. She does a little dance and dance. And [snorts] yes, I'm laying on the floor as you do. — Oh, no. Thank you. Imagine sabatons would be very good for actual tap dancing. You can kind of see the twist now a bit more prominently as well. I mean it makes it obviously articulate on an angle. — Yeah. Wow. [snorts] That's just such a piece of engineering. That is cool. — Yeah, cuz then that lines back up. — Yeah. — Cool. [snorts] — We can pinpoint where the rolled edges are going to go, leveling it out, getting the right amount of overlap under the lap, and then it's going to be ready for grinding and polishing it. Once the fit was perfected, it was up to Matt to bring each plate to its final armor blanch or mirror polished finish. Matt's starting with a 180 grit sanding belt on the contact wheel and using the slack of the belt to remove the deeper hammer marks. Next, he switches over to a 180 grit flap wheel to smooth it a little more. Then for a bit of hand sanding. Historically, iron used to have a grain much like wood. However, modern steel doesn't have this. So, this provides a similar look to medieval sanding with the grain going in one direction. Finally, the pieces are polished on a sisle wheel with 3000 grit steel cut compound, which gives the armor its final finish. One month after our initial fitting, we met to assemble the final look. The final shoot was effectively also our final fitting. Making sure all the straps were pulled and punched in the right places and learning the significance of a sturdy arming belt to help keep the legs tied tight. Because when the legs start to slip, the greaves dig into your ankles and the knee articulation starts clamping your knee flesh and you can end up with a lot of bruises. — I mean, you have to learn how to wear a lot of I mean, wearing a corset for the first time. I imagine is something that you have to learn how to operate, how you move, how you sit down, how you get back up again. Really, armor is no different in that respect other than it has this really strong functional role to play. It's more like operating a piece of machinery if you're doing it right. You know, when you understand how well it'll protect you, there are times when you get attacked, you won't even bother to defend yourself because you don't need to. He can't. There's nothing he can do to me. I can kill him though at the same time. If I don't bother to deal with his attack, I can move quicker. You have to wear it for a while to get used to this particular armor and what you're doing in it. And sometimes you have to fiddle with things and okay, that strap needs to be tighter. The looser. But when it works

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLWTDhKltJk&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 24:00)

it's like you feel so powerful. — When you're in this gear, you are not the same anymore. When it fits, like Toby says, there is a sense of power to it. You're both the puppeteer and the puppet. Somehow, you form a different relationship with the environment and with your body. It's very similar to corsetry in a way in that there's a sort of power in this knowledge of wearing something so structural capable of changing the shape of your body so dramatically that the shape that you present to the world is a shape that you can control entirely. And you also get to make a lot of really cool clanky noises. I'm just going The best part about a project like this that involves collaboration between crafts people is that not only is the result more spectacular than you ever could have imagined, but you also get to learn so much about other crafts. The process of fitting armor is so extensive since it's such an unforgiving material. We only had two fittings, each around 5 hours long, and that I learned was on the low end. I got to watch Matt hammer and shape and cut according to the most precise shapes and lines that only the eye of a skilled armorer can help you see building a piece of such well-crafted beauty. If you watch to the end of this video, you, my good pal, might be a nerd. And so I would be absolutely remiss not to tell you about my latest viewing obsession, Abolish Everything, which is a show where a bunch of absolute nerds get up on stage and basically give a PowerPoint presentation about some mundane aspect of life which they believe should be abolished. — Abolish the dentist — speaker phone — bombs. — It is hilarious, sometimes correct, and exclusively viewable on Nebula, who have kindly sponsored this video. Nebula, if you do not already know, is a fantastic streaming service which was built by creators and is currently run by creators bringing you the content that you love adfree and uncensored as well as producing original content. The great thing about Nebula is that it is not a big corporation. It is literally run by creative people. So all of the money that they earn through subscriptions is used directly to pay the Nebula staff to compensate creators for viewership on the platform. And then they're willing to pour a lot more resources into allowing creators just wild creative freedom to make content that they otherwise wouldn't have the funds to make. Hence, you get amazing original shows like Wendover's Jetlag, which is a race around the world, and abolish everything. As a Nebula creator myself, you can also watch my content adree over on Nebula. So, if you don't like seeing these ads, head over to Nebula. I have an exclusive link that will get you hella discounts. So, if you do plan to go over to Nebula, do use this link right now during the holiday season. You can get 50% off an annual membership. You can also get lifetime access to Nebula for $300. That is, as long as Nebula exists, you will have access to Nebula. You can also try it out free for 3 days if you just want to check out some of the content to see if it's really your vibe. And if you are still looking for the perfect gift for that content connoisseur in your life, you can gift Nebula subscriptions to anyone you want. Not only does that hopefully take something off your list, it also helps to support your favorite and probably your gifties favorite creators while you're at it. So, be sure to go check that out and I shall see you soon. Oh, you look like the leftovers in my fridge. — Well, see, some people have the thing for ankles, but hear me out. — Knees. — Thank you. — I'm set. I got energy. — You got across the room. Contemplate. Come soon. — Oh my god. The sitting down is so good. Night night.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/44415*