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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6496167" data-attributes="member: 50304">Not since I stopped playing AD&D and Unearthed Arcana, anyway.They "had mail." They did not have lion's share of their manpower in mail hauberk's to the knee with mail coifs. Those were awfully expensive to create and maintain and thus were reserved to the nobility / officers / elites. Chain or scale vests or shirts? Sure, give them to as many vanguard and heavy infantry as you can. Leather for everyone else who didn't make the cut - if they got any formal armor at all. Those had been around since the Classical Era in one form or another. Heck the Romans even had the Lorica Segmentum which is basically proto-plate technology. The thing is they still had exposed arms, legs, and necks and that's how they suffered most of their fatal slashing and piercing injuries.Of course it wasn't rare. The issue is that armies in the medieval period were comprised almost entirely of levies who couldn't be supplied with the high-grade equipment that was effectively immune to slashing and piercing damage from hand-weapons (like head-to-toe chain mail). They were the ones that died in droves to arrows too while the armor and horses of nobles contributed to a much lower rate of pincushion deaths.On top of that, did you (the medieval warrior / leader caste) really -want- the peasantry to be hard to kill on an individual basis? The nobles practically went apoplectic when the advance crossbows allowed any half-wit dairy farmer to ruin a suit of armor worth more than his entire village AND kill someone of actual social standing.The movement toward cheap armor, cannons, and point-and-shoot weaponry that could trump armor comes in parallel to the decline of the feudal military system and the rise of permanent national armies that served the crown directly.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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