Medieval History Questions

Bunch of random questions incoming!

I know chain mail was used in history by soldiers and knights but I was wondering if any (perhaps cheaper, flimsier) mail was used by peasants, more particularly outlaws and mercenaries.

Also, was the trade of armorsmithing a lucrative one (since you typically had rich clients) or were you just another commmon smith? Or did it depend on how good of a craftsmen you were.

Last random question - I promise! Could nobles like lords and ladies ever be exiled or outlawed? And, if so, did it happen?

Oh yeah you can totally exile or even execute lords and ladies if they pissed off or betrayed the king.

Shit happened all the time.

As for the last one, generally if you were proving to be difficult or batshit crazy, your relatives would ship you off to the country, such as Elizabeth Balthory's did. That way you'd stay out of big politics.

These are good questions, my mom is a history buff, I'll ask her about the others.

For Thieves. Boiled leather was a common armor. They likely stole most of their armor.

Mercenaries would wear whatever they could afford, capture, be awarded, or was paid for the by the company etc. For example the Landsknecht Mercenaries.

Genoese Crossbowmen

Condottiero Italian Mercenaries.

And the Swiss mercenaries

As you can see they are frequently depicted wearing a variety of armor. Europe had a lot of mercenary activity for a long time.

edited 4th Mar '14 4:06:49 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I doubt any thief ever wore leather armour, unless you mean the sort of thief that's more like a brigand or robber, then I guess it's not out of the question. I'm also pretty sure they didn't spend much of their time searching for traps and hidden doors.

And yes, mercenary forces quite often had some dashing fashion sense. When you live on the move, chances are you won't reach retirement, and any random battlefield is full of well-dressed dead noblemen, there is only so much to do, eh?

While any random smith would probably be able to pound a piece of metal into a plate to be worn, the production of armour was, I'm gonna say, rather the higher end of smithery. A village smith would probably have too much work on his hands (I'm guessing) with mundane requests to try producing armours, too, whether it's the sophisticated plate or perhaps not so sophisticated, but time-consuming chain. Not to mention the guilds might complain. I can't say what would these complaints involve though. All in all, if you climbed through the guild structure to reach the Master level, you likely became a part of your town's equivalent of upper or upper middle class. I'm thinking mostly of late-crossing-into-Renaissance Middle Ages, but I'm willing to guess there was no substantial change in this regard.

What kind of armour who wore is dependent on the specific time period. While a common man would probably be fine with some boiled leather or brigantine throughout the most of the Middle Ages, towards the later part of the era plate armour began to spread and we get to see all those cuirasses and stuff.

Armorsmithing was a dedicated craft. A suit of full-plate armor was generally tailored to the individual and took a long time to make, so yeah, your clientele would most likely be wealthy for that type of work. For other sorts of armor, making it was always a time-consuming process for the most part. The sort of metal you needed in armor was a higher quality than for most tools, designed to withstand impacts and bounce back into shape afterwards. Most common blacksmiths simply didn't have the time (as was mentioned) or the skill to craft armor, as lack of time leads to lack of experimentation leads to lack of refinement of technique.

Weaponsmithing, on the other hand, was much easier, and pretty much any smith could be conscripted to punch out swords or polearms, since they weren't too far off from what they were making to begin with.

Good answers! A few more even randomer questions. When was one declared an outlaw? Was it when you murdered someone or was it typically poaching the king's deer or offenses like that? Or did it vary on who was in charge?

Also, if a baker (or any job really) had a son, would the son be expected to carry on his family's baking tradition or would they send him to be apprentice to someone else.

Last question. Knights were known for having jousts and tournaments but were there any other similar peasant games involving feats of strength and the like?

Your first question: I believe it varied from society to society, and the age we're talking about. But in general terms, "outlaw" was only for the higher and most heinous (for the time) crimes (such as murder, treason, theft, failing to heed a royal summon, failing to pay considerable debt e.t.c). Something like killing the king's deer would presumably only land you in jail for a few weeks/months or at most losing some bodypart or somesuch.

I assume that yes, the baker's son would be expected (and probably trained from birth) to carry on his family's trade. That said, I think that would only apply if he was the elder son. It was not unheard of for one son to carry the family's business, while another son would work in something else (sometimes related to the family's business. Such as: One son would be the baker, the other would become a cook or somesuch). This happened specially in noble families (often the elder son would deal with his father's land and vassals, and the younger son(s) would become Knights or something of the sort).

And I may be wrong but I think peasants could participate in Jousts. So Jousts were sports for both classes, I think. Also: Hammer-throwing and wrestling were not unheard of, so those also serve as alternatives.

Re: armor.

For a long time, Milan was considered the premier armor-manufacturing region, with Bavaria close behind.

Re: outlawries

"Outlaw" was simply a punishment; what you could get it for varied by jurisdiction. In what is now the UK, it was generally used as a practical rather than a legal measure - most serious criminals were executed, outlaws were generally those whose guilt was not in doubt but who couldn't be reached or who had failed to answer summons to appear in court. Sometimes it would be used as a convenience punishment equivalent to exile, a man might be outlawed by a lord in Yorkshire who did not want - for whatever reason - to kill him, but the decree would not be promulgated and so the outlaw could conceivabley flee to Cornwall, say, and start over. The Romans used it as a fancy means of exile, and according to TOW, the Scandinavians used it as an alternative to prison.

Re: peasant sports

Football (or rather, a variety of anarchic ball games) was an extremely popular form of peasant sport in the medieval UK, and the village games could get quite bloody.

edited 14th Mar '14 1:48:50 PM by Achaemenid

Jousts were a knightly/noble sport. Peasants, commoners, and the gentry wouldn't be allowed to participate, even if they did own the warhorse, armor and weapons it required (which peasants and commoners would not be able to afford in the first place, and gentry might be able to afford but probably wouldn't own.)

Huh. Had read somewhere Commoners could acquire better positions for themselves in medieval society if they did well at Jousting. Go figure.

Man, this is kind of fun. Feel free to ask your own questions too in addition to answering them though you guys have been great. Speaking of which, I have one more; how did one become a medieval soldier? I'm not talking about being a knight but instead a common infrantry grunt like a pikeman or archer. Were you born into it (like most jobs back in the day), was there a draft, did you volunteer, or was it something else entirely?

Never mind.

edited 19th Mar '14 8:36:44 AM by FantasyLiver

Curious, when was gunpowder introduced to Medieval European Warfare? (I'm already aware of it's presence in China at the time.)

Early Renaissance, I'd say. Its most famous use was breaking down the walls of Constantinople in 1453, and it spread from there.

Man, weapons were cooler before gunpowder was introduced.

Until the Old West, anyway.

There was like a period between 1500 and 1870 that weapons didn't look that cool.

Oh no, don't turn into the guy from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie on us.

"Nobody knows how to kill people anymore. It's a lost art."

I've never seen that and

Earlier. Cannon were used at the Siege of Calais and the Battle of Cressy in 1346, although it took a while before they could demonstrate any advantages over traditional methods. TOW mentions cannon being used against the Scots in 1327.

Now that you've mentioned Crecy, I think that provides a good meter of the introduction of guns. At the start of the Hundred Years wars, it's all like "Wow, this longbows are amazing!" and at the end it's like "Eh, longbows, not so useful when you have cannons that transform the face of siege warface". So there's the introduction and then over a hundred years there's the emergence as a dominant factor.

I thought guns didn't outclass bows and crossbows until the American Revolution.

Oh, that happened long before the American Revolution.

So, when did it officially happen?

I'd say the 1600s, at the latest.

Well, yes and no. The English longbowmen of Azincourt and Cressy could have outshot Wellington's veterans; and, indeed, Wellington actually inquired about raising a corps of archers during the Peninsular War. The trouble is that an English longbowman was as close as the medieval world ever got to a Super-Soldier: you started young, and trained a child to shoot for his entire life. By the time he was twenty-one, he would have the huge muscles needed to draw and fire the bow and keep shooting. Skeletons of English archers have enlarged left arms and bone spurs, for instance.

By contrast, a man can be trained to proficiency with a musket in a fortnight.