Funny thing on history channel

[Oaty]

Archealogists have found many swords in rivers. This has historians baffled on how they got there and why.

So RTW is realistic when a whole army runs into the river. Or CA paid them to make this announcement so people see it as a little bit of historical accuracy. Only problem is we outwit the A.I.

Anyways thought I'd mention this since this is always happening in the games. The difference is we get a birds eye view and see how foolish this is. My guess is most people at that time were'nt familiar with water depth and very few could swim, but they did not know this until it was too late. Another is I bet not a lot of them knew to hold there breath when underwater and did'nt realize they could breath it in so they start coughing exhaling more air.

1 thing that contradicts this though is they did'nt mention anything about armour. Bones have a lighter mass than steel and can be washed away in a storm. I could see platemail being washed away too since it would be hollow and would off enough resistance to the current to wash it away, but chainmail would not succumb to this.

[desdichado]

Oaty,

perhaps they got there when an army was in retreat/flight and men were desperate enough to attempt a crossing. Their bodies would most likely later be carried downstream and then be caught up in a shallower part of the river where their armour could be stripped by locals etc.

Their swords however would fall to bottom of river and stay there as too deep for people to go looking for or even to kow they were there.

Might explain at least why swords are there but nothing else.

[Pellinor]

Archealogists have found many swords in rivers. This has historians baffled on how they got there and why.

One thought is that they were dumped there by the victors after the battle. This could either be getting rid of stuff you didn't want around - the enemy's weapons might not suit your style of fighting, but could be tempting to a rebellion.

The main theory though is that it could be a thank-offering to the local gods, who often hang around in rivers. That accounts for there being a lot of Roman swords and kit in Scandinavian and German lakes that the Roman army isn't thought to have got as far as.

1 thing that contradicts this though is they did'nt mention anything about armour. Bones have a lighter mass than steel and can be washed away in a storm. I could see platemail being washed away too since it would be hollow and would off enough resistance to the current to wash it away, but chainmail would not succumb to this.

Mail is generally made of thin wire, and wouldn't take much corroding to disintegrate - especially in an environment with lots of rocks banging around. Corroding 1mm into the surface of a sword leaves it largely intact, but going 1mm into a mail ring leaves hardly anything behind.

By the time you get to plate armour you're less likely to be chucking offerings into rivers (God doesn't live there any more). There's also more of a culture of ransoming people and selling their armour. Plate's also going to suffer a bit more from the corrosion: steel plate isn't normally much more than 1mm thick, and 2mm is pretty chunky.

By the way, in armouring circles "mail" means "armour made of interlocking rings". That makes "chainmail" a tautology, and "platemail", "scalemail" and "splint mail" meaningless terms - they were invented by Victorian historians who didn't know much about armour other than that it was made of metal (and so must have been really heavy) and wasn't used in modern armies (so it must have been primitive, clumsy and basically useless). Walter Scott and his ilk had a habit of using "mail" just as a poetic word for "armour", and the Victorians liked to use a bit of poetic license in their history.

It's more accepted nowadays to use "armour" rather than "mail", except when talking about mail proper: so "plate armour", "scale armour", and so forth. No-one really knows what the Victorians meant by "banded mail" and "splint mail", though of course it is accepted that whatever they are they are both AC6 in 3rd Ed. D&D

Cheers,

Pell.R.

[SwordsMaster]

Also might be warriors' ashes were thrown into the river and their swords as well.

[Kraxis]

About mail.

Indeed mail means good old interlocked rings, but I have always taken the meaning of platemail to mean plates interlocked with mail, a sort of armour where the chest and other big areas were covered with teh plates and mail took the weak spots. Or even just old armours where a simple breastplate was stuck in, you know a composite armour, which weren't uncommon in the high middle ages. Full plate or plate armour I take to mean those shiny big armours that came by in the 1400s.
Splint mail is actually the same armour as the eastern peoples ran around in, interlocked plates connected with small metalrings.

The only armour that can't be fitted into this is the scalemail, unless of course somebody found it to be a great idea to patch scales onto real mail. How heavy wouldn't that be.

[Pellinor]

The mixture of mail and plates is normally called "mail and plates" . It's common in the Middle East and India. Sometimes you just get two circles stuck in a mail shirt, sometimes you get lots of small plates - there's a lot of variety.

The transitional armours, where you get breastplates and so forth stuck on over a mail shirt, are normally treated as separate items. Actually, in Europe there's more of a tendency to put plates on arms and legs first, and leave the body until later: the limbs were more vulnerable, and the body is protected by the shield too (until the shield disappears when full plate harnesses come along).

Your "splint mail" is normally called "lamellar", and the small plates there were normally held together with leather lacings. The Romans sometimes used metal staples for this, but rings are rarer.

The Romans also did put scales onto mail. This is sometimes referred to as "lorica plumata" on the grounds that it would look like feathers, though many people prefer to use "plumata" for any scale that has a ridge down the middle, whether on a mail, leather or cloth backing. They tended to use fine rings and small scales, so the end result was probably not too heavy (their cuirasses were also very skimpy by later standards - barely more than a vest compared to a Norman hauberk).

At the end of the day everyone knows what you mean if you say "platemail", though, even though it's wrong - it just grates in the way that referring to a PC box as a "hard drive" does

Cheers,

Pell.R.

[Spuddicus]

[QUOTE=oaty]
My guess is most people at that time were'nt familiar with water depth and very few could swim, but they did not know this until it was too late. Another is I bet not a lot of them knew to hold there breath when underwater and did'nt realize they could breath it in so they start coughing exhaling more air.
QUOTE]
I'm not so sure about this. Ancient people tended to be much 'closer to the earth' (for lack of a better term) than moderns. And given that the overwhelming majority lived close to major water-ways, it's likely that swimming would have been second nature to them; indeed, maybe even a critical survival skill.
From what I've seen regarding the unusually high number of swords found in river beds and lakes, there are generally 2 explanations -
- Rituals.
- Frenzied retreats. Still common to this day (during the battle for Al Najaf last year, significant numbers of Iraqi 'hostiles' drowned in the Euphrates).

[Shadow]

I think the mostly likely reason maybe a way of showing one’s wish to surrender by throwing their swords into the river
or
It is the victor’s wish that the surrendered army disarm so they just throw their swords in to the river.

But I feel that frenzied retreats is very unlikely cause you will drop more then swords right

[Kraxis]

Yes lamellar was the one I was looking for. Interestingly I have always loved those armours and always used lamellar armour as the term (I didn't say splint was very good)... Funny how I suddenly couldn't remember the name.

Anyway, now that we are talking about I have remembered another splint-type which might be better.
Small plates that are not interlocked but rather tightly connected and thus quite flexible, often oblong hexagons. I think they were used by chinese warriors and their more southern neighbours. But I can't remember now.
Of course it wouldn't be as good protection as many other types due to each plate the full brunt of the hit, as well as points might glance off each plate into the small openings between them.
I can only imagine them being good as strapon armour over another more substantial armour.

Now that you mention it, I do remember something about some late-roman armours of what we can honestly call true scalemail.
But wasn't it only bronzescales on iron mail? Also, wasn't the lorica [insert any armourname here] a victorian invention because they didn't know what the Romans called them? At least it was so with the lorica segmentata.

[Pellinor]

I think the Romans mostly used bronze, but I think there were some iron scales too. They also tinned a lot of them, and may even have gilded or silvered the really posh ones. One problem of course is that bronze lasts a long time (a lot of 4,000-year-old stuff looks almost new) but iron corrodes quickly, so the finds aren't going to be representative and the iconoraphic evidence tends not to be clear on the material.

I've seen references to a Chinese armour called "mountain armour", which is made of three-pointed stars all interwoven. Apparently quite tough and fairly flexible, but a right bugger to make.

There's also of course brigandines and coats of plates - small plates riveted to the inside of a leather or cloth garment. These were often used over mail, as well as by themselves.

I think you're right about the Victorians making terms up. Unfortunately, sometimes they made up terms for things that didn't exist, sometimes they made up terms for things which already had perfectly good names, sometimes they used terms for something other than their original purpose, and only occasionally did they genuinely come up with a good term for something which didn't already have a name. IIRC segmentata is one of these last - a useful term as we don't know what the Romans called it.

Cheers,

Pell.R.

[Kraxis]

The mMountain armour... Yes, I have heard about those too. But in a rather different way, of course it could be that it was only the armour for specific troops I have heard about.

Anyway, the armour was indeed those small stars but in several layers and thus quite inflexible, and thus only applied to big shoulderpads, much like the Japanese armour. These would then work as repositionable armour and a sort of shields (they were rather big). But they were simply too timeconsuming and expensive.

I agree that lorica segmentata is quite possibly the best name we have for it. Segmented or banded armour simply doesn't have the punch to it.

[Proletariat]

My guess is most people at that time were'nt familiar with water depth and very few could swim, but they did not know this until it was too late. Another is I bet not a lot of them knew to hold there breath when underwater and did'nt realize they could breath it in so they start coughing exhaling more air.

I'm sorry, but when I read this I became confused. I either do not understand the meaning of the post, or find this very poorly thought out.

If you're actually implying that the typical soldier of these times wasn't intelligent enough to understand that water has the ability to be deep or to understand that it isn't breathable like air, I'm somewhat shocked.

There's no empirical evidence to support a belief that people a few thousand years ago were any brighter or more stupid than people living today. The only difference between our lives and their lives, in a chronological sense, is technology which only time can advance. Moral qualms, math, philosophy, etc are much more non-linear, I believe, so to say they would be more likely to foolishly jump into deep water with armor on or to think they could breath water makes no sense to me... Perhaps after some strong drink, but not just because 'those ancients were total dumbasses.'

Anyway, sorry if this sounds like a flame, maybe I misunderstood you. I just wanted to point something out that struck me as odd.

[Kraxis]

Proletariat, he was joking around a bit. But it is true enough that most people couldn't swim.

[Proletariat]

Oh. I'd edit the post, but I don't see the option. I was a bit exhausted when I posted, sorry.