In the broadest terms, armour can be defined as protective equipment which is worn on the person (i.e. excluding the shield). Shield bosses are a common finding in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries but finding evidence of a helmet or byrnie is incredibly rare. So far, only five helms have been recovered from English soil which relate to our period, and one has to be generous with dates to include the fifth – the Burgh Castle Helm. The only mail-coat which has survived is, of course, from the exceptional burial at Sutton-Hoo.
Why has so little survived to the present? After all, swords, seaxes, spears and arrow-heads have survived in significant numbers, buried with their owners in life. Like byrnies and helms, all these too were made from precious iron and could have been re-cycled. Although
mail has a large surface area and corrodes quickly in the ground, even in the acid soil of the Sutton Hoo mound, a mass of iron mail is difficult to miss. Perhaps mail was only very rarely buried in graves or perhaps it was much rarer than we have been led to believe. It is time to re-examine this question with an open mind, jettisoning modern re-enactor-induced preconceptions and going back to basics.
The first idea which needs to be examined is that until late in the Anglo-Saxon period, the English were technically incapable of manufacturing mail and that when the mail-coats acquired from Roman Fabricæ on the mainland of Europe wore out, they could not be replaced. It has been estimated that a ‘well cared for, iron byrnie, kept well-greased could last for up to 200 years. We know from ‘Beowulf’ that armour was kept in the family and passed down the generations:
…Onsend Higelace, gif mec hild nime,
beaduscruda betst, þæt mine breost wereð,
hrægla selest; þæt is Hrædlan laf,
Welandes geweorc…
…send back to Hygelac, if battle take me
(this) best of battle-shirts that my breast weareth.
(this) gifted garment that is Hrethel’s legacy
the work of Weland .,….
Armour gifted to a warrior by his lord had to be returned at death, in order that it could be leant out again. So Rædwald & Co. could well have been wearing heirloom mail, manufactured long ago in continental Europe. Some also say that the Sutton-Hoo helm was ancient when deposited and, to be fair, its design does hark back to a 4th Century AD Roman
Cavalry design. Also supporting this argument is the disappearance of the armour-piercing heavy javelin, the Angon, after the 7th Century; perhaps, in the absence of armour, it was no longer needed!
There are, however, major problems with this argument. The manufacture of mail is costly, tedious and time-consuming but not technically difficult compared to, for example, a ‘pattern-welded, sword, or even a silver-inlaid seax. Saying that the Anglo-Saxons possessed little or no mail (or other armour) a few hundred years after coming to Britain because they were incapable of its manufacture must be wrong. English smiths were quite capable of making mail armour – if it was needed!
One must therefore ask the question: Were heavily armoured warriors tactically useful during the Anglo-Saxon Period? The answer has to be: Only sometimes. Armour, even a well-fitting mail-coat, is heavy, hot and uncomfortable. A soldier will only wear the minimum amount of armour necessary to keep him alive. There are well-recorded instances, in the later Mediæval period, of soldiers shedding the heavy armour which had been issued to them and in the 5th century De Re Militari, Vegetius laments the laziness of the current Roman Infantry: …negligence and sloth having by degrees introduced a total relaxation of discipline, the soldiers began to consider their armour too heavy and seldom put it on. They first requested leave from the Emperor to lay aside the cuirass and afterwards the helmet.
For every military unit, from antiquity to the present day, there is the conflicting triad of protection vs. weaponry vs. mobility. A good modern example is the tank. In order to be an effective weapon the tank needs a gun for offence, a very large gun, needing a heavy turret and heavy, bulky ammunition limits either the armour that can be carried or the mobility or both. A light gun means a fast, well-armoured tank, but one without much offence. Similarly, with regard to armour protection: too light armour protection leaves the crew vulnerable to enemy fire, too heavy and the mobility or offensive power of the tank suffers, limiting its tactical usefulness. Balance and compromise need to be made in order to obtain an efficient armoured fighting vehicle. The same is true of the Dark Ages Warrior: Armour would only be worn / provided / manufactured if it was tactically useful!
If your war-band has to slog hundreds of miles across the country in order to fight:
- they will not want to carry more than the bare minimum of arms / protection in order to save weight. Or : -
- you will require a large baggage train. This will be slow-moving and, hence, tactically vulnerable. Or : -
- you can, of course, have all your war-band mounted. This is very costly, but as the horse, not the warrior, carries the weight of the armour and arms, until it comes time to fight, it is the best option but only affordable for a relatively small number of warriors, even if you are a king.
Thus, it is my thesis that Early English warriors usually went into battle with sword / spear and shield alone and only the privileged few who could ride to the field of battle wore helm and byrnie. Of course, heavy infantry could move by water, Viking-style and it is salutary to
remember, that one of the first things invading Danes did was to seize all the horses in the area.
Let us now consider the means whereby arms and armour from the distant past are preserved for us to find and study.
First, and most important, there is grave deposition. This comprises most of the important finds both in England and in continental Europe and includes the Sutton-Hoo panoply, the Pioneer Helm and the Benty Grange Helm. Grave goods, however, cease with the
end of official paganism.
Second, material can have been lost by accident or discarded as rubbish. Into this category, one can place the Burgh Castle Helm.
Third, material can have been hidden carefully for later retrieval, but, like treasure trove, never recovered. The best example of this being the Anglian Helm from Coppergate, York.
Last, there is careful, deliberate deposition of material into rivers, bogs etc. as sacrifice to the gods. So far as I am aware, this usually applies more to weapons than armour and I am not aware of a definite example from Anglo-Saxon England.
It can thus be seen that aside from grave deposition, where site are generally well-recognised as such, the chances of finding Anglo-Saxon military artefacts are slim, for we do not know where to look! The Coppergate Helm was only found by luck and the keen eyesight of the mechanical excavator operator.
We return to the subject of the Sutton-Hoo Burial, where the only Anglo-Saxon mail-shirt known was recovered. Why were the Pioneer Warrior, the Taplow Warrior or the Benty-Grange Warrior not buried with their byrnies? We can only speculate, but perhaps the
protective mail-coat did not have the same religious or ceremonial overtones that the sword or helmet did? Perhaps mail was not regarded as so personal an item. Certainly costly, it has great utility. It is durable, easy to repair and easy to adapt to different wearers. It can be
folded up, greased, stored and then used again and again. It can be re-worked repeatedly until the rings are worn to breaking point, whereupon it can be heat-welded into a lump and forged anew. The very versatility of mail thus makes it nigh on impossible to date: a byrnie could include rings from older mail-shirts which had themselves been hybrids. The Bayeux Tapestry shows dead warriors being relieved of their hauberks; mail was much too valuable to leave lying around. It is quite possible, therefore, that part of a mail-coat worn by one of Harold’s huscarls at Hastings may have formed part of the harness of a Norman War-Lord in the 12th Century Not a particularly encouraging thought!
September 16th, 2010
