Leather armor always gets shit on in RPGs, but it was probably hugely effective and worthwhile for general daily use in pre-gunpowder era.
>relatively cheap
>relatively light
>protection from slashes and minor other damage
>protection from animals and nature
Given how deadly infections were, protection against slashes was a big deal.
You can protect against slashes with a thick gambeson
Which can also be sewn back together more easily than leather armor could.
Leather armor was just a meme modern roleplayers invented.
Leather is relatively expensive, and if you ever consider going in to combat, the cost benefit of chainmail is way better. Its that one option in the middle that no one chooses for a reason.
It did exist, it might've just been more common in areas which had more cattle ranches than cotton or silk plantations. Also, a good set of maile is very time consuming, so guys who were looking for cheap stuff would either not use it or use a used suit that was passed down or captured
>relatively cheap
No. In the past there're a shortage of thick leather. It could make sense in some places. Shoes always took priority.
Real leather armor is a fricking myth cooked up in dnd. Cured leather and clothes made with them were expensive. The production of leather was dirty and deadly. Like a hangman, people who made leathe were outsiders in medieval society and lived in their own quarters. Unlike a hangman they died very young and lived shitty lives.
Leatherworkers were expert craftsmen that usually learnt their craft in guilds that tried to make money above else. So no poorgay leather shit for you.
Only rich and noble people could even hope to afford leather clothing.
If you want cheap, nonmetal armor, a cheap linen gambeson worked fine as a protective vest.
Layered linen offered protection, was easier to wear and cheaper to make
If you were REAL poor or backwards wood armor existed
it was but it didn't look like that D&D shit
this is a buff coat it was used through the gunpowder age
Jesus, dis someone skin OP's mother and make a suit of armor out of her vast hide?
they were made of buffalo hide
hence the name
merchant, i need your syrongest leather armor.
Buff hide just won't do. I need a coat of the skin of the legendary beast called Jeamuddah.
>pre-gunpowder
Buff coats are 17th century armor
Shit like that never existed.
The extent of leather armor before the 17th century is pretty much
>lamellar armor with leather elements used by steppeBlack folk and japs
>boiled leather vambraces and greaves in the 13th and 14th centuries
and that's it. This leather cuirass shit is fantasy.
>This leather cuirass shit is fantasy.
The form is, but of course the leather cuirass as a monolithic plate existed. It's the name. Cuir = latin for leather, and you can directly trace the etymology of cuirass from it.
or probably not.
there's multiple reasons for this:
it is not cheap. you need to breed cows for at least two years to get a decent sized hide, then you need to tan it, which takes a filthy process taking months.
Leather clothing was an extreme anomaly. As an example of this, there were something like 8,000 fragments of leather excavated in early medieval York from digs in the 1980s. about half of those were shoes, roughly 20% each of belts and knife sheathes, etc. the remainder are bags, pouches, purses, etc. Just one single item from the 8,000 or so pieces was a possible garment section.
Part of this is that vegetable tanned leather isn't a pleasant material. it was made by skinning the animal and soaking in pits of shit and lime (literally.) to make hair fall off it. it was then tanned usually using oak bark, with the hide soaking in filthy brown water for months on end. The end result is nothing like the leather you get on a jacket today - and it soaks up water and smells awful. You really wouldn't want to be wearing it, except as shoes, belts, or similar where you really needed to have it as a material. Leather for clothing really didn't become viable till new production processes in the 16th and 17thCentury (when buff coats like became commoner.)
It was vastly easier to produce linen in large quantities, purchased from the hundreds of thousands of people who were weaving fabrics in much of Europe. From that ready supply of material, its straightforward to create padded textile armour - which we have massive amounts of evidence for.
In contrast, leather armour is incredibly rare - about a dozen pieces over the whole of Europe. We have millions of surviving pieces of leather in archaeology - leather preserves really well in waterlogged strata. We simply have no evidence for leather armour or clothing.
>In contrast, leather armour is incredibly rare - about a dozen pieces over the whole of Europe. We have millions of surviving pieces of leather in archaeology - leather preserves really well in waterlogged strata. We simply have no evidence for leather armour or clothing
Armour is already quite rare in the archeological record, the amount of exant pieces we have from the 14th century alone in Europe for leather armour is actually phenomenal. Also, do not ignore the written, and artistic record. The inventories of the Tower armoury as an example mention various types of leather armour in the hundreds, and such pieces are overall rather commonly refrenced in the written record. Art too depicts it rather frequently in the early-mid 14th century.
i hate how leather armor became the standard light armor in rpg. gambesons look way better.
and they actually were worn as armor
Lol, lmao even.
Leather armor is something you find on basically every continent inhabited by humans, in various different periods. It is not something that was invented for modern fantasy, and it certainly isn't ineffective armour. In late medieval europe and specifically the earlier parts of the 14th century you see it worn with maille to provide significant blunt force protection, and it sees usage in tourneys even later than that. The Ancient greeks made their famous tube and yoke cuirasses, the Spolas, from leather and it saw massive usage in parts of asia.
Proper leather armour made using half tan leather and techniques such as gluing different forms of leather together is incredibly resistant to various blows and strikes too.
Anon real leather armor didn't look and had properties of like biker jacket.
That's AD&D myth.
Real leather armor would be made from hard cured leather that resembles plywood sheets not soft leather. Such plates would be arranged into something like lamellar armor and/or coats of plate. And by its properties it resembles lamellar armor, but thicker than steel lamellar (but not necessarily better protection).
Leather armor has never been commonly used outside of modern day fantasy
Brigandine armor was way better and realistic then the fantasy D&D crap
Pic Rel, a real Brigandine Chad
looks like he bought it on Alibaba
>but it was probably hugely effective and worthwhile for general daily use in pre-gunpowder era.
Nah, it was pretty shit. A brigandine was better.
Besides really early warfare, iron and then steel armor was always cheaper and more obvious of a choice for armor. No one would really be walking in thick leather to be protected as they fricked about, the best self defense as always since time began is a good offense, which is why it’s better to pack a strap than to wear a vest
Boiling leather to make it worthwhile armor causes the leather to shrink. You'd end up needing a half dozen cows just to make one suit of leather armor.
it was the flak jacket of its day
>but it was probably hugely effective and worthwhile for general daily use in pre-gunpowder era.
Probably not, because it was almost never actually used historically.
gamebson >>>>>>>>>>>> leather
Gambesons must have been hot as hell. I can't imagine wearing one on the march.
imagine the smell
The Spanish actually often switched their steel cuirasses for a nativr Aztec gambeson called Ichcahuipilli, since it was more comfortable in the environment. It was made of layers of cotton and other fabric. I remember it being soaked in sea water then dried, so that the sea salt would harden it somewhat, but that could just be hearsay
This has been vastly overstated as a phenomenon. The cotton armour was fine enough against the threats they faced over there, those being less serious than the threats faced on mainland Europe thus the protection of the cuirass wasn't always needed. What we actually get quite a bit of in Spanish colonial areas is usage of maille after it had gone out of fashion in Europe.
The number of conquistador's that had metal breastplates to begin with may not have been all that great. Díaz expedition before his trip with Cortés was basically just one search for fresh water after another, with the whole bunch nearly being killed off by thirst, for the simple reason that the only barrels the group could afford as they set out were all leaking like sieves. Finding the coin for armor...
armor and weapons are fricky in RPGs in general because the goal is to achieve game balance, and also to create an upgrade path for a character to get better and better gear as time progresses because fun is more important than realism in a game. Consequently you get all kinds of still stuff, like giving crap stats to leather armor just so something else can be an upgrade. Or my personal favorite, considering plate armor to be heavier than "chain mail" while the opposite is actually true. It's not like games any better with weapons. "Magnum" pistols are often more powerful than the average rifle. Depending on the game shotguns get all kind of improbable stats, like extreme spread or suddenly they are useless at 30 yards distance. And how many games assign god-tier stats to Katanas for no reason?
My pet peeve is bronze being a cheaper alternative to iron.
Literally didn't exist.
Isn't this just a leather jerkin? I know the English, when they needed light or very cheap armor, would wear it. I seem to recall some of the colonists wearing it, like around Jamestown-times, which would make sense, since it would be affordable for the poor and easier to move around in the forests with, but I can't give you a source on it. Also, I guess the leather helmets and particularly thick shakos worn from the 1700's to 1800's could be counted as that. If you look up American militia helmets from the War of 1812 and around then, they are somewhat thick and have brass or bronze fittings/reinforcements. Also, just remembered the Spanish Soldado de Cuera, who wore leather vests and leg coverings and carried a leather shield, apparently they were used until the early 1800's, probably in the more rural and Indian-infested parts of Spain's American holdings.
cheap
light
Cuirboulli is neither light, nor is it particularly cheap. There's a reason why basically no-one used it.
No one has ever received a blow job in khaki cargo shorts or in leather armor
--Abraham Lincoln