Physiological effects of wearing armour and heat

[Jim McDougall]

Since we have brought in some great discussion on armour, and we at last have this forum to discuss and archive material for further research, I thought this might be interesting.

While the most typical thoughts concerning armour in the medieval period focus toward either weight of the armour, and of course the old 'chestnut' about knights being hoisted onto thier horses (false), and of course the dreaded rust, it seems that there must have been issues with heat as well.

Some time ago Jens brought this subject up, and it led to some interesting findings, and I have just found my notes so thought I would share them here.

One problem was physiologically, that of either apoplexy or heat prostration, as noted by Dr. F. Kottenkamp in "The History of Chivalry and Armour" (1850, p.89) stating that "...the heat of summer made the armour insupportable and exposed the wearer to the dangers of suffocation and apoplexy or produced at least, such a debility as to disable him from wielding his weapons".

*apoplexy is noted as a sudden usually marked loss of bodily function due to a rupture or occlusion of a blood vessel (brain hemorrhage).

An interesting illustration of this is quite possibly related in the example found in "Brasseys Book of Body Armour" (Robert Wasasnam-Savage, 2000, p.70);
"...the real problem with armour was not its weight, but the way it trapped heat. Body heat resulting from battle exertion could prove fatal. At the Battle of Agincourt (1415) the Duke of York seems to have died of a 'heart attack' brought on by the heat of battle".
While this assumption is made without proper medical protocol of course, it well illustrates that the concerns on these matters were at hand.

"...it is one of the mysteries in the history of armour how the Crusaders can have fought under the scorching sun of the east in thick quilted garments covered with excessively heavy chain mail".
-Brittanica p.392

The subject may have been best summed up by Shakespeare;

"Art thou not fatal vision,
sensible to feeling as to sight?
Or art thou a dagger of the mind,
a false creation...proceeding
from heat oppressed brain?
-MacBeth II, i33
(Brewers, p.237, 13)


Just an aspect of the study of armour not often discussed.

Best regards,
Jim

[Ed]

Certainly the weight/heat was a contributory element to the loss at Hattin which wrote finis to the First Crusade. But isn't this sort of a given? I mean to say that even a modern soldier, if fully burdoned and exposed to the heat, would doubtless cease to be an effective fighter.

This little snippit shows that serious heat related disorders have 3 times the incidence of wounding in Iraq. And that is within a modern army!

BTW, I read in my searches that the load amedic carries is 65 lbs(!)

Assuming medical air transport is an indicator of serious wounds, injuries, or sickness, these data can also be described as follows:

* 6,273 seriously wounded;
* 6,430 seriously injured in non-hostile events (e.g. vehicle accidents)
* 17,662 seriously ill (e.g. serious heat prostration)
* A total of 30,365 seriously wounded, injured, or sick – all causes.

http://www.cdi.org/program/document....intversion.cfm

Serious stuff indeed.

ETA I just noticed that heat related illness is one of the disorders counted among the 17000.

[Atlantia]

What a great idea for disucssion.

I wonder, we know the details of the armour itself, the construction the articulation, joints, vents etc.
Has there been any studys of the evolution of the undergarments/padding and whether there were deliberate differences in materials or construction for summer/winter/ warm and cold climates?
Wearing metal armour in a hot sunny climate when you've come from wet cold ole England must have been unbearable.
I wonder what the surface temperature of the shiny metal must have been?
Would they have tried to shade the knights? Cloaks? Umberellas? ;-)
Would the metal be painted even?

[fearn]

Hi Jim,

Great question, with a bunch of angles to explore.

The problem isn't just the metal, it's the quilted gambeson that was often worn under the mail or plate to act as cushioning against impacts.

I suspect there's something we're not getting. I'm not disputing Ed's numbers at all, but there's something we're not understanding. For one thing, the season for wars was typically the warm season, not the cool season. If overheating was a critical problem, why weren't they fighting in the fall after the harvest? The other things was that, so far as I remember, the heaviest plate was worn in Italy, because they needed protection against crossbow snipers in urban warfare (sound similar to Iraq?).

While the medievals placed less value on human life than we do, the patterns of armor wearing make me think that either a) conditioning allowed the warriors to deal with the heat load imposed by their armor, or b) there's something we're missing in armor design that allowed the warriors to be cooler than expected. I'd specifically note that we should be looking at the padding, as well as the metal.

Perhaps we should also check in with the SCA folks? They've been fighting in replica armor for years.

Great topic!

F

[Jim McDougall]

Thank you very much guys! I really appreciate your comments and observations, and it does seem this is a subject we could give some attention to.
While certainly this is not a problem isolated to armies of any certain period, and of course is certainly a problem in modern armies in qualified degree, but I wanted to address how much attention was given to it in the period of our studies.

My son in law fought in Iraq, and he is particularly susceptible to heat, and upon returning actually never even mentioned the heat, though he was in considerable combat situations. As far as I recall from the military (its been over 40 yrs!), the general full pack was around 60 lbs. The specific command I recall hearing most was 'take your salt tablets!' and I did see a number go down with heat prostration in training with temperatures well over 100 degrees. It is my impression that in modern times, the technology has offered not only awareness of these issues, but made efforts to use various resources to help alleviate the problem.

I know that armour was often burnished, russeted or even painted in order to prevent rust and corrosion, but I am not certain of those being applied to reduce heat. It does seem that, as Atlantia mentioned, cloaks or draped coverings were worn over armour as seen in illustrations, but again, I do not know whether this was artists license, fashion enhancement or indeed intended to reduce heat.

In desert regions, it is known in relatively modern times armies did cover the hilts of swords in leather to prevent glinting steel revealing positions and the heat from suns glare in handling the weapon. I once had a British M1908 cavalry sword (called the Allenby sword for the Commander in the Palestine campaign in WWI)with the huge bowl hilt covered in leather. In early Mexico, the sabres on the frontier had hilts and scabbards covered entirely in leather.

But back to the medieval armour, I think Fearn has a great point, the heavy padding that was worn, seems certainly to not only comfortably (?) support the heavy mail, but protect the wearer from the incredible heat it must have carried. I know that out here in the desert southwest, during the summer, I have burned my hands in inadvertantly grabbing items that have been in the sun (learned quick to wear gloves!).
I recall a rather grim story of a British officer who survived the tragic and immortal 'Charge of the Light Brigade' but later died in India of a heatstroke from the metal plate placed in his skull.

Best regards,
JIm

[fernando]

Alow me to put my empyrical spoon on this plate .

Originally Posted by Ed

... BTW, I read in my searches that the load amedic carries is 65 lbs(!)

I was a medic in the Mozambique guerilla warfare. In our case the gear, a nurse bag, weighed no more than some 10 lbs. Even so we were lucky to be provided with a native servant to carry it. All we had to bear was the rifle and ammunition, like the other troopers.
The heat in campaign is terrible, specially for 'civilized' guys out of their usual tempered habitat.
I saw tactical operations being interrupted, due to fatigue caused by heat. I even saw a nc sargent criticaly handing his gun and ammunition belt to the servant, to resist marching under heat fatigue.
Thirst comes along; when you finaly find a puddle, with suspect whitish water full of tadpoles, you don't even give the medic time to desinfect it.
But human condition, after intense training, can endure the hardest accomplishments; in the same manner military comandos or rangers can resist infinitely worse conditions than ordinary troops, so certainly the medieval knights trained themselves quite hard before going into battle inside those iron cans.

Originally Posted by fern

...The problem isn't just the metal, it's the quilted gambeson that was often worn under the mail or plate to act as cushioning against impacts ...

Sometimes things work in the inverted way. I have read that:
To counter the heat, many knights wore a surcoat underneath their armour to insulate against the metal which under the heat of the Sun, would have literally burned their skin.
Still is a riddle for the contemporaneus common man, how those guys resisted critical heat endurance. Maybe many a times they droped down before the job had ended .
Fernando

[migueldiaz]

Originally Posted by Jim McDougall

At the Battle of Agincourt (1415) the Duke of York seems to have died of a 'heart attack' brought on by the heat of battle". While this assumption is made without proper medical protocol of course, it well illustrates that the concerns on these matters were at hand.

Hi Jim and all,

This is quite an interesting topic!

Still on Agincourt and this time viewing it from the side of the French, we read this eyewitness account from one Jehan de Wavrin, son of a Flemish knight (his father and older brother fought on the side of the French, and both died at Agincourt that day) --

"The place was narrow, and very advantageous for the English, and, on the contrary, very ruinous for the French, for the said French had been all night on horseback, and it rained [the whole night and for several days before], and the pages, grooms, and others, in leading about the horses, had broken up the ground, which was so soft that the horses could with difficulty step out of the soil. And also the said French were so loaded with armour that they could not support themselves or move forward. In the first place they were armed with long coats of steel, reaching to the knees or lower, and very heavy, over the leg harness, and besides plate armour also most them had hooded helmets; wherefore this weight of armor, with the softness of the wet ground, as has been said, kept them as if immovable, so that they could raise their clubs with great difficulty, and with all these mischiefs there was this, that most of them were troubled with hunger and want of sleep."

From Wikipedia, we read of more details. And as noted from many sources, it was not really the heavy armour per se that was the problem. Rather simplistically, it was allegedly the mud:

"Such heavy armour allowed them to close the 300 yards or so to the English lines while being under what the French monk of Saint Denis described as 'a terrifying hail of arrow shot'.[26] However they had to lower their visors and bend their heads to avoid being shot in the face (the eye and airholes in their helmets were some of the weakest points in the armour), which restricted both their breathing and their vision, and then they had to walk a few hundred yards through thick mud, wearing armour which weighed 50–60 pounds.[27]

"The French men-at-arms reached the English line and actually pushed it back, with the longbowmen continuing to fire until they ran out of arrows and then dropping their bows and joining the melee (which lasted about three hours), implying that the French were able to walk through the fire of tens of thousands of arrows while taking comparatively few casualties. The physical pounding even from non-penetrating arrows, combined with the slog in heavy armour through the mud, the heat and lack of oxygen in plate armour with the visor down, and the crush of their numbers, meant they could 'scarcely lift their weapons' when they finally engaged the English line however.

"When the English archers, using hatchets, swords and other weapons, attacked the now disordered and fatigued French, the French could not cope with their unarmoured assailants (who were much less hindered by the mud). The exhausted French men-at-arms are described as being knocked to the ground and then unable to get back up.

"As the battle was fought on a recently ploughed field, and there had recently been heavy rain leaving it very muddy, it proved very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as 'marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy'.[21] The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights struggled to get back up to fight in the melee. Barker (2005) states that several knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in it [some sources say that the Duke of York was one of them]. Their limited mobility made them easy targets for the volleys from the English archers. The mud also increased the ability of the much more lightly armoured English archers to join in hand-to-hand fighting against the heavily armed French men-at-arms."

As to what happens to those tons of armour in the aftermath of the battle, we refer back to this firsthand account of Jehan de Wavrin:

"And the English archers busied themselves in turning over the dead ... and they carried the armour of the dead by horseloads to their quarters ....

"When evening came the King of England [Henry V], being informed that there was so much baggage accumulated at the lodging places, caused it to be proclaimed everywhere with sound of trumpet that no one should load himself with more armour than was necessary for his own body, because they were not yet wholly out of danger from the King of France [the French were reported to be regrouping, and Henry V was fearing another attack; and it must recalled that the English were vastly outnumbered, anywhere between 1-6 to 1-10] ... the King further ordered that all the armour that was over and above what his people were wearing, with all the dead bodies on their side, should be carried into a barn or house, and there burned altogether ....

"Next day, which was Saturday, the King of England and his whole army ... passed through the scene of the slaughter [the killing of the French prisoners]... and King Henry stood there, looking at the pitiable condition of those dead bodies, which were quite naked, for during the night they had been stripped as well as by the English as by the peasantry."

Agincourt is not exactly about the the effects of wearing armour and heat. But I thought that the effect of wearing armour in a muddy battlefield is as interesting academically as well.

This has become quite a long post. Thanks for reading this far!

PS - Some say that the the Duke of York actually died from drowning while stuck in mud in his heavy armour. Overall in the battlefield, the mud was reportedly anywhere from ankle-deep to waist-deep. And then the Duke of York who was no longer a spring chicken at the time, was reportedly fat, too. Would there be authoritative sources that support this? Thanks.

[migueldiaz]

Rummaging through my old pics, I found these which I snapped at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) when I went there last year.

Now I have no idea as to the era and as to which countries these armours are from!

Just the same, I thought I can post these pics, in order for us to better visualize the subject.

PS - I have many other pics of the armours displayed in that museum. Now if only I can find them ...

[Jim McDougall]

Miguel, absolutely beautifully done! Thank you so much for the outstanding detail on Agincourt, which gives us even more perspective. Actually, in reading these accounts I can almost visualize all of this much more vividly.
I had not even taken into the account mud and field conditions.

The lack of oxygen in closed helmets I had heard of, and I think if one placed one of those iron buckets over your head and then tried to complete something with any degree of exertion it would be minutely an example.

I think that one of the best books I have read that describes these battle conditions is "Face of Battle" by John Keegan. He too adds this kind of depth, and understanding of the human experience endured. While we can view and admire armour in static collections, it is often difficult for many to think of what it was really like for the man inside.


Fernando, thank you so much for the notes on these conditions in combat zones, which also more clearly gives us perspective as well, and I can only say I admire you and all the men who served as medics. The thin thread of life was well guarded by medics in unbelievable conditions, at the risk of thier own, and you all deserve the highest gratititude and respect.


Miguel, nice shots of the Met!! Thank you!


All best regards,
Jim

[Paul Macdonald]

Aye, a good thread and one that brings home realities of combat equipment and environment.

I used to take part in late C15th re-enactment some years ago. The largest annual UK medieval re-enactment was and I believe still is Tewksbury.




This was a great adventure to partake in and could also be a fair test of fitness and endurance given the conditions.

A couple of years saw it in sweltering heat, which saw many dropping like flies with heat exhaustion and/or blacking out. I threw up myself once in full kit, but to be fair, the combination of a hard battle under hard conditions after a hard night in the beer tent lead to my momentary tactical retreat.

One year, I remember one fellow in a pig face bascinet -



Conditions - Decidedly wet underfoot following rain during the night and morning.
Situation - He falls face down with one or two others on top of him.
Result - His pig face stuck firmly in the mud, water rapidly filled in through the vent holes and he nearly drowned in a few inches of muddy puddlewater.

These served as stark reminders that it wasn`t all just about going out there and having a jolly good time, but that all eventualities had to be accounted for given the effects of armour in various atmospheric conditions.

[fearn]

Thanks Paul,

Great story and good warning. I'm not sure what's wrong with drinking hard the night before a battle. Sounds properly medieval to me!

Incidentally, that story about the mishap with the bascinet (along with the story of Agincourt) also answers why they didn't fight in the cool season unless they could help it. That reason is mud. Mud was one of the great enemies of infantrymen. That probably trumps the need to get crops planted and harvested.

F