Maille: quality control and repetition

One of my passions that I have not written about in a professional context yet is maille armour. More popularly known by its modern label, 'chainmail' was originally known as maille or mail. At least as old as 300BC and having never really fallen out of use, it's a prime example of human industry, involving mind-boggling levels of time, skill and material dedication. And, across history, it's something that has been subject to strict quality control measures to ensure high repeatability in production. 

For something intended to protect a warrior's life, armour is intrinsically linked to high quality standards. Whereas a single piece of armour such as a helmet may be easily determined to be passable or faulty depending on its manufacturing quality, for something such as a hauberk (a maille shirt), the countless parts involved in making the armour effective require every link to be of a high quality. It's similar to how we define repeatability in production today, and undoubtedly the medieval maille-makers would have had a keen eye for inspecting every component to ensure this high quality: what we now know as quality control. 

In an article by Nicholas Checksfield, David Edge and Alan Williams (Examination and assessment of the Wenceslaus mail hauberk), they described the opportunity they had to inspect a hauberk kept in the treasury and museum of St. Vitus' Cathedral in Prague. It's attributed to St Wenceslaus and I had the good fortune of seeing it in person in 2016 on a visit to Prague. It's an immense garment, clearly meant for someone who was quite tall. I could go on for hours about why the Wenceslaus hauberk is interesting and historically significant, but I will focus specifically on why it's relevant to us.

The hauberk, possibly as old as the 10th century AD, is quite badly damaged due to its age, but is estimated to have consisted of a total of 80-100,000 individual links. Naturally, when the aforementioned inspected the hauberk, it was impossible to measure every single ring, so  sample measurements were taken that should give a fairly good indication of the characteristics of the whole hauberk. Across all the rings, the diameter of the material varies between 0.66mm and 1.14mm. The inner diameter of the rings varies between 3.59mm and 4.45mm. So for something that was made possibly over a thousand years ago, it indicates true craftsmanship, with a variance in material thickness of less than half a millimetre, and a shape difference of less than a millimetre. When I work with modern tools today, I struggle to acquire that level of precision. It might not be as precise as modern manufacturing standards demand, but it's amazing to think that this level of precision was achieved in a workshop with only hand tools, likely with a large group of apprentices assisting the master maille-maker. 

Part of my passion for maille is expressed in making it myself. In fact, the piece in the titular photograph is a piece I made myself. Granted, for this I did not make the rings, I bought them from the company that Nicholas Checksfield also happens to work in, Cap-a-pie (French for head-to-toe). Because I love statistics and because, ironically, I can be quite impatient to see results, I bought a precise scale to measure the rings so that I could possibly estimate some statistics for a full hauberk. These rings are a modern machine-made product, which makes them incomparably cheaper to what they would have cost in the Middle Ages. My sample measurement of twenty rings revealed a fairly consistent average of 0.265 grams per ring, with a mass ranging from 0.24 to 0.28 grams, although the vast majority were solidly at 0.27. So it's fairly consistent, especially considering how many a full hauberk will take. Given that these rings have an inner diameter of 6mm, and the Wenceslaus hauberk's rings have a fairly average inner diameter of 4mm, there's a 30% difference between them. Theoretically, that means that if I were to try and recreate the Wenceslaus hauberk with these rings (which I'm not trying to do by any means), I would use 30% fewer rings. That still means roughly 48-67,000 rings for the total piece, and I'm only about 4,000 rings in. 

I dread to think how much time it will take, especially if you take into account that half the rings are riveted shut (the other half are solid rings punched from a sheet of metal). 

In the modern day, maille is still used. Butchers are familiar with maille gloves and aprons, and German riot police have been seen wearing maille to protect against stabbing. But the most high-tech version is in 3D-printing. It's possible nowadays to print an entire dress from a chainmail-like structure in one piece, as was done by Nervous System. The most interesting part I find is that because maille behaves much like a soft fabric, the dress wasn't posed in order to be printed, but it was digitally rendered to essentially be crumpled into a little box and printed that way. That allowed the creators to print the whole thing before unwrapping it and posing it on a mannequin. Although it's definitely not armour, it's interesting to see what's possible with modern technology, and it leaves me to wonder how long maille will remain in use and what quality control procedures it will be subject to.