Mail armour guarded warriors for two millennia and now stops sharks
Link enough small metal rings together and you get mail, armour that protected European soldiers from the third century BC into the 1500s. It is far from obsolete. Butchers wear mail gloves, divers wear mail suits against shark bites, and it still turns up inside modern stab-resistant vests.
The oldest surviving pieces come from the Carpathian Basin: a third-century BC grave at Horný Jatov in Slovakia and a chieftain's burial at Ciumești in Romania. Celts usually get the credit for inventing it, but Etruscan mail goes back at least to the fourth century BC, and the idea may have grown out of much older scale armour. The Zoroastrian scripture the Avesta, written in the sixth century BC, mentions mail. The Romans apparently met it fighting Gauls in what is now northern Italy and adopted it as the lorica hamata, a main armour of the imperial army.
When the Western Roman Empire fell, the workshops needed for plate armour dwindled, and mail became so central that its name came to mean armour in general. It was slow and costly to make, so fallen fighters' mail was routinely stripped and reused or sold. Women worked the trade as well as men: Alice la Haubergere made mail in London's Cheapside in the early 1300s, and in 1446 Agnes Hecche of York inherited her father's tools to carry on his business. The oldest complete hauberk known is thought to have belonged to Leopold III, Duke of Austria, who died at the Battle of Sempach in 1386.
A whole vocabulary grew up, mostly borrowed from French. A knee-length mail shirt is a hauberk and a shorter one a haubergeon; a hood is a coif, leggings are chausses, and a curtain of mail hanging from a helmet is a camail or aventail. Mail sandwiched between fabric layers is a jazerant. The Carolingian byrnie, the soldier's most prized armour, remains a puzzle, since without surviving examples historians argue over whether it was mail or leather covered in metal scales.
Nobody is sure where the word itself comes from; proposed roots include Latin macula, a spot, and Old French maillier, to hammer. The phrase chain mail is a colloquialism dating only from the 18th century. Plate armour and better firearms pushed mail off European battlefields during the 16th and 17th centuries, though in Asia, Africa and the Middle East it served into the 18th.
Source: Chain mail
