Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 1).djvu/146

 the general inclination to drag the hauberk out of shape. Admittedly superior power of defence, likewise greater rigidity, would be obtainable when the hauberk was newly thonged; but after a few days of wear the leather straps would curl round to the shape of the rings and they would lose their utility in giving support. Again, if the leather strips were passed through every row of rings the hauberk would lose a great deal of its flexibility. This was the disadvantage of the reinforced mail of the latter part of the XVth century, when the system of widening the rivet joint of the links, in order to make the mesh of the mail smaller, was often carried to such an extent that the hauberks lost nearly all their flexibility. A hauberk in the collection of Dr. Bashford Dean, of New York, made on these principles, has about the suppleness of a very thick piece of felt.

The fact that mail is so hard to depict caused the early artists to treat it in many different ways, and thereby to furnish the latter-day students with a topic fruitful in points. For even in modern times when we look at a pen-and-ink drawing, say by the late Sir John Tenniel or Linley Sambourne, we see chain mail as conventionally represented as it was in any early illumination.

After Sir Samuel Meyrick's time, possibly no one has given such close study to chain mail and its representation as the late Mr. J. G. Waller, who, agreeing with the late Mr. Albert Way, eventually came to the conclusion that all the variations were in the end but different formal manners of representing the ordinary interlinked mail.

Since we have no chain mail that can with certainty be assigned to the XIIth or even XIIIth century we must be satisfied to consider it as almost identical with the same material of a later date that has been handed down to us. Certainly entire suits of chain mail, purporting to be of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, exist in the Zouche collection at Parham; but, to quote the late Mr. W. Burgess's opinion, "their origin is more than doubtful, indeed, it must be confessed that the appearance of the surface of the rings points to the action of fire rather than the oxidization truly produced by time."

Before quitting the subject of the pictorial representation of chain mail, an ingenious suggestion put forward by Mr. W. G. B. Lewis, the illustrator of the now famous brochure on "Helmets and Mail," by the Baron de Cosson and the late Mr. W. Burgess, published by the Royal Archaeological Institute in 1881, is worthy of consideration.

His theory is that "banded" mail was made by first sewing rows of overlapping rings on to linen (some examples having the rings closer than