Gambeson



(also, , , or ) is a undercoat commonly worn as  under a. Gambesons cover the s,, , s, , and s. They may be lengthened to cover the s and may be half- or full-sleeved. The skirt is split to facilitate mounted use. Some gambesons include high collars to protect the. Impoverished s sometimes wear gambesons by themselves, preferably reinforced with or  pieces.

An (also called ) is worn under armour, particularly  and contains  for attaching plates. Some may include mail sewn into the elbows and armpits to protect the wearer in locations not covered by plate.

Etymology
The term gambeson is a loan from Old French gambeson, gambaison, originally wambais, formed after the  term wambeis “doublet”, in turn from  wamba “stomach” ( to ).

The term aketon, originally medieval French alcottonem, might be a loan from al-qutn “” (definite article – “the cotton”).

In medieval Norse, the garment was known as vápntreyja, literally “weapon shirt”, or panzari/panzer. Treyja is a loan from (Middle) Low German. Panzari/panzer is probably also a loan from (Middle) Low German, though the word has its likely origin in Italian, and is related to Latin pantex ‘abdomen’, cognate with English paunch.

History
Quilted leather open jackets and trousers were worn by horsemen before the 4th century BC, as can be seen on  ornaments crafted by Greek goldsmiths. As stand-alone cloth armor, the European gambeson can be traced at least to the late tenth century, but it is likely to have been in use in various forms for longer than that. In Europe, its use became widespread in the thirteenth century, and peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The gambeson was used both as a complete armor unto itself and underneath mail and plate in order to cushion the body and prevent chafing. Evidence for its use under armor does not appear until the mid twelfth century. It was very insulating and thus uncomfortable, but its protection was vital for the soldier.

Although they are thought to have been used in Europe much earlier, gambesons underwent a revolution from their first proven use in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries as an independent item of armor to one that facilitated the wearing of mail, but it remained popular amongst infantry as cloth armor. Although quilted armor survived into the in  as a poor man’s, and as an item to be worn beneath the few remaining suits of full plate, it was increasingly replaced by the ‘’ – a leather jacket of rough suede.

There are two distinctive designs of gambeson: those designed to be worn beneath another armor, and those designed to be worn as independent armor. The latter tend to be thicker and higher in the collar, and faced with other materials, such as leather, or heavy canvas. This variant is usually referred to as padded jack and made of several (some say around 18, some even 30 ) layers of cotton, linen or wool. These jacks were known to stop even heavy arrows and their design of multiple layers bears a striking resemblance to modern day, which substituted at first silk, ballistic nylon and later as fabric.

For common soldiers who could not afford mail or plate armor, the gambeson, combined with a helmet as the only additional protection, remained a common sight on European battlefields during the entire Middle Ages, and its decline – paralleling that of plate armor – came only with the, as the use of firearms became more widespread, until by the eighteenth century it was no longer in military use.

While the use of linen has been shown in archaeological evidence, the use of cotton – and cotton-based canvas – is disputed since large amounts of cotton cloth were not widely available in northern Europe at this time. It is quite probable that Egypt (and Asia-Minor generally) still produced cotton well after the 7th and 8th centuries and knowledge (and samples) of this cloth was brought to Europe by the returning Crusaders; however, the logistics and expense of equipping a town militia or army with large numbers of cotton-based garments is doubtful, when flax-based textiles (linen) were in widespread use.

was a type of armor similar to gambeson used by. Meanwhile, the Mesoamericans were known to make use of quilted textile armor called before the arrival of the Spaniards. Another example is the bullet resistant that was created in the  in an attempt to confront the effects of Western rifles.

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