"I can remember the first time I saw proper medieval armor when I went down to the Tower of London with my dad when I was about 10" he says. The idea for this research was born out of Askew's lifelong fascination with armor. Not only that, but some of the helmets from the medieval period had only thin slits in the face mask, further restricting oxygen flow. Wearing plates of heavy steel over the chest and back, while potentially preventing death in a battle, limits how much the lungs can expand and how much air a soldier can breathe in. In addition, the armor impairs breathing, Askew says. You have 7 or 8 kilos of armor on the legs, so when you swing your legs, your muscles are having to do much more work," Askew says. "A suit of medieval armor loads the lower limbs. This is partially because of how the weight is distributed. For instance, Askew says, he found that moving around in armor is actually much more taxing than carrying the same load, but in a backpack. "It is harder to walk around wearing armor than if you're not, but it is interesting to get figures for that."īut while the fact that wearing armor makes moving (and fighting) more difficult was always obvious, actually dressing volunteers in feudal-era garb and crunching the numbers turned up some interesting results. "Some of it, I'm afraid, is really sort of stating the obvious," Thom Richardson, the Keeper of Armour at the Royal Armories, says. Nevertheless, the team found that the volunteers expended nearly twice as much energy walking and running while wearing the armor as when they weren't. "We didn't want someone's inexperience wearing armor to be a factor in our results, so these people, being experienced, were ideal." Askew says. The fact that the volunteers were all used to wearing armor was important for historical accuracy.
The respirometer measured the amount of oxygen being used, which the researchers used as a measure of the energy expended.
#Medieval armor full#
The four volunteers walked and ran at different paces on a treadmill while attached to a respirometer, both while they were dressed in their full suit of armor and while they were dressed normally. The researchers, including author Graham Askew, recruited seasoned fight interpreters from the nearby Royal Armouries museum in Leeds to use a treadmill in full armor borrowed from the museum while scientists measured how much energy they were using. Clearly, a knight's shining armor required a lot of energy to wear, and the Leeds researchers wanted to find out just how much this metal wardrobe wore down medieval warriors-and how badly it hurt their battle performance. But for a new study from the University of Leeds, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers were serious about putting a historical myth to the test in the lab. Ok, so we're not talking about actual knights here, just historical fight interpreters in full medieval costume.
No longer needed for castle sieges, and with a skill set that was out of date centuries ago, they have been reduced to running on treadmills for science experiments. Media Platforms Design Team The legendary knights of yesteryear, mounted on mighty steeds and clad in full suits of heavy armor, have descended to a new low.
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