Coat of plates

In his 2013 PhD thesis, Mathias Goll suggests that this kind of armour made from several segments held together via leather or fabric only should be described as “segmented-armour”, in this case in the subtype "torso-front-and-back-segmented".

He interprets the backplates of his coat of arms as vertically arranged lames held in place beneath leather or fabric by horizontal rows of rivets, like on some of the Visby plates.

In Mike Loades' military documentary called Weapons that Made Britain: Armor, the older set of mail harness and aketon proved itself unable to stop lance strikes at horseback charges.

Iron plate reinforcements would be recorded again in Heinrich von dem Türlin's Diu Crône, from 1220's; the gehôrte vür die brust ein blat is mentioned after the gambeson, hauberk and coif, but before the surcoat, thus still not being entirely visible.

By mid-13th century, artistic evidence shows similar plate pattern to that of St. Maurice's Effigy in a German manuscript.

[9] The fact that German men-at-arms often are described with this armor in art or military records under foreign lands might suggest they were behind their popularization in Europe by that time.

[10] Contemporary to this, Scandinavian sources from mid-to-late 13th century also make reference to it: in the Konungs skuggsjá, from around 1250, it is called a Briost Bjorg and specifies that is should cover the area between the nipples and the belt.

The later Hirdskraa of the 1270s calls it a plata, informing that it should be worn beneath the hauberk, permitting it only to the highest ranks of Scandinavian military, from skutilsvein (knight) and up.

[12] In 1295, the coat of plates was worn along with mail by nearly all troops in an army gathered by King Philip IV of France.

[14] By the second half of the 14th century, the coat of plates became affordable enough to be worn by soldiers of lesser status, like the Gotland's militiamen or the urban militia of Paris.