How tall were medieval knights?

[asomotif]

Maybe knights where like the jockeys in horseracing

[Battara]

Filipinos and Moros of the same time period were also short. They still are if they come from there today. I am too tall and American/Native American build to fit into my Moro armour. I am taller than my Filipino father.

[fearn]

Remember that we're seeing the armor that survived, not necessarily the armor the *used.*

We're also talking about museums, which have limited space and (hopefully) a wide, physically diverse audience. Unless there's a historical reason to show a big suit (for example, one from Henry VIII), I'd show a smaller suit. There's more room for other stuff around it, and more people can see more of it.

My microtuppence,

F

[A Senefelder]

A fair amount of European armour in museums is not displayed " properly ". By that I mean that it is simply on a stand to prop it up, not on a stand of the same dimensions as the original wearer for whom it was built so this tends to give a distorted view of height when looking at possed suits in museums. Diet had a great deal to do with height then as now. The upper classes ate much better than the lower classes and thus suffered much less from a wide array of issued induced by continuos poor diet including height. The upper classes were by and large on par with heights today, while the lower classes suffered somewhat in height as well as other issues produced by poor or limited diet. That being said weight in general or at least body mass seems to have been a bit lower if the sizes of surviving pieces are any indicator. I have owned several breast plates over the years that are of the correct height for some one of my height ( bottom edge of the breast plate at the height of the lowest rib of the rib cage ) but were very tight in the upper chest. Another feature that comes to light on many 15th and 16th century fine armours is that the calfs are very thin ( this being determined by the dimensions of the greaves ), something that would seem to not make sense given that some level of military service/training would be part of the users lifestyle. One explaination i've heard for this is the idea that this level of society seldom walked but rather road everywhere. A fair portion of the world today owns cars and drives most places, so one would expect to see the same result in modern humans but this does not seem to necessarily be the case so I find the above explaination suspect.

[fearn]

For the calves, I wonder if they are thin because they are being held on it part by the springiness of the metal, as opposed to slapping around as the wearer walked.

Not sure about the small chest thing, though. You'd think, given the mucking great weapons they were swinging, they would have rather large chests.

Fun stuff!

F

[Dmitry]

When I was just a lad of 10 or 11, growing up in the old USSR, I visited the Lenin Museum in Ulyanovsk. Exhibited was the coat that Lenin wore when he was shot [poorly] by Fanni Kaplan. Even then it struck me how tiny it was. Man was a midget.

[A Senefelder]

For the calves, I wonder if they are thin because they are being held on it part by the springiness of the metal, as opposed to slapping around as the wearer walked.

Having seen a number of these greaves up close, they're really thin. I've made a fair number of them over the years and one thing that has to be taken into account when building them is that the calf cannot be an absolute contour of the wearers calf when standing since in a full crouch the calf expands considerably out to either side due to downward presure/compression from the thigh above and the greave must allow room for this. That being said the period greaves from fine harness i've seen are still very slim, often seemingly slightly abnormally so.

You'd think, given the mucking great weapons they were swinging, they would have rather large chests.

Based on the original weapons i've owned over the years weight is not an overidding factor. They've been quite light and user friendly, most swords comming in at the 1.75 to 2.75 pound range. I visited with Lee Jones this past weekend and he was kind enough to let me handle an excellent munitions zweihander he owns which I suspect came in at the 4.5 pound range but was still easilly controlable in the single hand. I swing hammer for a living making armour and it has manifested inteself not in my chest but in my arms, specifically my right arm which is noticibly bigger than my left. I suspect that weapons practice would have yielded a fit individual rather than a big one but this is of course nothing more than my supposition.