On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 6:26 AM, David J Brooks <[email protected]> wrote: > Nice sign. > > I visited London England in 1975 and toured some of the castles. I was > amazed at how small the Knights armour was and i'm only 5'6" > > Dave >
Most display armour is actually around 5/6th scale, not full size. While people were smaller in the middle ages, they still tended to be pretty big in Europe, with men averaging around 5'6" - 5'8" (vs 5'11" today). When historians started comparing display armour to some parts that were known to have seen combat, they found that much of the display suits were actually not full sized, likely for cost reasons. In other news, Napoleon was not actually terribly short. The French pouce was larger than the English Inch, so while he was 5'2" in the French system, he would actually have been 5'7" in the British measurements, average height for the era. The idea of Napoleon as short was mostly propaganda exploiting the common mistake. -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
