Gambeson

A gambeson is a part of armour in the form of a padded jacket. It is used either discretely as a complete armour or under a plate or mail armour to facilitate it's wearing and prevent chafing. The design of these two types of gambeson is different, the former were thicker and used more resilient materials, like leather. The gambeson was very insulatory and thus uncomfortable, but its protection was vital for the soldier.

Production
Gambeson were quilted out of several layers of cloth and stuffed afterwards. While the cloth was usually linen or wool, the stuffing varied, and could be for example scrap cloth or horse hair. Gambesons as full armour were faced with leather or heavy canvas to give better protection to the cost of being heavier.

The production of a quality reenactment gambeson lasts 30 to 40 working hours, using a sewing machine.

History
Quilted leather open jackets and trousers were worn by Scythian horsemen before the 4th century BC, as can be seen on Scythian gold ornaments crafted by Greek goldsmiths. The European gambeson can be traced at least to the late 10th 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 13th century, and peaked in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Although they are thought to have been used in Europe much earlier, gambesons underwent a revolution from their first proven use in the late 11th and early 12th centuries as an item of armour that simply facilitated the wearing of mail to an item of independent armour popular amongst infantry. Although quilted armour survived into the English Civil War in England as a poor man's cuirass, and as an item to be worn beneath the few remaining suits of full plate, it was increasingly replaced by the 'buff coat'- a leather jacket of rough suede.

There are two distinctive designs of gambeson; those designed to be worn beneath another armour, and those designed to be worn as independent armour. The latter tend to be thicker and higher in the collar, and faced with more resilient 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 renowned to stop even heavy arrows and their design of multiple layers bears a striking resemblance to modern day body armor, which substituted at first silk and later Kevlar as fabric.

For common soldiers who could not afford mail or plate armour, 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 armour - came only with the Renaissance, as the use of firearms became more widespread, until by the 18th 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 the access to large amounts of cotton cloth was 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 logistics and expense of equipping a town militia or army with large amounts of cotton-based garments is doubtful, when flax-based textiles (linen) was in widespread use.