If we look carefully at the selected illustration of the Conqueror from the Bayeux needlework, we can see the armoured sleeves of another garment issuing through the wide arm-holes of the hauberk; these in the loose drawing of the time are represented as possessing exactly the same annulated surface as the hauberk itself. May they not be the sleeves of the small under-hauberk that might correctly be called the haubergeon?
The hauberks have a square opening at the neck, whilst at about the height of the chest we see on most of the shirts a rectangular reinforcement edged with some other material. This, in the Duke's hauberk, is not present, but it seems that the hood of mail issues from under the top of his hauberk. Might not this mail hood and the under sleeves appearing from beneath the hauberk be part and parcel of the same under protective garment?
We have discussed the probable shape of the Norman hauberk, but we come now to a far more difficult problem—the method of its construction and the material used. Up to this point the word mail has been used to denote the pliant protective material of the hauberk, not necessarily inter-*linked mail. From the divers ways of illustrating it, it would appear that various forms of mail are intended to be indicated. That pioneer in the study of armour, Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, in his "Critical Inquiry," classifies the various styles represented as "tegulated," "trellised," "mascled," "banded," etc., scale-mail being already recognized by antiquaries in the lorica squamata of the Romans. But after most carefully studying his views we cannot help agreeing with the late Mr. W. Burges, that these many names are but so many guesses at the materials indicated by the old artists, and that, whatever convention their brush or needle may follow, it is, as a rule, chain-mail that they would show us.
In the Bayeux needlework, where the figures are small and the material coarse, the embroiderer had no better method of representing interlinked mail than by indicating rings on the surface of the coat. Many writers have imagined from this that the armour was actually composed of rings sewn on to a foundation of some kind of linen, cloth, or leather. But such a protection would be of the poorest quality; it might withstand a sword-cut, but would be incapable of stopping a thrust from any weapon—the rings would immediately be forced apart. It may also be asked how long the stitches attaching the rings would last when the iron had begun to rust? Let us therefore be bold and assert that the mail hauberk of the Norman, conventionally represented by rings, by dots, or by scale-like marks, was none other than the ordinary interlinked chain mail, as we know it, of the
