Open,
quilted leather 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. As stand-alone cloth armour, the European gambeson can be traced at least to the late tenth century, but it is likely to have been used in various forms for longer. In the
Middle Ages, its use became widespread
in the thirteenth century and resembled a
tunic. Eventually, it made way for the
pourpoint (jack or paltock) in the 14th century and had surplanted the gambeson in Henry III's Assize of Arms (1242). The gambeson was used both as a complete armour unto itself and underneath mail and plate to cushion the body and prevent chafing. Evidence for its use under armour does not appear in iconography until the mid-twelfth century. Although they are thought to have been used in Europe much earlier, gambesons underwent a revolution from their first proven use (in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries) as an independent item of armour to one that facilitated the wearing of mail. They remained popular amongst infantry as cloth armour. 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 armour, and those designed to be worn as independent armour. The latter tend to be thicker and higher in the collar and faced with other 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 known to stop even heavy arrows, and their design of multiple layers bears a striking resemblance to modern-day
body armour, which used at first
silk, then
ballistic nylon, and later,
Kevlar as its 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. Its decline—paralleling that of plate armour—came only with the
Renaissance, as the use of firearms became more widespread. By the eighteenth century, it was no longer in military use. While the use of linen in these jackets has been proven by archaeological evidence, the use of cotton—and cotton-based canvas—is disputed since large amounts of cotton cloth were not widely available in Northern Europe. It is 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, the logistics and expense of equipping a town militia or army with large numbers of cotton-based garments make its usage doubtful when flax-based textiles (linen) were in widespread use.
Linothorax was a type of armour similar to gambeson, used by
ancient Greeks. Meanwhile, the Mesoamericans were known to have used a kind of quilted textile armour called
ichcahuipilli before the arrival of the
conquistadors, who loaned this word as . Another example is the bullet-resistant
Myeonje baegab created during Joseon Korea to confront the effects of Western rifles. File:Morgan_bible_gambeson.jpg|alt=Morgan_bible_gambeson|13th-century gambeson worn by a soldier in the Morgan Bible File:Rytter fra Bagirmi.jpg|
Sultanate of Bagirmi horseman in full padded armour suit, 1901 ==See also==