Injuries from stoning

[seekingnevada]

Setting: Fairly generic medieval fantasy

Situation: There's a big crowd gathered, and... long story short, it turns very nasty. I'm intending for the two women that are the focus of this whole mess to end up being stoned by the crowd - the area where everyone's gathered is covered in seashore-style stones of the sort that fit in the hand nicely and

Comments

[sollersuk]

Riding: it's rather difficult to hold someone on a horse. If the helper is on another horse, they have to lean a long way sideways and keep the horses exactly in pace with each other; if they're on foot, the rider is a long way up. It would be a lot safer to put her up pillion behind another rider, and if she's not up to holding on, tie her to the rider.

Metal-plated robes: I go all nerdy and practical over things like this. Plate armour works because the plates are attached to each other. Jerkins with metal plates worked because the jerkins themselves were leather. Unless the fabric was very heavy and substantial to start with, the weight of the individual plates would pull at it and risk tearing it - and if it was that heavy and substantial, with the weight of the plates added to it she'd find it very exhausting to walk about much. Also, starching that sort of fabric and garment would be impractical; while still stiff, it would be like wearing a coffin.

Full plate armour is a good protection against "blunt instrument" blows, which is what these would be, but mail and separate plates (as in the jerkins) isn't much help; I've seen enough bone reports on fractures in early medieval individuals to feel pretty sure of this. What they're best at is protection from slashing weapons.

[seekingnevada]

Re: riding. She's an absolute slip of a thing, so they do put her on a horse with someone else. That was badly phrased on my part though, sorry.

Re: the robes. Yeah, these are... well, they're supposed to be High Ceremony type stuff, only rolled out on *really* special occasions. The werewolf can get around with walking around in them (this once) because werewolf means extra body strength just to begin with. They weren't designed for stuff like this.

I *still* can't find the plans either. Drat. Well, there's a light linen robe to go by the skin, but then on the male version of the robes it's basically a very tough-fabric robe just to go under a (slightly ornamentalised, but still tough enough to help in case of an assassination attempt) breastplate. The 'skirted' part of the... outfit then has stiffened layers of linen, with one layer of nicer fabric over the top to take the embroidery and making-look-nice that's going on. Then over all of that goes the 'robe' proper, which is of a finer fabric and embroidered and whatever.

The overall robes are supposed to be pretty dramatic and over-the-top, quite deliberately. Originally it would have been, "Put this on and sit in the throne whilst people bow to you and whatever". It's something of a long story how the werewolf ended up wearing men's ceremonial robes, for that matter.

[corvideye]

For the plausibility of the stiffened linen part, you might look at Greek hoplite armor... some versions of the cuirass were made of layers of stitched and glued linen, esp. the 'skirt' of tassets. I think more likely stiffened with glue than with starch (which will knock right out of fabric if you strike it--no use at all against an impact).

[seekingnevada]

Sorry, I have bit of a bad vocabulary when it comes to clothing, and can get away with it because the viewpoint character is just a little bit, "Ooh! Shiny!"

But yeah, I knew there was linen armour out there, and figured it would make a lot more sense than metal armour covering the legs. Plus, of course, there's a question of what's likely to be the biggest target for a would-be assassin. Thanks for the heads-up about how to describe it, though~