Banded Maille

 Back in my Armor post, I passingly sniped at the inclusion of "Banded Mail," when Gygax himself said no-one really knew what it was. It was merely a Victorian Neologism.  Yet somehow it wound up in the book with stats assigned,

Even the wikipedia page says that the historicity of banded maille is highly debatable, and it's pretty much only a thing because of D&D.

The descriptions given in the books seems to describe plate armor of overlapping plates riveted together, or something like a Roman Lorica Segmentata.

http://www.legionxxiv.org/loricapage/
















While the D&D usually describes banded maile as a cousin of lamellar or brigandine, the term was originally intended to reference a manner in which some form of mail is depicted in armor of effigy. I believe that these depictions are merely stylizations of your garden variety chaninmail. Charles Henry Ashdown, an Edwardian scholar proposed that these stylizations represented other forms of mail-like armor. He suggests that banded mail was composed of washers arrayed on a ring, or perhaps chain with interwoven leather strips. 
I say this "banded maille" can not have been washers-on-a-strip. Such a layout would have necessitated lots of overlap, making for a lot of unnecessary weight, while still leaving lots of chinks.

But the other thing- about the leather reinforced mail. There might be someting to that. So I gave it a try.

I had a "bishop's mantle" lying around to experiment with. It was not very high quality mail: made of 16 or 14 gauge stainless steel with butted links. Pretty weak stuff.

For Testing purposes, I used the cold steel gladius. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is just about the best commercial sword you can get for under $40 dollars. The blade flares at the center of percussion, making it quite a good chopper. The armor was backed by a treestump. This sort of rigid backing would make the destructive testing harder on the armor than it would usually be.

As you can see, this specimen of mail is pretty weak. Between the hard steel of the sword and the rigid backing of the wood, several links were chopped open.
If we were using a padded or tissue-like backing for this experiment, the mail would not have taken all the brunt of the blow. The idea was to test for how much tougher bandiing made the mail, however informally.

In this same picture, you can see where I banded some leather strips  "across" the grain of the chainmail. You can see the sword-cuts on the leather, but the leather has protected the links and kept them from bursting.

Quarters included for scale.

 In this Patch, I was using paracord. It is not much of an improvement over no re-inforcement at all- but it does make the mail slightly more resistant to penetrative attacks.

It also does a lot to Quieten the mail, and to dull or change the color of the mail. It aslo provides you with an emergency supply of cord. So there are reasons one might want to interlace their mail with cordage.

This layout performed the best: with the strips running with the grain of the Chainmail. ->

All in all- it protects the links and makes the mail even more resistant to cutting. It makes the mail marginally more resistant to penetrative attacks.
It also makes the mail much less jingly. I could feature using waxed leather for the strips-to protect the leather and lubricate the chain. It would also make the chain warmer to wear and mute its appearance.
The leather and cordage would be prone to breaking or severing, but could be easily repaired. 

So yeah. There are reasons you might want to  reinforce chain with leather strips. I can dig it. I am not sure it was common practice in medieval times by any means. But it can be done.

What are you doing in that hauberk, dog! You're not even proficient in chain armors!