Chain mail is more interesting than it appears at first glance, and the Museum’s specimens deserve to be looked at carefully. In the first place, it was made of wire. Nowadays wire is so common that we think nothing of it; it is produced by the mile with automatic machinery. But in medieval times wire was scarce and valuable, for every bit of it had to be made by hand. At first this was done with the hammer: a billet of iron was pounded with a hammer held in one hand, while the other kept the billet rotating so that its diameter became less and less until it was small enough to be made up into links of mail. Of course, only short bits of wire could be made in this way and the diameter was naturally irregular. It was slow and tedious work, but the earliest mail was so made. Later it was found that a rod of iron could be pulled by tongs through a hole in a hardened steel plate, thus reducing its diameter and giving it a uniform thickness. By drawing it through a number of holes of progressively smaller diameter, the wire could be made quite thin and entirely uniform. Then such wire could be wound in a coil around an iron rod, and the coil then cut lengthwise with a chisel or saw giving a large number of links all of the same size. All later chain mail was so made. Such links were interlaced, each link with four others, to form a fabric much like that of a lady’s mesh bag. However, if the ends of the links were simply brought together the fabric would not be very strong. An arrow or dagger point could easily spread open a link, and penetrate to the wearer’s body. So all good chain mail was strengthened by having the ends of every link overlapped, slightly flattened, and then riveted. In that part of the world we now call “Middle East”—where the Mohammedan and Hindu cultures flourished—the rivet was a separate piece of fine wire. European chain mail is more of a mystery—principally because there is so very little old European chain mail still in existence. The probability is that a separate rivet was used as in the Eastern mail, but that its insertion was more skillfully performed. However, some scholars feel that European chain mail was welded or was riveted by a swaging process, that a special tool in the form of tongs or a pair of dies forced a small part of the lower end of the link of chain mail through a slit in the upper end and then riveted it over. Careful microscopical research on sections of links of mail could doubtless solve this problems, but who wants to cut off links from a rare and precious genuine, documented piece? As yet it may be said that no such ingenious swaging tool has been discovered, nor have we any unquestionably contemporary illustrations which would prove this theory.