#combat archer

A breakdown of my Chesterwick archer kit for my alternate character “William ‘Willy’ Hunter, inspired by 14th century longbowmen. These photos were all taken in October so it’s actually quite different now, but this gives you the general gist of it. 

1 & 2 - Underwear and boots. 14th century braies, hose and undertunic from Historic Enterprises combined with ArmStreet’s best selling “forest boots”. 

3. My sad, old ArmStreet gambeson. This is basically a thinly padded linen jacket that provides just a little bit of a buffer from my mail, which I put on next.

4. Struggling into my mail. The struggle is real. Note I have a bag over my head to prevent the riveted rings from grabbing my hair and ruining my day. 

5. So this is not the MOST fitted mail you can get (I need to take in the arms a bit), but it’s a miles above a lot of the other stuff you see people using for LARPs. Unfortunately I don’t really have a source for this - I bought it off a friend who ordered a bunch of it, and I managed to get a great price because it wouldn’t really fit anything beyond children. I added my sword belt/ scabbard here as well.

6. Hood and coif. The hood actually belongs to a friend (but I made it for him). A coif is a little linen hat, usually worn under another hat to keep it safe from sweat etc.

7. A straw hat! When I was getting dressed it was still really sunny out. I later swapped this hat out for a wool hat once the sun went down (as seen in the last picture)

8. LARP arrows in a quiver covered in a fox and my 25 pound longbow. It shoots nice and straight and isn’t super heavy so no one gets hurt!

9. Picture of me at the game later that night. 

Hopefully someone finds this interesting. It’s much less complicated than a lot of my other costumes but people still seem to love it.