London - Edward Rutherfurd [101]
It was towards the end of June that his life at the armoury began to change.
They had been told to produce a dozen new coats of mail. Alfred found this prospect exciting, though the master cursed the short notice and the other apprentices groaned. Before each coat of mail could be begun, however, there was one miserable task to perform, and this was to make the wire for the links.
How he hated it. A long, thin iron bar was heated in the forge to soften it, and then its end was worked through a steel draw plate with a hole in the middle. The heaviest apprentice would begin, dragging the rod through the plate; then repeating the process again with another plate which had a smaller hole. And again; and again, so that the rod was stripped and stretched as it came through. But once it was reduced, the later drawing out was done by Alfred. Holding the thick wire in gripping tongs attached to a broad leather belt around his waist, he would haul himself backwards across the workshop floor like a man in a tug of war, until his whole body was aching.
At the end of one day of this activity, the apprentices were leaving to go drinking together when the master called out: “I need help. Alfred will stay behind.”
There was a sympathetic laugh from the others as he brusquely ordered the boy to tend the bellows, and for another two hours he kept Alfred busy with menial tasks before sending him home.
A few days later the same thing occurred, except that this time the master made another junior apprentice stay too and kept them both occupied for three hours before letting them go.
The making of a coat of mail fascinated Alfred. It was so simple, yet so exacting. First the wire was formed into rings with open ends. This was done by winding it round a metal spindle and then making a cut down the length of the coil. The newly formed rings were then pushed through a tapering hole in a steel block to force one of the ends neatly to overlap the other. The rings were softened in the brazier and then, while hot, each was put in a mould and given two taps with a hammer to flatten the overlapping ends. Now, using piercing tongs, one apprentice punched a tiny hole through the flattened ends. “That’s where the rivet will go,” he explained. After that, another prised the ends gently apart again so that the rings could be linked together, and tossed them into a bucket of oil. “Always use oil,” the master admonished them. “If you put hot iron in water it cools too fast and becomes brittle.”
But what astonished Alfred was how at the end of this process, the work had been so precisely done that he could never see any difference between the rings. In fact the links rarely varied by more than twelve-thousandths of one inch.
The third time the master ordered Alfred to stay late, the other apprentices groaned, and two of them even offered to take his place. But the master only grunted, “The newest apprentice does the dirty work,” and waved them away.
This time, however, after an hour, the master called Alfred to him. Speaking little, he made the boy perform each of the tasks – winding and cutting, overlapping, piercing and opening – correcting him when necessary, nodding quietly once he had got it right. Then, leading the boy to a large trestle table in the middle of the workshop, he instructed: “Now watch.”
The art of the master armourer was like that of the master tailor. First he would lay out the open rings in rows so that each could be linked to four others – two diagonally above and two below. The shape of the coat was like a long shirt, with elbow-length sleeves. The lower part was slit back and front for ease when riding. The top was formed into a hood that could be pushed back off the head on to the shoulders. The neck was slit like the top of a shirt and tightened with laces, whilst a flap, held in place