byrnie

[prettygoodword]

byrnie (BUR-nee) - n., a coat or shirt of mail, a hauberk.


May or may not be sleeveless -- the exact distinctions between a byrnie, hauberk, and haubergeon seem to have changed over the centuries and likely will never get cleared up. The word goes back to Old English brynja (which has Germanic cognates all over) and survived through Scots English.


Thanks, WikiMedia!

(What? -- I never said I wasn't going to do more Scots.)

---L.

Comments

[prettygoodword]

Er, I was speaking loosely, distinguishing Franconian from West Francian as above ...

[thistleingrey]

ah, sorry! To me, W Francia is a splinter of the proto-French state. Franconia is the teutophonic complement (easterly), which had its own political ID at times before the post-Napoleonic reorgs. Curious what your sense of it is.

[prettygoodword]

In a Frankish context, vague, but generally thought of as Carolingian areas west and east of the Rhine.

[thistleingrey]

I see. East of the Rhine has been predominantly Germanic-speaking for as long as we have any linguistic evidence until we run into the Huns and Slavs. That's... why the Strasbourg Oaths were agreed upon, isn't it?

[prettygoodword]

Pretty much, yeah, as I understand it.