[Ramius]

The hat is particularly over the top.

The boots might work. :-)

[300winmag]

Good luck on your sword work. From what I understand, no matter how much martial arts training one had, when it got down to the nitty gritty it was pretty much street fighting style with a sword rather than a shiv.

I don't know what possessed me, but I downloaded a 36MB PDF yesterday. "Hans Talhoffer, Medieval Combat, 15th Century Manual of Sword Fighting". Interested?

I'm only beginning to realize how much of a "strategic metal" iron was up until the last few hundred years. The Romans considered iron their most important "strategic metal", even above gold. All iron ore was kept in military warehouses until an authorized ironsmith picked it up. Our common steels of today would seem almost magical even 200 years ago.

And we still have "magic steel" today, in the form of single-crystal superalloys. My nephew is working on that stuff for his PhD at Georgia Tech, trying to turn it from "black art" to something that can be simulated with a computer.