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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I remember a couple who once gave sword fighting demos at Gen-Con (cannot remember the name). They made an interesting remark that the male of the couple couldn't find historic armor that fit since he was 6'+, but the female could since she was about the same size as most of the old armor wearers. Shows you how nutrition has really upped the size of humans.

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The average male height in middle ages Europe was about 175 CM, which isn't that far off what what it is today.

The average height actually went down since the middle ages, and plummeted to below 170cm in the 17th and 18th centuries, making people like Napoleon which was 168-169CM tall about average for the day.

Being over 6" (182cm) in most caucasian / european descendants nations is considered tall even today.

I'm also not sure what he means by finding "historic armor", modern replicas are made to size, even production runs will have a height range that fits the average modern male (or female, there are replica makers that make armor tailored for women).

Whilst being tall he would also have no much problem finding chain mail or plate to fit a 6" tall person, what he would have is a problem finding one in wearable condition which isn't a museum exhibit ;).

Going further back to say the Roman empire we know based on the documents from the period of Gaius Marius (Marian Reforms) that the required height of a roman legionnaire translated to feet was 5"10-6"0 tall.

but here there are some citation with much shorter legionnaires

http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-hei...

" Imperial regulations, though not entirely unambiguous, suggest that the minimum height for new recruits was five Roman feet, seven inches (165 cm., 5'5") ... for the army as a whole a reasonable estimate of a soldier's average height is around 170 cm (5'7").

- Roth, Jonathan, and Jonathan P. Roth. The Logistics of the Roman Army at War: 264 BC-AD 235. Columbia studies in the classical tradition, Vol. 23. Brill, 1999.

"Roman records directly attest such measuring of recruits, although determining the exact height requirement is problematic. Vegetius gives the minimum standard, or incomma, as “6 [Roman] feet [178 cm.] or 5 feet 10 inches [ca. 173 cm.] among the auxiliary cavalry or the [soldiers] of the legionary first cohort.”15 Although both Fritz Wille and N.P. Milner see Vegetius’s figures as an optimum and a minimum figure respectively, the expression incommam . . . exactam strongly suggests a regulation height.16 Vegetius may mean that cavalrymen must be 6 feet and soldiers of the first cohort five foot ten. In any case, these are clearly height requirements for elite sol- diers and not for the entire military. Praetorian Guardsmen probably had a higher minimum height than rank and file legionaries until the Septimius Severus started recruiting the latter into the imperial guard at the end of the second century.17"

Page 9 of that same book.

During the later Marian Reforms the height requirements were extended to the rest of the legions including the auxiliaries. That book however doesn't cover that period.

I thought Gaius Marius was pre-Caesar, so Republican Rome? And Septimius Severus / Vegetius were post-Augustus Imperial Rome.

Not sure about minimum heights, but the timeline seems a bit off here...

and ancient roman foot is shorter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measure...

Roman unit| English name | Equal to | Metric equivalent | Imperial equivalent

pes | (Roman) foot | 1 pes | 296 mm | 0.971 ft

> The average male height

What if the difference is not the average male height, but that extremes are more likely?

That's highly likely, but then average knight or man-at-arms would tower the average malfed peasant.

Henry the Eighth was 6"1', his field armor is more or less complete and at the met[0], so if anyone has a tall friend in need of a good plate armor you know where to stop ;)

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23936

our world in data has some historic data: https://ourworldindata.org/human-height/

Funnily enough, my wife has a different problem - she has trouble finding sparring jackets that fit her. She's above average height for a woman, so the biggest available jacket was still too tight for her.

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