The Lord of the Rings DVD came with a second disc with documentaries on the making of the film, and one short clip included a chainmail maker talking about making chainmail (surprise, surprise). I thought it looked like it might be worth a try, and half an hour later I found the following two sites:

• Becky's chainmail site, which provided useful information on how to make chainmail on a budget - useful if you fancy having a go, but don't want to invest or mail order lots of links.
• Lloydian Armour, which has a bit more detail on the history of chainmail, and details of patterns and how to link your links together.
• Miron's animated chainmail site a good tutorial on fixing individual links together.

Step one was to buy the requisite tools: normal pliers (£1), needle-nose pliers (£2), wire cutters (£1), gloves (£0.75), a 6mm diameter phillips screwdriver (£2), and 32 meters of 1.6mm diameter galvanised mild steel wire (£3.00). So total cost was less than £10.

Here is a picture of all of these things (except the gloves), and some links already linked together. The next step is to make the links. You wear the gloves, cut off about a 50cm piece of wire, leave a bit sticking out and start winding a coil around the phillips screwdriver. Eventually you have a coiled bit of wire that is a spring. Then you clip the individual links off with a wire cutter - imagine you're trying to cut along the top of the spring bit by bit. With each cut a link falls off onto the board.

I won't bother to describe how you link the links together here - after messing about for half an hour anyone with reasonable eyesight and moderate visio-spacial abilities can do it. I worked out my own method whereby I looped an open link through three links already on the mail, and added a closed link before closing the open link. In time trials with Jon Whose-Surname-Shall-Not-Be-Mentioned-On-The-Web my method was about 25% faster than his. Notice my delightful double chin.

Here are some pieces put together. This is about four hours work for a novice! With experience you can produce a 5cm by 5cm piece in about 2 hours. Now you know why I made chainmail for Ongar and not for me.

At this point the chainmail was starting to look sensible. I didn't use a pattern in the end, but sort of guessed. As a result I had to remove some links from the back of the chainmail to tighten the back, as the mail was almost falling off Ongar.

And here is the proud monkey in his new protective gear!