Battered mail

Hello. I am reading Charles Lummis' The Spanish Pioneers, and I wondered what "battered mail" means in the following sentence, or any other. "Only a few of them had even the clumsy flintlocks of the day; the majority were not arquebusiers but piquiers, armed only with swords and lances, and clad in jackets of quilted cotton or battered mail."
I have been training to find it out but to no avail.
Thanks in advance for your kind cooperation.

Mail is a kind of armor. It sounds like it was old and worn out.

mail

Heraldry - flexible armor of metal rings or plates.

Quilted cotton is a sort of "armor" also, meant to blunt sword blows.

battered - worn or damaged by constant blows or much use.
mail - chain mail.

The Wikipedia article about mail armor is very informative:

Chain mail - Wikipedia

By the way, the Spanish word for "mail" in the sense of armor rather than postal communications (and which I cannot tell you in the 'English Only' forum... 👁 Wink ;)
) is a close cognate to the English word "mail." You may want to ask about it in the Spanish English Vocabulary forum on the Word Reference site.

Thank you, both. Clumsy me, I was not able to find it. Thanks to you I can now see the meaning of mail in the sense of armour.

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