Apart from chainmail what other types of armour would Germanic warriors be using? If I'm correct, the High German tribes were usually richer than those in the south and thus better armed.
Was scale armour used by Germanic warriors after the arrival of the Huns and other Central Asian peoples into Europe? I ask because I've seen depictions of Frankish warriors in scale armor and Saxons with lamellar helmets in museums.
Very little body armor survives from this time period, and what little does is, to the best of my knowledge, all mail. This is because weapons and armor usually only survive from special contexts where they were deliberately buried (like graves), and - for whatever reason - armor wasn't buried as often as shields, spears, swords, and knives. Perhaps this is because armor was extremely rare, or too valuable to throw away; or it might have been because weapons had social or 'magical' properties that made it less appropriate to inherit them (hence, at the funeral, armor goes to the kids, spears go in the grave - this is what happens in Beowulf). In the few cases where body armor does survive in graves, it's mail; sometimes with an attached mail hood.
Something that looks like scale armor is, however, depicted on images of Merovingian (French) kings, like this one from Childeric's ring.
For helmets, you see more diversity. The most common (though still extremely rare) kind of helmet we find are spangenhelms (see the link for several examples).
Toward the 7th century, this style develops into the more ornate styles of the Vendel and Valsgärde helmets (some reproductions), or the related Sutton Hoo helmet found in England (reproduction).
Lamellar helmets are found in eastern Europe, but never near anywhere connected with Saxony or Anglo-Saxon England.
On the whole, it's unclear how often people wore armor. Certainly, soldiers connected with the roman army would have been well equipped (and many people born north of the frontier traveled south to fight for the romans, until the western empire collapsed). It's less clear how well armed the armies of the successor kingdoms (Merovingians, etc) were in comparison to their Roman predecessors; we have textual references to armor in, for example, Gregory of Tours' sixth-century history. In other regions, like England, most people seem to have been too poor and focused on farming for much armament beyond a shield and spear. Armor appears in wealthy-looking graves north of the Rhine, but it's the exception there as well; but whether these burial practices reflect reality is difficult to say.
