Posts: 871 Location: Paris, France
Tue 01 May, 2007 8:21 am
| Stephen Hand wrote: |
| OK, having been hit repeatedly with swords, sometimes harder than I would have liked, I would tend to agree with Kel, but I thought I'd do the maths. Let's look at what that energy of 123-126J (let's say 121 as it makes the maths easier) really means. KE=half mass x velocity squared. So in other words being hit by an arrow with 121J of energy is the equivalent of being hit by a 2kg housebrick travelling at 11m/s or about the velocity that it would get if dropped from around 6m (or about 20 feet) up. That sound pretty unpleasant to me but plenty of people survived the blunt trauma of being hit with a musket ball and they have twenty times the energy, so I feel that there's something we're missing in the equation. |
I think what you are missing in your equations is that impact is not just a matter of energy since the relative masses of the objects in collision can have a great influence, as well as the properties of the materials that make the shock more or less elastic.
In other words there is only one case where all the energy of the projectile is being converted into blunt trauma: completely inelastic impact against an enormous mass. If you make the impact a bit more elastic (i.e. the target is able to deform reversibly), the projectile will bounce back, taking away some energy. If the target has a finite mass, it will start to move as well, and this energy is not turned into blunt trauma either.
And even if all the energy of the projectile was dissipated in blunt trauma, it is quite possible that the projectile gets damaged as well. That must be happening, for example, when a lead musket ball hits a steel plate. I'd think that the bullet gets deformed pretty heavily, and that's as much energy that will not cause damage.
If it is of interest to anyone I could probably dig out the equations for all this, since I used them back when I was thinking about swords impacts...
Regards
Posts: 739 Location: San Bernardino, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 8:54 am
| Mikael Ranelius wrote: |
| When people are discussing battle shafts vs armour - why do they always focus on mid 15th century (and later) plate harnesses? In battles like Morlaix, Crécy and to some extent even Poitiers, the English faced French men-at-arms in mail and early plate. And those were the best armoured men - crossbowmen and other infantry would have had even less armour. I do think that a man-at-arms clad in a complete suit of plate armour of the 1420's and onwards were virtually invulnerable to arrows and crossbow-bolts, but not their 14th century predecessors, nor their less well-to-do contemporary infantrymen or light cavalrymen |
Sorry, but it was true all throughout history. I can provide dozens of references, but let me supply just two:
Galbert of Bruges on the seige of Bruges (1127-1128)[attack on the gate of the town, protected by archers and infantry]: "By the special grace of God no one died in this multitude which was entering." and "I could not begin to describe the crowd of those who were hit and wounded." and "...as to those wearing an armor, they were exempted from wounds but not from bruises.."
And:
Halidon Hill: "The archers again played a role in this defeat. As at Dupplin Moor they attacked the Scots as they rushed into the infantry lines, and they continued to fire into their flanks and rear as the fight continued. In this, as at Duplin Moor, they blinded many of the Scots, creating disorder in their ranks and adding to the slaughter. The Lanercrost chronicler writes: “Now the Scots approaching in the first division were so grievously wounded in the face and blinded by the host of English archery, just as they had been formerly at Glendenmore (Dupplin Moor), that they were helpless, and quickly began to turn away their faces from the arrow flights and to fall.” (p. 124) Further: It was at this point in the two battles when the archers made their presence felt. Although it may be too much to say, as Jonathon Sumption does, that these battles ‘were [both] won by the archers,’ the archers did play a major role in the battle, although not the one – as a decisive killing machine – which has been bestowed on them traditionally by scholars. (Sumption is in error on pp. 125-26 in describing ‘some thousands of Scots [dying] of arrow wounds.’ There is no record of this in the contemporary battlefield narratives." (From Kelly Devries’ Infantry Warfare In the Early 14thCentury, p.127)
As you can see from these two sources, arrows have never done much to fully-armored men at arms *unless* they leave off a critical piece of armor such as the Scots did at Halidon Hill. That's one of the purposes of arrows, to force people to wear extra protection that helps with overheating and limits vision, etc. People always ask how archery works if it didn't actually kill, and here we see a great example of one of the ways it works.
Posts: 552 Location: San Jose, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 11:18 am
| Michael Edelson wrote: |
To me, with my admitedly limited knowledge, it seems as though the most unrealistic part of this test is the range. 10m is basically point blank, and not a range at which an archer would fire a bow at a charging knight, whether on horse or on foot. A running man in good shape can cover ten meters in less than 2 seconds.
In tests I have conducted against mail, a bow that penetrated very high quality mail at 20ft failed to do so at 50-60ft. Arrows lose steam very quickly, and so it can be argued that even if the rest of the test was perfect, the range makes its applicability to medieval warfare questionable at best. |
Ten meters is a rediculously close range. In practical terms, it is equal to the distance that modern police procedures state is too short for an officer to draw his weapon to shoot a charging assailant, on foot!
At that range the archer should be either behind a line of men-at-arms, a shield wall or a line of stakes. If not, he's toast if stays in place to take aim and fire an arrow. A more realistic range should be 25m or 50m in my opinion.
Just for reference, the fastest I have ever drawn a pistol on an exercise is about a half a second. That is using modern methods and equipment after being well practiced. For an archer being charged by an opponent less than 10m away he would have little or no time to draw forth a melee weapon for that situation, which is probably what he would do if being charged at so short a range.
Posts: 552 Location: San Jose, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 11:28 am
| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: |
| Matt Doernhoefer wrote: | | This may have been beat to death already but isn't the direct penetrating power of an arrow a moot point? In mass-formation combat, your archers (I would hope), shouldn't be in a direct line against heavy cav. Wouldn't it be more often true that your archers would be back on a hill, firing arced clouds of arrows to disrupt enemy foot troops? |
Well, "back on a hill?" Not exactly. In many cases they obviously were, but there were frequent instances of the English longbowmen being placed at the front of the battle line--since, after all, they were a great deal less reluctant to close into hand-to-hand combat than most other archers.
BTW, about non-lethal arrow hits: Procopius's account of the 6th-century siege of Rome by the Goths had one of the Byzantine captains surviving a hit by an arrow in the head. The arrow hit near his nose, just missing his eye, and stuck all the way in to the back of his neck without striking any vital organs. Over a period of three years the arrow came out on its own until finally he was able to pull the last remaining bit by hand.
(Obviously, Procopius also commented on how the soldiers marveled at the sight of their commander riding all through the skirmish with the arrow sticking out of his face!) |
Henry V had an arrow wound to his face that had to be carefully tended to. He almost died from it. Just another example.
Posts: 552 Location: San Jose, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 11:34 am
| Stephen Hand wrote: |
The figures on kinetic energy are interesting. I did some calculations some years ago on a 60lb longbow shooting reasonably light arrows and came up with 26.5 Joules but 123-126 are reasonable numbers given a higher poundage bow and heavier arrows. Incidentally I also had a musket that I owned clocked on a range and came up with the figure of 2611J, a figure which matches very well with later figures published by the Graz Armouries firing antique muskets (they have a lot!). One massive wall piece (essentially the snipers rifle of the Thirty Years War) came in at around 7000J! When musket balls hit armour they blow it apart (we did tests with old army surplus helmets that were impervious to arrows).
OK, having been hit repeatedly with swords, sometimes harder than I would have liked, I would tend to agree with Kel, but I thought I'd do the maths. Let's look at what that energy of 123-126J (let's say 121 as it makes the maths easier) really means. KE=half mass x velocity squared. So in other words being hit by an arrow with 121J of energy is the equivalent of being hit by a 2kg housebrick travelling at 11m/s or about the velocity that it would get if dropped from around 6m (or about 20 feet) up. That sound pretty unpleasant to me but plenty of people survived the blunt trauma of being hit with a musket ball and they have twenty times the energy, so I feel that there's something we're missing in the equation. |
Maybe the amount of surface area hit with the object needs to be factored into the equation. This is one reason, aside from hardness of the material used, why being hit with a waster is less damaging and hurts less than being hit by metal blunt sword. The metal blunt hits a smaller surface area upon impact than the waster, not much but it does make a difference. So a pointy arrow head would be more severe than large brick.
Posts: 252 Location: Sweden
Tue 01 May, 2007 1:57 pm
| Hugh Knight wrote: |
Sorry, but it was true all throughout history. I can provide dozens of references, but let me supply just two:
[- - -]
As you can see from these two sources, arrows have never done much to fully-armored men at arms *unless* they leave off a critical piece of armor such as the Scots did at Halidon Hill. That's one of the purposes of arrows, to force people to wear extra protection that helps with overheating and limits vision, etc. People always ask how archery works if it didn't actually kill, and here we see a great example of one of the ways it works. |
Yes, there are undeniably sources that speaks of armoured men who were invulnerable to arrows. But then we also have lots of sources that actually speak of arrows piercing through armour like Randall Moffet said in an earlier post. So we have sources that contradicts oneanother, and thus my conclusion is that we can't rely on medieval sources alone. Perhaps most important, some medieval arrow heads were obviously designed for armour penetration. If they didn't expected arrows to pierce armour, why did they ever bother forging armour piercing heads? Now I don't think these were intended to punch through a 3 mm plate harness, but rather thinner armour like limb defenses, jacks and mail.
Posts: 3,637 Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Tue 01 May, 2007 2:10 pm
| Mikael Ranelius wrote: |
| Yes, there are undeniably sources that speaks of armoured men who were invulnerable to arrows. But then we also have lots of sources that actually speak of arrows piercing through armour like Randall Moffet said in an earlier post. |
No we don't. We have sources speaking of men being killed by arrows but very few specify that the injury was in a place that was covered by armour. My FAQ on SFI lists the few that I have managed to track down regarding mail. Regarding plate there are only three. One involving a non-fatal wound through a vambrace. One involving a non fatal wound through a gorget (another translation suggests that it was mail and not plate). A third one speaks generally about arrows punching through the sides of helmets but doesn't indicate the level of injury.
Posts: 230 Location: Bolton, UK
Tue 01 May, 2007 2:27 pm
| Bryce Felperin wrote: |
Henry V had an arrow wound to his face that had to be carefully tended to. He almost died from it. Just another example. |
Henry received the wound at the battle of Shrewsbury 1403. He was 16 and it was the first major engagement that he took part in. As he led his division uphill, into a fierce arrow storm, he was hit in the face. The arrow entered 'overwharte', that is to say, on the left side of his face, hitting his cheekbone and penetrating to behind his nose,where it lodged. Needless to say, this was quite an awkward and painful wound to receive. The arrow remained in his face for five days until his fathers surgeon, John Bradmor, managed to extract it with the aid of a rather gruesome corkscrew-like instrument. Henry was scarred for life.
I know this is slightly 'off topic' but think it illustrates the kinds of wounds which longbows inflicted. And the skill of medieval surgeons! :eek:
Posts: 289 Location: UK
Tue 01 May, 2007 2:28 pm
Dan,
Your tenacious belief in the invunerability of plate to arrows obviously winds some people up. What is it about archers that disagrees with you so much? There's a definite feeling in your writing that you believe the archer was very much a second-class citizen on the battlefield
Posts: 739 Location: San Bernardino, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 2:31 pm
| Mikael Ranelius wrote: |
| Yes, there are undeniably sources that speaks of armoured men who were invulnerable to arrows. But then we also have lots of sources that actually speak of arrows piercing through armour like Randall Moffet said in an earlier post. So we have sources that contradicts oneanother, and thus my conclusion is that we can't rely on medieval sources alone. Perhaps most important, some medieval arrow heads were obviously designed for armour penetration. If they didn't expected arrows to pierce armour, why did they ever bother forging armour piercing heads? Now I don't think these were intended to punch through a 3 mm plate harness, but rather thinner armour like limb defenses, jacks and mail. |
As Dan said, no, we don't have such records. We have a very few, such as the ones that mention some arrows penetrating the thinner parts of visors at Agincourt, but none of them speak of killing people through the armor.
The sources you've probably read (and I don't mean any insult by this!) have made the mistake of reading either a modern historian's misunderstanding of a situation or they've read an account that talked about how effective the arrows were in a given battle and extrapolated from that thinking that the only thing arrows could do was kill, and they used a lot of them, so they must have been able to kill. Lots of serious historians believe arrows killed through armor because of those kinds of mistakes, but when you go to the primary-source material (as DeVries did in the Halidon Hill quote I referenced above) you find that they only kill when armor is left off. You have to understand what arrows really did on the battlefield to understand why they were still useful in spite of not being able to kill.
As for "armor-piercing" arrows, you're right if you mean "mail" but wrong if you mean plate. Bodkin-point arrows were intended to pierce mail, not plate, but weren't common in the middle ages until after they started wearing plate (which is why so many records from the Age of Mail say the same things about mail being mostly invulnerable to arrows, as in the quote I cited above). They penetrated the gaps between plates (just as we're taught to do in Harnischfechten with a halfsword attack). Moreover, as Dan pointed out earlier, bodkin-point arroows weren't generally hardened, something you'd expect if people intended them to punch plate. Instead, broadheads were hardened--not because they were intended to pierce plate but because hardened steel holds an edge better.
And you make the argument against killing through plate yourself when you talk about penetrating the thinner plates: Thinner plates didn't cover vital targets, they covered arms and legs and hands--the spots that couldn't result in lethal hits. Breastplates and helmets were thick and therefore invulnerable even by the standards you mention. Granted visors were thinner, but the nature of visors was such that they are held away from the face, so an arrow would have to penetrate very far indeed to kill--much farther than they did even in the flawed study that is the starting point for this discussion.
Posts: 739 Location: San Bernardino, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 2:39 pm
| Glennan Carnie wrote: |
| Your tenacious belief in the invunerability of plate to arrows obviously winds some people up. What is it about archers that disagrees with you so much? There's a definite feeling in your writing that you believe the archer was very much a second-class citizen on the battlefield |
I can't speak for Dan, but the archer *was* a second-class citizen on the battlefield. Armored men at arms did the majority of killing while archers created circumstances that made that easier to do. They were superbly valuable, but not as valuable as a man at arms. Both were integral parts of a powerful combined-arms concept, but people have to understand how they were important in order to stop misunderstanding how battles were fought.
There is a certain reverse snobbishness evident in the archery crowd and in people from Democratic countries; they love the thought that great and noble knights didn't win fights, the humble peasant with his bow did; you hear this kind of sneering nonsense in every TV show on the subject. Well, sorry, it's not true. The majority of Frenchmen killed in every battle of the HYW were killed by men at arms, not by arrows.
Posts: 2,698 Location: Indonesia
Tue 01 May, 2007 9:15 pm
| Hugh Knight wrote: |
| The majority of Frenchmen killed in every battle of the HYW were killed by men at arms, not by arrows. |
Not by arrows, yes. By men-at-arms? I don't think so. There were always more longbowmen than men-at-arms, and they almost always joined the men-at-arms in hand-to-hand combat. So it would be rash to declare that people killed in hand-to-hand combat were always killed by men-at-arms. Moreover, I suspect men-at-arms would have been more eager to capture their enemies alive than longbowmen were except in those battles where they were specifically ordered not to take prisoners.
Of course, I agree that the conceit of "peasant longbowmen" defeating "aristocratic knights" is silly on several counts, firstly because the English won by combined arms (not by longbows alone) and then because the longbowmen themselves weren't exactly peasants--they were yeomen, rich farmers who would be best described as an agricultural middle class. But then on the other hand it would be silly to overemphasize the role of the men-at-arms in the English tactical milieu because most of the time there were so few of them available that they wouldn't have made a difference if not supported by other troops.
Men-at-arms and longbowmen needed each other. Without both of them there would have been no such thing as the HYW English army.
Posts: 739 Location: San Bernardino, CA
Tue 01 May, 2007 9:36 pm
| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: |
| Hugh Knight wrote: | | The majority of Frenchmen killed in every battle of the HYW were killed by men at arms, not by arrows. |
Not by arrows, yes. By men-at-arms? I don't think so. There were always more longbowmen than men-at-arms, and they almost always joined the men-at-arms in hand-to-hand combat. So it would be rash to declare that people killed in hand-to-hand combat were always killed by men-at-arms. Moreover, I suspect men-at-arms would have been more eager to capture their enemies alive than longbowmen were except in those battles where they were specifically ordered not to take prisoners.
Of course, I agree that the conceit of "peasant longbowmen" defeating "aristocratic knights" is silly on several counts, firstly because the English won by combined arms (not by longbows alone) and then because the longbowmen themselves weren't exactly peasants--they were yeomen, rich farmers who would be best described as an agricultural middle class. But then on the other hand it would be silly to overemphasize the role of the men-at-arms in the English tactical milieu because most of the time there were so few of them available that they wouldn't have made a difference if not supported by other troops.
Men-at-arms and longbowmen needed each other. Without both of them there would have been no such thing as the HYW English army. |
I think I said *both* were essential.
But I'd love to see evidence to support your claim that the majority of English kills during the HYW weren't made by men at arms. Can you back that up with hard primary-source evidence?
Posts: 252 Location: Sweden
Wed 02 May, 2007 3:05 am
| Hugh Knight wrote: |
As Dan said, no, we don't have such records. We have a very few, such as the ones that mention some arrows penetrating the thinner parts of visors at Agincourt, but none of them speak of killing people through the armor.
The sources you've probably read (and I don't mean any insult by this!) have made the mistake of reading either a modern historian's misunderstanding of a situation or they've read an account that talked about how effective the arrows were in a given battle and extrapolated from that thinking that the only thing arrows could do was kill, and they used a lot of them, so they must have been able to kill. Lots of serious historians believe arrows killed through armor because of those kinds of mistakes, but when you go to the primary-source material (as DeVries did in the Halidon Hill quote I referenced above) you find that they only kill when armor is left off. You have to understand what arrows really did on the battlefield to understand why they were still useful in spite of not being able to kill.
As for "armor-piercing" arrows, you're right if you mean "mail" but wrong if you mean plate. Bodkin-point arrows were intended to pierce mail, not plate, but weren't common in the middle ages until after they started wearing plate (which is why so many records from the Age of Mail say the same things about mail being mostly invulnerable to arrows, as in the quote I cited above). They penetrated the gaps between plates (just as we're taught to do in Harnischfechten with a halfsword attack). Moreover, as Dan pointed out earlier, bodkin-point arroows weren't generally hardened, something you'd expect if people intended them to punch plate. Instead, broadheads were hardened--not because they were intended to pierce plate but because hardened steel holds an edge better.
And you make the argument against killing through plate yourself when you talk about penetrating the thinner plates: Thinner plates didn't cover vital targets, they covered arms and legs and hands--the spots that couldn't result in lethal hits. Breastplates and helmets were thick and therefore invulnerable even by the standards you mention. Granted visors were thinner, but the nature of visors was such that they are held away from the face, so an arrow would have to penetrate very far indeed to kill--much farther than they did even in the flawed study that is the starting point for this discussion. |
Please note that I never claimed that arrows pierced through plate and killed people. I meant that arrow heads could pierce through thinner plate armour (at least beforethe 1400's) and mail. But of course arrows killed people in medieval battles, as they were intended to. An archer myself, I realise that a weapon that can't even hurt your opponent is worthless for warfare. The question is who were hurt by battle shafts. Any soldier below the rank of a man-at-arms would have been considerably more exposed to arrow storms, and they were evidently also injured and killed by arrows - like the scottish spearmen in numerous battles, the genoese at Crécy and the archers and billmen in the Wars of the roses.
When I'm speaking of armour piercing arrow heads, I'm talking about this kind. It's not a common bodkin, but a heavy, quarrel-like head.
| Quote: |
| There is a certain reverse snobbishness evident in the archery crowd and in people from Democratic countries; they love the thought that great and noble knights didn't win fights, the humble peasant with his bow did; you hear this kind of sneering nonsense in every TV show on the subject. Well, sorry, it's not true. The majority of Frenchmen killed in every battle of the HYW were killed by men at arms, not by arrows. |
That sounds like a quite bold claim, and I doubt that we have any way of actually validating such statistics today.
Reverse snobbishness or not, it's a historical fact that noble knights were slain by "humble peasants", like the Swiss halbardiers and pikemen who slaughtered Austrian and Burgundian nobles at numerous occasions
Posts: 1,032 Location: New York
Wed 02 May, 2007 9:43 am
| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: |
Of course, I agree that the conceit of "peasant longbowmen" defeating "aristocratic knights" is silly on several counts, firstly because the English won by combined arms (not by longbows alone) and then because the longbowmen themselves weren't exactly peasants--they were yeomen, rich farmers who would be best described as an agricultural middle class. But then on the other hand it would be silly to overemphasize the role of the men-at-arms in the English tactical milieu because most of the time there were so few of them available that they wouldn't have made a difference if not supported by other troops.
|
Not all archers were yeomen.
As for the topic at hand, it's really rather simple. People were not stupid in the middle ages, and if bows were capable of dealing accurate death at long ranges, there would be no need for any other weapon except as backups.
This is not idle speculation, this is fact. The instant a weapon came along that could deal death somewhat accurately at long ranges, all other weapons were tossed to the sideline, just as would have been done had that weapon been the longbow. When that weapon became accurate and reliable, there were no other weapons on the battlefield.
Don't think like an archer or a sword and armor enthusiast, think like a military commander. If you have a weapon that can reliably kill at range, you win, and you don't need all that annoying armor and those pesky swords and spears and such, and you don't need to spend a fortune paying for those that can use them.
Posts: 2,698 Location: Indonesia
Wed 02 May, 2007 10:36 am
| Hugh Knight wrote: |
| But I'd love to see evidence to support your claim that the majority of English kills during the HYW weren't made by men at arms. Can you back that up with hard primary-source evidence? |
Can you provide evidence that most of the kills were indeed made by men-at-arms? Even if we go so far as to count the deaths individually attributed to the distinguished men-at-arms in any given battle, they'd still be only a small fraction of the whole. So what I'm contending is that we don't have enough evidence to establish whether the men-at-arms or the longbowmen made most of the kills, and I think this is an immaterial issua since dead enemies are dead regardless of who killed them. And we all know that most deaths occurred in the pursuit, which in some cases was conducted mostly by men-at-arms (at least this was my impression from Froissart's account of what happened after Crecy) while in others the longbowmen also joined it and killed many men as well (like at Poitiers).
| Mikael Ranelius wrote: |
| Reverse snobbishness or not, it's a historical fact that noble knights were slain by "humble peasants", like the Swiss halbardiers and pikemen who slaughtered Austrian and Burgundian nobles at numerous occasions |
It's not. The Swiss forces included a considerable number of gentlemen (men from the knightly social class, that is) fighting on foot as well as middle-class burghers and rich farmers alongside the peasants and urban laborers. The peasants never formed the entirety of such an army. The Flemish pike formations were predominantly middle-class workers with some poorer members of the gentry thrown in; the English longbowmen were mostly middle-class farmers with a smattering of gentlemen; and the Scottish pike formations often contained significant numbers of dismounted men-at-arms, even if only in the front ranks.
And it would also be silly to say that they defeated "noble knights." Let's not go into the issue that most knights weren't even nobles, being of the gentry instead; most of the mounted men-at-arms participating in such encounters weren't full knights either, being squires and serjeants and the like. The second class in particular included middle-class adventurers.
Somehow it reminds me of the Spanish caballeros villanos, not to forget the ministeriales and milites servi...
Posts: 2,698 Location: Indonesia
Wed 02 May, 2007 10:38 am
| Michael Edelson wrote: |
As for the topic at hand, it's really rather simple. People were not stupid in the middle ages, and if bows were capable of dealing accurate death at long ranges, there would be no need for any other weapon except as backups.
This is not idle speculation, this is fact. The instant a weapon came along that could deal death somewhat accurately at long ranges, all other weapons were tossed to the sideline, just as would have been done had that weapon been the longbow. When that weapon became accurate and reliable, there were no other weapons on the battlefield.
Don't think like an archer or a sword and armor enthusiast, think like a military commander. If you have a weapon that can reliably kill at range, you win, and you don't need all that annoying armor and those pesky swords and spears and such, and you don't need to spend a fortune paying for those that can use them. |
That's an excellent summation of the issue. Combined arms existed because most of the time it was the only thing that gave consistently satisfactory results on the battlefield.
Posts: 252 Location: Sweden
Wed 02 May, 2007 11:02 am
| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: |
| Mikael Ranelius wrote: | | Reverse snobbishness or not, it's a historical fact that noble knights were slain by "humble peasants", like the Swiss halbardiers and pikemen who slaughtered Austrian and Burgundian nobles at numerous occasions |
It's not. The Swiss forces included a considerable number of gentlemen (men from the knightly social class, that is) fighting on foot as well as middle-class burghers and rich farmers alongside the peasants and urban laborers. The peasants never formed the entirety of such an army. The Flemish pike formations were predominantly middle-class workers with some poorer members of the gentry thrown in; the English longbowmen were mostly middle-class farmers with a smattering of gentlemen; and the Scottish pike formations often contained significant numbers of dismounted men-at-arms, even if only in the front ranks.
And it would also be silly to say that they defeated "noble knights." Let's not go into the issue that most knights weren't even nobles, being of the gentry instead; most of the mounted men-at-arms participating in such encounters weren't full knights either, being squires and serjeants and the like. The second class in particular included middle-class adventurers.
Somehow it reminds me of the Spanish caballeros villanos, not to forget the ministeriales and milites servi... |
Wow take it easy. Note that I wrote "humble peasants" with quotation marks. I know that armies contained fighting men from all social groups, and I don't think any of these wars were "class wars". But still the truth is that men-at-arms could be (and were) wounded, captured or slain in battle against what they considered to be social inferiors.
Posts: 1,532 Location: Tennessee
Wed 02 May, 2007 5:02 pm
The topic of simulated test of arrow versus plate seems to come around every few months. I am wondering how people would like to have seen the testing done? Perhaps a consensus for the "desired" methodology would inspire someone to actually do it "the right way."
Some ideas for doing a more realistic test. Please criticize but provide "how to" for a better way!
Validate the 150 lb draw war bow arrows velocity and angle of impact by shooting as required to reach some sort of credible range (maybe 100 yards or 100 meters could be accepted as an average distance enemy charge that archers would attempt to interrupt?) Once you have a velocity and angle of impact (vertical lob), some other draw weight bow could be constructed to achieve the same velocity at target ranges (need consistency against flat plate.) This might end up being something roughly like a 100 lb draw bow at 20 yards? (Just guessing very wildly based on prior post input about arrows only loosing something like 15% energy at longer ranges.)
Suspend (maybe hang with chains and some weight behind) the target flat plates with weight and flesh like backing plus credible padding. Try to simulate the give and mass of a padded and armoured human torso target.
Shoot at the targets from the close range which a customized draw weight bow has been designed to simulate "mid range of 150 lb draw war bow) with a horizontal angle that approximates the vertical incoming angle of arrow flights at mid charge (100 yards?)
Try to get realistic masses and metallurgy in the arrow shaft and head.
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