[Elling Polden]

Bucklers would not be very suitable for battlefield use; they are to small to provide much "passive defence".
A buckler fighter is highly wounerable to polearms, cross striking, and the like.
it is, of course, preferable to no buckler, but in most battlefield conditions, you would bring a full size shield instead.

Thus, as armour is only worn on the battlefield, armoured buckler fighting would not be very common other than as a backup option.
Also, what appears to be "sport" sword and buckler fencing is conducted without armour.

All in all, there are few sources on the use of larger shields in the manuals, probably because it's a lot less "fun" than sword&buckler or longswords.
Large shields seems to be a almost exclusively military weapon, of little interest to the fencing masters.

[Jean Thibodeau]

Elling;

I agree that if one has the choice one would use a polearm if using full or somewhat full armour but might have a buckler also to use with a single handed backup sword.

Or one would prefer having a longer type XVa instead.

I see the buckler mostly for an archer, crossbowman or handgonner who might also be fairly well armoured as a back up and whose principle weapon would make carrying a full size shield difficult..

The buckler is mostly for that night at the tavern or for protection when out of armour. And duels for honour I guess

[Felix Wang]

I suspect the lack of writings about the use of large shields is not due to their being less "fun", but rather due to the changing times. The volume of surviving writings does up in the later part of the Middle Ages, and it seems that the total amount of writing went up as well. However, the use of large shields decreases dramatically in the 14th century, so the amount written about them was not great.

[Stephen Hand]

Large shields are better in all respects except ease of carry, particularly while you're using a primary weapon like a pike, bill or bow. Bucklers are illustrated being used by civilians and by lightly armoured foot soldiers as an adjunct to their sword (their secondary weapon). It's hard to carry a large shield while you're using a polearm or a bow. Such soldiers might be wearing body armour, gambeson, mail, jack or breastplate, maybe protection for the upper arms and/or legs and an open faced helmet. The primary targets in the I.33 sword and buckler system, the face and the arms would still be uncovered.

In full plate harness, you're really so well protected against normal sword blows that it becomes a whole different type of fight.

Cheers
Stephen

[Stephen Hand]

[Shane Allee]

Stephen covered his points nicely with the fighting aspects of the shield, guess I should elaborate a bit more on my points. My references will be a bit earlier, but that is just because that is more of the stuff I know. If you look at the Iron Age continental celts and the Roman legions at the time, you can see similar sized shields, but different shapes and uses based on the fighting technic. Gross generalization here, but the legions fought in a close dense formation with spear/javelins and a short thrusting sword. The Celts fought in a much more open less dense style with spear/javelins and more cutting types of swords. The celtic shields were generally more rounded with more glancing surfaces, and they would have been much more motion involved with their fighting style. The legions shields lacked the glancing surfaces, but allowed them to be used together with other shields to form more of a solid barrier. They were going to be less likely to need to move their shields to block/deflect because there is probably going to be someone else shield there to do it. If you start looking at other types of solders in the Roman army you can start seeing other styles and size shields. A lightly armoured, very mobile skirmisher isn't going to want to be carrying a barn door (yeah I said it) around with them. Just like someone on horseback isn't going to want that large flat area for blows to land on when they wouldn't even have had stirrups yet. A solid whack with a spear would take either the shield out of your hand or you and your shield to the ground. So you will want something that will only take part of the blow and deflect it.

Building a bit from Stephen's point about the ease of carrying. If you look at times and or areas where most of the fighting would be done by smaller bands of warriors, you more than likely going to see a balance between getting the best size/shape shield for the fighting style and something that isn't going to slow or hamper the mobility a small group of warriors needs. So your probably not going to find that viking with a barn door unless he is planning on doing some boarding behind the longboat.

No matter where or what time you look though all the all the armour, weapons, fighting style, etc were all interlinked, and then you can also see how things outside that sphere still manage to influence the way they fought.

I think I've butchered enough history today...*G*

Shane

[Ryan A. C.]

Just a thought as to why there are no sword and shield treatises, besides the fact most documents seem to be lost to history.

Who would be reading these things? Would they be readily available to the station of fighter that would use a large shield?
If the fechtbuch was mainly an upper class thing why would the majority of people reading them want to learn about something they aren’t going to be using?

thoughts?