Swords Were NOT Primary Weapons | Medieval Warfare Myths Debunked With Weapons Expert Matt Easton

So this is the type of sword that someone like Henry VII would have carried at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, for example. And this lives in its scabbard. The hero has a sword. Whether it's Conan or Robin Hood or King Arthur, they all use a sword when it comes to a fight. But the reality is that on a medieval battlefield, swords, I won't say they're not important at all, but they are usually a secondary weapon. Medieval swords were really expensive and only rich people could afford them. They're noblemen's weapons. Complete rubbish, OK? Hello and welcome to another episode of Times Radio History Mythbusting. I'm James Hanson. Every episode we choose a moment from history, an historical figure or a piece of equipment and I sit down with one of our experts to talk through some things that people get wrong. We'll also cover a few things you may not know. Today we're back in the medieval period looking at some of the weapons and armour that knights and soldiers might have used at the time. And joining me today for the first time on the channel, I'm delighted to welcome the historical weapons expert, antiques and YouTuber Matt Easton. Matt, welcome to Times Radio History. Now I should say your channel, Scholar Gladiatoria, is absolutely fantastic where you talk about all these weapons all the time. What first got you interested in medieval history? Oh, wow. Probably watching movies as a kid. So I think I had a misspent youth watching old classics like El Cid and Ben-Hur and things like that. So, yeah, so Charlton Heston featured strongly in my youth. And, you know, I guess other people wanted to be a fireman or, you know, a modern soldier and I wanted to be a knight or a gladiator or something. I don't know, Robin Hood possibly. And do you think this era of history has a particularly large number of myths? I mean, you must hear a lot all the time. I mean, it's often called the Dark Ages, this period. Does that mean that inevitably there are a lot of myths that spring up? Yeah, I think so. And ironically, given what I just said, I think Hollywood plays a large part in that because, you know, I guess as people making movies, they want to feed into people's expectations. And so there are certain sort of tropes and cliches which get repeated over and over and over again. Funnily enough, we even find this in the study of history as well. In some cases, historians repeat something that they've read that another historian wrote. And we go back and we look for the primary source material, which is my main focus is looking at the primary sources. And we find that there is no primary source material. It's just that some historian some time ago wrote this and everyone's repeated it since. Well, let's get into some of your medieval weapons myths. And the first myth doesn't actually look at weapons per se, but more medieval armour. And this is all around how heavy it was. So tell us the truth there, Matt. How heavy was it? Well, so I think the headline is a lot of people think that medieval plate armour specifically was something where if you fell over on the ground, you couldn't get up. And this goes all the way back, I think, to Mark Twain and sort of various Victorian representations of armour, of sort of the idea of knights being winched up into their horses. I think this is even featured in the Laurence Olivier Henry V back in the 1940s. And this essentially is just complete rubbish. If armour is that heavy, you can't really fight in it. Now, some people come back with that and say, oh, well, jousting armour could be very heavy. And it is true to say that specific tournament armours were sometimes built heavier for a number of reasons, partly because you don't have to travel anywhere, you don't have to march, you don't have to go on campaign or climb up siege ladders or things like this. You just either sit on a horse or fight on foot. And it's for a limited amount of time. You've got a lot of servants to help you. So, yes, sometimes tournament armour can be different to war armour. But that being said, even tournament armour, you can still, every tournament armour I've ever looked at, and I do some work with the Royal Armouries and I've done filming at places like the Wallace Collection and the Stibbet Museum in Florence and places like this, you can get your hands on this armour and you can see that actually it has to be functional weight. You have to be able to, certainly in war, you need to be able to go on campaign, you need to be able to live day to day getting this armour on and off, and you need to do all the things that a soldier needs to do. So even if you are a knight or a noble with lots of servants and attendants to help you get into armour, and you do need people to help you get into most armours, once you're in it, you need to be a fully functioning military unit. You need to be a soldier. So you need to be able to use weapons freely, you need to be able to move freely. And the other thing is this idea of ending up on the ground. In fact, that is a specific part of armoured combat, what some people refer to as Harness Spechten, which means, it's just the German term for armoured fighting. But we have all of these manuals and treatises telling us how to fight, how to use these weapons and how to fight in this armour. And a lot of the fighting ends up on the ground. I guess most people know that a lot of fights end up on the ground and it's no different in armour. If anything, it's possibly even more common in armour, particularly in tournaments. And so there's a whole bunch of techniques, much like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, for wrestling on the ground and getting people into submissions, breaking their arms, using your weapons if they're still in your hand at that point. But you need to be able to get up as well, because clearly if you're rolling around on the ground, you'd be very vulnerable to all sorts of enemies on a battlefield. And equally, as I say, in tournaments you need to be able to fall over and get up again. So how much would you say, let's take a typical medieval plate armour suit, how much would that weigh? I mean, would it still be pretty heavy, even if it's not so heavy that you can't then get up? Yeah, it's actually not... So some books will give you a specific weight, like 70 pounds, for example, and they often compare it to a modern army soldier's backpack. The difference between a fully loaded up backpack and all the ammunition you have to carry is that it's in quite specific parts of your body. Now, they have improved that over the years, and so backpacks are obviously designed to distribute the weight on your waist and your shoulders, but armour distributes it even more than that, because of course armour is on every bit of your body. So your gauntlets, your arm harness, your pauldrons for the shoulders, the cuirass, they are all attached to different parts of the underlying garment. So that's the first thing, is you have to have a well-fitted, and really tight, it's almost corseted, it pulls you in at the waist, literally, you lace yourself into this thing, and it pulls your waist in here, and that means that the fabric garment, known as an arming doublet, which you're wearing on your body, is almost glued to your body, and then the armour attaches to that, usually via a sort of lacing system, which is known as points, or pointing, and these are essentially cord, which are usually waxed, so they're quite very strong. Sometimes you can be strapped as well, but essentially the armour is attached as securely as it can be to your body, and so it's distributed very, very well, so your leg armour is borne by your legs alone, and then your cuirass, which is what you wear on your breast and back, and a sort of skirt that comes down from your waist, the weight of that is kind of borne at two points, partly at the shoulder, but partly at the waist, and if it's well-fitted, and well-made plate armour should be well-fitted, it comes in tight at the waist, and so that again distributes the weight. And then the arm harness is usually made of thinner steel, so it's light, so you can move around quickly, and that's attached at various different points, usually at the shoulder or high up the arm, often also at the elbow, and sometimes some are even attached down at the forearm as well, so it's attached at various points. So although the total weight is not inconsiderable, it's about the same as a modern military backpack and ammunition, it's distributed, I would say, better, in a better way. Moreover, the type of person who'd be wearing plate armour isn't carrying anything else, because they've got squires, they've got attendants with them, servants with them, so they might be wearing a sword and holding a poleaxe if they're fighting on foot, but if they need to mount up on their horse, someone goes and gets their horse, brings it over, they hand over their poleaxe, their servant gives them their lance, they mount the horse, maybe with a bit of help if needed, and off they go. So you have to remember that it's a little bit like a tank, a knight, for example, or a man-at-arms, has a crew, and you really need that crew to keep you running, because if something comes detached, if one of your points comes undone, or your sabaton on your foot gets a bit, the strap comes off your shoe, then you need a servant to go down and sort that out for you. So even when I'm doing, for example, reenactment at something like the Battle of Tewkesbury, we've got people in the group who essentially are assigned to help out us heavies, the guys in the full plate, they're there to jump in and help us as needed, but they are also soldiers, they could be longbowmen, they could be billmen, so they're more lightly equipped, they're a little bit more capable to help the knights. Is that a very pertinent kind of comparison with tank design? Because in the same way that some people think, oh, just build the heaviest, strongest, best protected tank possible, but actually that ignores the fact you've got to think about mobility, you've got to think about ammunition as well, the same is true when it comes to designing armour, that the false assumption that heavy equals good is a false assumption. I think, yeah, there are a lot of parallels to be made there, and it's a fun one to make, especially as I like tanks as well. But I think, yeah, the combination between protection, attack or offensiveness, and mobility. But you've got this other one, which you could sort of roll into the engine part of the tank, and that is the human inside. And so a lot of people, I think, fixate on the armour or the weapons, and they don't think about the humans. So first of all, you've got to be pretty fit. And actually the main, it's not entirely about strength. I know a lot of people who aren't the strongest in the world who function very well in armour, but you need to have pretty good cardio. And the fact is that armour, we can kind of downplay, it's not incredibly heavy and all of these sorts of things, but number one, it's hot. And number two, yeah, it does wear you out. Because not only are you wearing additional weight all over your body, so you have just increased your body mass by an amount that you might not be used to unless you train in it often. But in addition to that, you get a lot of heat build-up inside. So if you're fighting in hot summer heat, you really, really feel it, and it saps your energy. You get build-up of acid in the muscles, and you need to drink a lot. Again, that's when the servants come into it. You've swept huge amounts, so you need to consume huge amounts of liquid and replace it. So it's very easy to get exhausted in armour. And I think one of the things that sometimes perhaps movies or video games or things like that don't take into account is that you get tired far quicker in armour than you would do fencing, for example, out of armour. Well, let's come on to medieval weapon myth number two now. We're going to talk about swords, and we should say, as we can see, you've got an amazing array of weapons behind you, so feel free to get any of them out, as it were. Were swords, if we focus on swords particularly, were they the main weapon of choice in the medieval period, and what exactly were they used for, Matt? So the headline here is that swords were very often not a primary weapon. So again, if we go to movies or video games, the hero has a sword. Whether it's Conan or Robin Hood or King Arthur, they all use a sword when it comes to a fight. But the reality is that on a medieval battlefield, swords, I won't say they're not important at all, but they are usually a secondary weapon. So what do I mean by that? Well, the primary weapons on a medieval battlefield are usually a form of what we often call a polearm or hafted weapon, in other words, something on a long stick, which I'll come into in a second, or a missile weapon, a shooting weapon of some kind. Now, what the polearms are and what the shooting weapons, missile weapons are, depends on what period you're in and what area you're in, but this actually goes for mounted or on foot. So the most common types of soldier and most important, you could say, soldiers across the medieval period are essentially people on foot with poleweapons. So if we're going back into the early medieval period, the so-called Dark Ages, the Viking era, then spears, essentially. And then if we come forward in time, there starts to be a greater diversity of polearms, so we start to get things like early forms of glaive and halberd and bill and things like this. And essentially they are, you could say that they're variations on the spear. Most of them have essentially a spear tip, but they tend to have other things on the side, so an axe blade or a hook or a spike or things like this. And that's essentially to give dual purposes to the spear, so it means you can now hook people off a horse or you can chop someone or whatever, or hit someone in armour and have more effect. So polearm soldiers on foot, incredibly important throughout history, and you could say it even comes through to the bayonet attached to the musket and rifle in, well, almost the modern age. Then missile troops, so through most of the medieval period, the bowman or the archer is the most important type of missile troop. Some people think of slingers, so people shooting bullets or stones, pebbles essentially from a sling. That's something more of the ancient world, and it's one of the great questions actually of history, is why slingers don't stay more popular in the medieval period. They still sort of exist, but they're not very important. So bowmen are the most important, and then of course there's the crossbow. So from about the 10th, 11th century we start to see crossbows appear and they become progressively more important as we go through to the late medieval period and even into the Renaissance. And at the end of it, people often forget, we have guns. So the medieval period does actually have firearms. We know that there was a form of cannon of some sort present at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, pretty early. There are also possible references to the presence of guns even at the Battle of Agincourt, although everyone thinks of longbows at the Battle of Agincourt, the Siege of Harfleur. And then if we come to sort of what we could call almost the end of the medieval period, 1453, and the Siege of Constantinople, of course large guns were the deciding factor. And you could say the end of the Hundred Years' War between the English and French as well, really one of the reasons that the French succeeded over the English at the end of that war was they fully embraced firearm technology with a form of early field artillery. The English were still using longbows very effectively. They were starting to use guns, but the French had definitely kind of absorbed that technology more fully than the English had at that point. So the primary weapons essentially are pole arms on foot, and of course the mounted guy, the lance as well. So the primary weapon for the knight is actually the lance, not the sword. So pole arms on foot and mounted missile weapons on foot, usually in Europe. But we have to remember people like the Mongols were using, of course, bows on horseback. And in fact one of the counters to Mongols was to use crossbows both on foot and on horseback as well, because you can use crossbows from horseback. So that was certainly something that they kind of adapted, and in fact firearms used both obviously on foot and on horseback as well. So Matt, how common actually were hand-to-hand sword fights? Because a lot of people have that in their mind when they think about medieval warfare. In reality, how often would that happen? Well, so swords were used a lot, and so I don't want people to go away with the impression that, you know, oh, swords weren't used in the medieval period. The fact is that they are a sidearm. So I guess a parallel in the modern world would be you've got your rifle, but then you might have your pistol as well. So I'll just grab a sword here. This is a type of sword known as an arming sword, and it's called an arming sword because it's the sword that you wear. Arming is putting on all of your military gear. So this is a one-handed sword. It's not terribly long. It's got a cut-and-thrust blade, and I should mention this is a replica of an actual surviving one in the Royal Armouries. So I do some work with the Royal Armouries, producing one-to-one accurate replicas of some of the things in their collection. So this is a replica of a probably English arming sword of the late 15th century. So this is the type of sword that someone like Henry VII would have carried at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, for example. And this lives in its scabbard, which is a wooden cord leather-covered holder, essentially, with a metal shape at the end, and that essentially is attached to a belt which is worn at your side, and that is always there as your backup. So if your primary weapon on horseback is a lance, or on foot it might be a spear or a poleaxe, if you're a knight, or indeed if you're like an archer and you're using a longbow as your primary weapon, this is always here as a backup. And in much the same way as in the 19th century, for example, people were using muskets on rifles as their primary weapon, the fact that they had a bayonet was very important because sometimes you can't use your primary weapon for a number of reasons. So let's look at a couple of reasons. If you're a knight on horseback and you have a lance, if you successfully hit an enemy with your lance with a bit of speed, there's a very good chance that your lance will either break, because some of them were intended to do that, or it will skewer the opponent and now be stuck in them. So at that point you don't have your lance anymore, so that's where you need to pull this out. And in fact many mounted knights even carried additional weapons after this as well, because sometimes these got knocked out of the hand or they broke. So pretty much every knight would have one of these as the next backup, and this is called a rondel dagger. It's named after the style of the hilt, which we could maybe look at in detail another time. But essentially this is a specialised dagger for fighting in armoured combat. Now there's a few reasons you want one of these in addition to one of these. One might be that this might break or get knocked out of your hand, but the other might be that you end up wrestling or rolling around on the ground, and if you end up wrestling with an opponent who's also in armour, then very often the dagger will be a more practical weapon than the sword, because you're in wrestling distance or you're rolling on the floor. But in addition, mounted soldiers sometimes, because sword blades can sometimes break, especially if you're hitting someone very hard in armour with them, they even carried sometimes an additional backup weapon of a mace. So I think most people probably know a mace is a heavy, can-be-spiked or flanged head on a shaft, either wood or metal shaft, and that was often carried as a backup even to the sword as well. For someone like an archer, obviously you need a hand-to-hand combat weapon, because if your primary weapon is the longbow, two things. Number one, at one point the enemy might charge you, might come so close that you can't keep shooting at them and you need to fight hand-to-hand. Secondly, you might run out of arrows, and the simple fact is that all missile weapons, whether it's a modern rifle or whether it's a longbow or a crossbow, runs out of ammunition at some point, and that was one of the most important reasons why bayonets were obviously used in the 19th century. Slow rate of fire, loading a muzzle, loading musket, and only having a certain number of shots. So swords were still important in the 19th century, but obviously very important in the 14th and 15th century. So yeah, so swords really important for everyone as a backup weapon to what their primary weapon was, and it should also be said, some people did use them as a primary weapon. One particular scenario where you might choose to use the sword as your primary is actually if you are a heavy armoured person, and that's largely because heavy armour in the late medieval period can make you so invulnerable to most weapons that sometimes tactically the best choice to make is just to wade in there and get to close range as quickly as possible. And if your opponent is unarmoured or very lightly armoured, like an archer, then often the best way to take them out is to just get as close as possible, as quickly as possible, and if need be, you might go straight to the dagger, but their options against you are very, very limited because late medieval armour is incredibly well protecting pretty much everywhere. So yeah, in the earlier period as well, we could also say that swords were very important because of large shields. So while the spear generally dominates the sword in warfare and in single combat, when you put large shields into the equation, as the Romans showed, when you put a large shield in it, it blocks and prevents a lot of the lines of attack for a spear. So the Romans realised that if you have a large scutum, a large rectangular shield, they can go against, for example, a Macedonian phalanx, and they can close in under the cover of their large shields and suddenly you're at sort of shanking distance with a short sword and then you've got the big advantage over the person with the longer weapon. And it's the same thing in the medieval period, except rather than large shields, it's usually with armour. But large shields were still used occasionally in the late medieval period as well and, for example, in the Viking period, they have quite large round shields and in some cases, sword and shield can sort of match spear and shield to some extent. Although the spear has greater range, the shield can help negate that. Matt, that's absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for showing us those incredible weapons. Let's move on to your third myth now, and this is around what people would be wearing in combat. And there is this kind of image of soldiers fighting, covered in mud, all dressed in sort of dreary colours. Is that true? Well, you know, I'm not going to make out that they were all dressed in bright rainbow colours necessarily, but the fact is that the medieval period was colourful. They loved bright, clashing, gaudy, contrasting colours. And very often they would specifically not colour match things. So sometimes we see, you know, I'll pick up a different sword. Sometimes we see that a scabbard, a grip and the belt that it's attached to, yeah, in the modern world you might think, well, I'll have matching colours of, you know, I'll have a green scabbard with a green grip and a green belt. Wouldn't that look cool? Medieval person would be like, that's horrible. Too much matching. They want more clashing. So if you look at medieval art, you know, primarily we look at things like manuscripts. So there are thousands and thousands of medieval manuscripts with what are known as illuminations in them, essentially pictures. And a lot of our knowledge of medieval arms and armour comes from manuscripts like that. We've also got treatises, technical treatises, telling us how to use these things. That shows us lots of detail. We've also got things like church windows, sculpture or paintings, all sorts. So if we look at those, it's very clear that very often in the medieval period, people picked the brightest possible colours they could get and in as many clashing contrasting colours as they could get. So very often something like a, you know, they might have, let's say a black scabbard with a bright red grip with a yellow belt or something like that. And that was the height of good taste as far as the late medieval period was concerned. So one of the kind of bugbears for medieval historians like me, and you know, I studied medieval history and archaeology at university, so I've been studying these sorts of sources for a long time, and it's the representation of the medieval world in modern media. Now this didn't used to be the case. If we go back to the golden age of Hollywood and we look at those sort of Richard the Lionheart type epics from the 1950s and 60s or El Cid, everything was bright colours, technicolour. And actually that was far more accurate. I think modern people look at that and go, oh, that doesn't look very historical. And we have, we notice with a lot of modern TV shows and movies, there's this blue filter they put on everything. Oh, it's the historical blue filter. We know it's the past because everything's blue. And then the clothes they're wearing, they all have to be shades of brown and grey and black and lots of leather, lots and lots of leather. We'll come back to leather in a second. And then mud slapped on everything. And were the battlefields even that muddy? Because there is that sense that everything was kind of, you know, everyone was caked in mud. The battlefields were covered in mud. People's armour would be covered in mud. Is that true? Well, I think it depends what time of year you're fighting. So typically in the medieval world, people fought in the warmer months of the year. There are exceptions to that. There were some famous battles during the Wars of the Roses, which were unusually bloody and vendetta-filled, which were in the depths of winter, you know, in snow and this kind of stuff. The Battle of Agincourt famously was very muddy. And this is not a modern myth. This is true because of the time of year that it was fought in. So if a campaign or a battle was fought at a rainy or snowy time of year, then I'm sure people did end up covered in mud. But a lot of battles were fought in summer, when the ground was hard, you weren't going to get any mud off that. You know, I mean, I take part in one of the biggest sort of medieval battle reenactments, the Battle of Tewkesbury, every year. And that is the height of summer. We usually have a heat wave and we're all boiling inside our armour. And I can tell you, we don't get muddy at all. The only thing we get is sweaty. But all the armour is very shiny. And it's not just because we're, you know, modern people kind of cherishing and polishing our armour. You've got to remember in the 15th century, for example, you've got a load of servants. If you get a spot of rust on your armour, all you do is you give it to them and say, Polish that up. So in many cases, you'd find medieval armour was better looked after than modern reenactor's armour because you had all these people, all these staff to look after things for you. You know, it's like if you've got a really expensive modern car, you might let it get dirty. But if you've got the staff, you just say, can you give it a wash? And they wash it, you know, they clean it. So it's the same thing as getting your car sort of valet. So I think it depends what in terms of what they would look like. I don't think it's necessarily unrealistic to show muddy armies if it's at the right time of year. But if they're in summer, they should look bright and clean. And, you know, people paid as much. Well, I won't say as much, but they paid a fair amount of attention to cleaning, polishing and maintaining things. And in fact, we actually have records from the Tudor period of the maintenance of local armouries. So when armies were raised, some of the army was made up of personal retainers. So essentially sort of professional soldiers for the local lord. But some of them were levied troops. Now, these levied troops were provided with arms and armour by the state. A bit like, you know, sort of World War One draft. And we know from records that these armouries were maintained to a high degree. And there were officials who were employed, essentially civil servants were employed, to make sure that the armour and equipment in that armoury for the local militia was well maintained. The swords were sharp, the halberds were pointy and the armour was shiny and the leather straps. And that's one thing they'd go on about, actually. Because in the medieval world, one of the problems they had to deal with was things like parasites and, you know, mice and things like this, eating anything that they could, such as leather straps, crossbow strings, arrow fletchings. So they paid a lot of attention, much like they would do with crops and, you know, things that had been harvested, and keeping them away from the vermin which might ruin them. So yeah, they had to, you know, because at the end of the day, if a leather strap doesn't work on an armour, the entire armour could be useless. If you can't, if the leather strap which holds the cuirass closed has been eaten by mice, the armour's almost useless, you know, until it's fixed. So they washed their clothes, they went for bright colours, they maintained their gear, they cleaned it. You don't want a rusty sword, because a rusty sword gets stuck in the scabbard. You want the blades to be polished, sharp, oiled, so that at that moment, when someone's just about to take your head off, you're able to pull the sword out quickly. We even have records, actually, to people in rainy conditions, this is in a later period, their sword's getting stuck in their scabbard because they'd rusted it in the scabbard, and clearly the sword's useless if that happens. So yeah, they had to, just like a modern soldier cleaning their rifle, they had to look after their gear. Well, let's move on to medieval weapons myth number four now, Matt, and this is a really interesting one. This is the idea that there were no guns at all during the period, and that once these were invented, armour became useless. Now, we kind of touched on the guns a bit earlier on, but let's expand on it. Talk us through this myth. Yeah, so I mean, the first thing to say is that firearm technology had been around for hundreds of years in Asia, and you could say that while there had been early attempts in the Middle East and Asia to weaponise gunpowder, it was really, I would say, the Europeans who really took that idea and ran with it, and you know, the modern world is a testament to what happened afterwards. You know, European countries really got behind the idea of guns, both handheld guns and the type of guns that most people would know as a cannon. Now, of course, they can fulfil different functions. Generally speaking, handheld firearms are usually shot at other people, whereas larger guns are usually shot either at fortifications or ships, and you know, guns completely changed naval warfare. So in the classical world, naval warfare had been either about ramming the enemy or boarding the enemy, pretty much. They had some, OK, they had some sort of fire-throwing, they had Greek fire, and they had these sort of precursors, I suppose, to artillery and things like scorpions and omegas and things like that, but by and large, it was usually about ramming the opposing ship or boarding the opposing ship. The medieval world was, you could say, even more limited than that, because they didn't have as many artillery, pre-gun artillery machines as, say, the Greeks and Romans did. And so really, most medieval naval battles were about fighting a bit like a land battle while you were floating on a boat. So essentially, they would come alongside each other, and then usually archers and crossbowmen, both on the deck of the ship, but also up in the crow's nest and things like this, and on the fore and aft castles, would essentially shoot at each other for a while, and then at some point, the ships would board, one would board the other, or sometimes, I guess, they would mutually board. And so essentially, they were like battles that we'd fight on land, but they were fought on board ships. Now, as soon as large artillery, gunpowder weapons came along, this changes the game, because you can now blow a hole in the side of the opposing person's ship, as we see possibly with Mary Rose in 1545. So, you know, naval warfare was really changing drastically at the end of the medieval period, but this started in the 15th century, we could say. But then siege warfare changed hugely, probably starting in the late 14th century as a result also of these cannons, because now you've got these fortifications which have been designed purely with the aim of keeping someone out for long enough that they either give up, get a disease, start to run out of food, or whatever. So it's basically about sitting there and just, you know, surviving it, surviving the siege. And yeah, okay, you've got some places where archers can shoot from, and maybe you can throw some things down on the enemies, but really it's about weathering the storm. When large cannons come along, you can't necessarily weather the storm, at least not with the sort of 13th, 14th century style castles that were in place at that point. And so we see, by the 16th century, fortifications have drastically changed, because they're having things like angular, you know, the famous star forts, the Heavenly Eight Belts, for example, angular fortifications that are designed to create ricochets of cannonballs off the walls. So they literally have to change the design of castles, partly to defend against artillery, but partly also to accommodate artillery, because of course now a castle doesn't have to just sit there, now it can shoot at an enemy encampment that's quite some distance away, and put a great big stone ball through the middle of their camp. So it completely changes siege warfare. Now there is a change in the manner of fortifications we see at the end of the Hundred Years' War, so we're talking here about the 1450s. The French really made, under Bureau, incidentally, who gives us the word bureaucracy, the field artillery, but also the use of artillery in sort of temporary and light fortifications. So if you're able to arrive at a place, throw up some earthen banks and a wooden palisade, and then put some guns on it, you're able now to make a small, quickly raised fortification, which has a huge amount of defensive and offensive potential. Sir John Talbot was killed by a gunshot, one of the great commanders of the English army at the time, and the fact is that the French use of artillery towards the end of that war really absolutely changed the nature of the way they were fighting against each other. In terms of handheld guns as well, this is an interesting one. There's some debate about how effective they were. So at various battles in the Wars of the Roses, for example, we know that handgunners were present, but they're never really attributed with having had a huge effect on the battle, but we don't really know. They're mentioned, but what the actual effect they had was is not really described very clearly, and that's similar with the Hundred Years' War and indeed the Burgundian-Swiss Wars as well. So it seems that handheld guns still had a bit of a way to come, and they really started to reach their real turning point of effectiveness, you could say, in the 16th century, so really after the period we're talking about here. But they certainly appeared in the 15th century in quite large numbers, and increasingly so as we go through the century. But in terms of range and accuracy and reliability, safety of use, they don't seem to have been very heavily relied on, and they seem to have been used often alongside crossbows. So people at that point, the technology wasn't really quite there yet for handheld artillery, and people pretty much hedged their bets and mixed it in with longbows and crossbows. So there was a huge overlap, and I guess that's important to say, is that people didn't just go, oh, we've got guns now, we're not going to use longbows, we're not going to use crossbows. Absolutely, they kept using crossbows and longbows, in fact until the English Civil War in some cases. So there were small units of longbowmen present in the English Civil War in the 1640s, despite the fact that the musket had been around for decades and decades by that point. Lastly, in terms of armour. So I think there's a commonly held myth that guns came along, guns can shoot through armour, armour disappeared. Now, that is a gross simplification. So number one, early guns, as I've mentioned, the handguns anyway, I mean obviously if you get hit by a cannonball, it doesn't matter what you're wearing, you're going to go splat. But if you get shot by a musket ball, for example, out of a 16th century early form of musket, that's not necessarily going to go through armour, and in fact, so much so, that they started beefing up certain parts of the armour to make it bulletproof. Now, I think everybody watching this probably has heard the expression bulletproof, but I think a fair chunk of people don't realise that it comes from armour, and that's because in the 16th century specifically, although they started this in the 15th century, but in the 16th century, the best breastplates started being shot as a test to show that they were bulletproof, and a proof means a stamp, and they would leave the dent on the breastplate to show that it had been tested. So it carried the bulletproof. So absolutely, in the 16th century, the armourers and the armourers' guilds all over Europe, who'd been around for centuries by this point, they saw this new technology was a risk to their industry and their guilds, and they went, well, we're not going to go out without a fight, and so inevitably, as always happens, with one technology, you get a counter technology, always. So armour, which had been evolving for centuries to defeat swords and spears and then poleaxes and lances and then longbows and crossbows, and eventually, it had to deal with firearms. And so in the 16th century, these bulletproof breastplates and helmets, I won't say that there wasn't bulletproof arm and leg armour, but for the most part, they seemed to have not bothered. They seemed to have basically just gone for the breastplate and the helmet as being the most critical targets, but also the most likely to be hit by a bullet, number one. But also, if you've got a thinner, non-bulletproof plate on your arm, because of the curvature, it's more likely to glance off anyway. So these larger, flatter surfaces, they started experimenting, first of all, with hardened steel, which they'd been using for a while anyway, because they needed hardened steel breastplates and helmets to deal with crossbows, for example, and lances. So they were already making hardened steel armour, but they just made it thicker. So the first thing they did against gunpowder weapons was to make the armour thicker and heavier, which obviously reduces your mobility, but if it keeps you alive, it's a trade-off that's worth taking. But then, later on, going into the 17th century, they even started experimenting with laminating, that is, having different layers of iron and steel within a breastplate. So some people have x-rayed breastplates from the 17th century, for example, which show that on the outer surface we have some hardened steel, high-carbon steel, same kind of hardness as a leaf spring from a Land Rover, and then we have a layer of softer steel behind that, and maybe a wrought iron surface on the inside. There's even some suggestion that some armour might even have a layer of wax as well, to deaden, to absorb. There's some mention of that in helmets. So essentially, they were doing everything they could to make the armour bulletproof, and they did succeed. And in fact, I think a lot of people don't realise, obviously we have modern material bulletproof armour today, but they did have bulletproof armour in the 19th century, and in World War I, and in World War II. It's just that as firearms got more and more potent, the armour had to get so heavy it just became impractical. But in the 16th and 17th century, the guns, bearing in mind they were shooting a soft lead ball at a lower velocity, and fairly large calibre as well, so it would go splat, they were effectively making armour that was bulletproof. In fact, it was so popular that the Japanese bought it. So a lot of people don't realise that Japanese samurai in the 17th century were like, wow, yeah, we love this bulletproof European armour. One of the things they were buying from Europeans was breastplates and helmets, but then, in true Japanese style, they were Japanese-ing it. They were making it of the artistic style that suited their armour. So essentially, they would lacquer it, they would paint it, they would attach all of the normal cheek plates and back pieces onto the helmets, but inside, you can see it's like a European cabasset or morion, so it's a Spanish-Portuguese-Dutch helmet underneath, and the breastplates have the kind of Elizabethan-style peace cod shape, but then they have all of the Japanese pauldrons and tassets and everything added to them. So the Japanese loved them because they had muskets, and they had the same problem. They had to deal with suddenly these guns being shot at their samurai. And in the English Civil War, some of the bulletproof armour worn by cuirassiers, who were the kind of descendants of knights, essentially. They were still wearing full armour in the 1640s. They were bulletproof, and there's some accounts of them at point-blank range being shot with pistols in the helmet, and the pistol failing to go through. Repeated times as well, not just once, but parliamentarian cavalry riding up to them and levelling the pistol at them, shooting them in the head, and it, bam, going that, and them still riding on. So earlier forms of firearm weren't as potent as people, I think, think. You talk about a gun, and people instantly think of an SA80 or a Beretta or a Glock or whatever, but it's not the same thing as a 16th or 17th century firearm. Matt, this is absolutely fascinating. We just have time to squeeze in one final myth very briefly. Let's talk about longbows and crossbows. Now, obviously these were very effective weapons, but kind of building on what you were talking about, could they shoot through armour? So, in the world of medieval history and warfare studies, you could say there are two large camps. There's the longbow camp and there's the armour camp. And there are people who think that, and to paraphrase, the longbow was the medieval machine gun. I hate this expression so much. First of all, heavy warbows, so I understand with a light modern bow you can shoot quite, you know, you can have quite a high rate of shooting with a light bow, but when you move into the heavy draw weights as we see on the Mary Rose bows, which are 100, 120, 160 pounds draw weight, most people can't just pick one of those up and pull them, and certainly not shoot them repeatedly. You can't shoot them particularly quickly. I don't like to use the term rate of fire because that relates to firearms, but you know what I mean with rate of fire. You can't produce a very high rate of fire with a very heavy warbow. And there are people out there, friends of mine, who shoot 150 pound draw weight longbows or warbows, but they can't shoot them incredibly quickly. So the first thing is they were not a medieval machine gun. But the second idea was that it was just, you know, oh, Agincourt was these English archers mowing down the French knights. No, okay. If we actually go back and look at the history, there are very, very few mentions of arrows going through armour. There are mentions of arrows bypassing armour, but not actually going through the plate. Okay, so we'll come back to that in a second. So let's talk about the Battle of Agincourt. So Agincourt, 1415, absolutely dominates this topic and people always refer to it. In fact, people should also talk about the Battle of Benoy, which was a decade later, which was just as important but is far less famous because Shakespeare didn't write about it. But the Battle of Agincourt was dominated by the number of prisoners that Henry V took. If you are taking record numbers of prisoners, so many that for some reason you have to execute them instead of keeping them prisoner because you don't have enough people to keep them prisoner, they've not been shot to pieces with longbow arrows because you're taking them prisoner. So, for example, Marshal Boussicault, who was one of the most famous French knights, he was also captured at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 I think it was. He was reckoned to be one of the best French knights, but he was also one of the generals, one of the leaders at Agincourt. He led one of the advances on the English lines and he was captured and he lived the rest of his life in captivity in England. He was never ransomed back, but there's no record of him being wounded. So despite the fact that he would have led that force from the front into this hail of English arrows, he would have been wearing the best armour of the day and according to the records he wasn't wounded. So I guess the question is, do we have records of people who were wounded in armour against longbow or crossbow bolts? The answer is yes, but pretty much always it's in a gap. So, for example, there are these two brothers who fought in the Paston Brothers, so you may have heard of the Paston Letters, and one of the Paston Brothers was wounded at the inside of the elbow during the Wars of the Roses by an arrow. But the inside of the elbow is where the plate isn't, so it's very conspicuous that he's been hit in somewhere. You'd have mail, aka chainmail, in the gap, but we can shoot through chainmail. The fact is that, yeah, plate armour, amazing against arrows. Chainmail, not so good against arrows. So he was shot in a gap. Henry V, when he was the prince and he was fighting the Battle of Shrewsbury, he took an arrow to the face, famously, which his surgeon had to create a special tool to extract, but it was the face. Almost certainly he had his visor up, or he didn't even have a visor on. Very often English knights at this time wore a type of helmet called a great bassinet, and very often if they're fighting in close combat they didn't have the visor on, or they lifted the visor up so they could see better. So, yeah, he was almost certainly in a place where the armour wasn't. We've also got records from Burgundy of people who would have been wearing a full harness being shot in the back of the leg and things like this. So generally speaking, when arrows or crossbows wounded someone in full armour, it was in a gap. So therefore, why did people use them? Well, the answer is because most people on Bafferville didn't have full armour. So if most of the opposing enemy... So the Battle of Agincourt, yeah, OK, there were a lot of French knights and men-at-arms there, but the greater number of the army would have been lower-level squires, crossbowmen to some extent, levies. There were a lot of sort of militia-type levies raised that basically would have had maybe a male shirt and a helmet, maybe a gambeson, maybe a coat of plate, something like this. But they would have had lots of places that arrows could stick in. So even if you're wearing... Let's say even if you're wearing a breastplate that's arrow-proof, if you're not wearing anything else, well, if there's enough arrows coming down, an arrow's going to hit you somewhere the armour isn't. So the fact is that delivered in volume, arrows and crossbows were still extremely effective, one of the most effective weapons on the medieval battlefield. But we get fixated on this, we have to penetrate the armour. Well, no, you don't have to penetrate the armour. You just need to shoot enough arrows that some of them will find gaps. Well, Matt, this has been absolutely fascinating. You have comprehensively busted five medieval weapons myths for us. Just before you go, we always like to ask our guests to give us one fact, maybe a lesser-known fact that a lot of people aren't aware of. What have you got for us? OK, so a myth that I hear so often is that medieval swords were really expensive and only rich people could afford them. They're noblemen's weapons. Complete rubbish, OK? By the middle of the medieval period, this might be vaguely true of the early medieval period, but by the middle of the Middle Ages, pretty much anyone with a job could afford a sword, and there were swords to suit all pockets, so we could compare it with something like a modern motorbike or car, OK? The fact is, yes, if you wanted to buy the most expensive one out there, that would be only the thing that a high nobility or a king could afford, and there's a record of Henry V, for example, buying a number of swords which were valued at £2,000 each, which was castle-building money, vast amounts of money, and he bought these diplomatic gifts to give to other monarchs in Europe as a way of making some strong diplomatic ties with them. But at the lowest level, we also have records of swords sometimes described in records as rusty old sword or similar things worth as little as one or two pence. Now, to put that into context, an English archer on campaign earned six pence per day. Wow. So you're earning six pence per day a sword for one or two pence. It's actually very affordable. Yeah, you could buy one a week if you wanted to. You could start a sword collection. Not that there's any evidence that people did do that. So the fact is they could suit any pocket, and the fact is that old swords, rusty, battered old swords, didn't just disappear. They kept in use for people who couldn't afford the newer stuff. And in fact, swords were so prevalent that actually laws were brought in in cities like London. So we have very detailed laws from London about who could carry a sword, where, why, and when. And the problem was they started getting lots of people causing mischief, ne'er-do-wells, after sunset. So after curfew. So there was a law against walking around the street after dark carrying a sword. So that was a specific law. So you weren't allowed to walk around the street carrying a sword at night. So this idea, I guess from fantasy films and stuff, of everyone walking around with a sword, you weren't necessarily allowed to do that. But perhaps more surprisingly, common people, I assume both of us here, neither of us as far as I know... We are mere commoners, sadly. Neither of us are knighted, and so we couldn't legally walk in the city of London, or Paris, incidentally, or York, or various other cities, wearing a sword unless we had just arrived from travelling and were going to our place of residence, or like an inn or whatever. And so what you had to do, so let's say, for example, I had travelled from Canterbury to London. I travel into London. I travel to the inn that I'm going to stay in or my friend's house that I'm going to stay in. And then I put the sword in that place where I'm staying and it has to stay there until I leave. And that was the medieval law. I couldn't walk around in the street with it unless I'd been knighted. And if I was knighted, then I could wear my sword. And so that's partly how the sword became the symbol of the knight, because you know that person's a knight because he's wearing his sword in the street. Matt, I'm sure it is only a matter of time until you are knighted and until you can walk around the streets of London with your sword, rightfully so. Matt, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm afraid that is all we've got time for, but we'll be back very soon busting more historical myths. And if there's anything you'd like to see us deconstruct, let us know in the comments. And remember to like this video and subscribe to our channel, Times Radio History, on YouTube. That's it from us. Goodbye.