Medieval Spear Fighting - Battle Of Hastings

carry a shield as well. Swings and roundabouts. You trade a heavier blow for the protection that a shield will give you. That's the choice of our warriors. Spears varied enormously in length. Shorter ones maybe only five foot long. Some of those carried by mounted soldiers would have been double that in length. Because as a man of God, he cannot spill blood. But we have laid on a training session. He knocked off the helmet of his half-brother. We have safe training lances here. We don't want to spill holy blood, or indeed, royal blood just yet, but normally the Normans would have actually used sharp weapons for their training. The best kind of training is realistic training. So all of our soldiers would have been familiar with the use of a spear. For a knight or a huscarl, probably not the favoured weapon, but certainly for the common soldiers, the ordinary men in arms, the Norman peasants, the Norman mercenaries, Or on the Saxon side, the fyrdmen, the militia if you like, the farmers who would have given two months military service per year to their lord or to their king, they would probably come to battle with merely a spear, a shield and a seax knife as we've already seen. You can hopefully burst asunder the rings of what we now call chain mail, and what soldiers at the time would simply have called mail. The points of a spear can rupture those metal links, penetrate the padded linen cloth armour beneath and get to the squishy bits, the vital organs, the heart.