Even the English archer's thick bodkin arrowhead, designed specially to defeat full plate armor, was utterly useless against the new Milanese suits. There's nothing more terrifying. If only the Italian knights hadn't started pillaging the English rear positions and actually supported the main French force, this might have been a major French victory.
Great video. Thanks for posting, amigo. Ancient and medieval warfare has always been a fascination of mine, and it can be hard to find good documentaries.
You have to see that the Lombard breastplates were really some of the best that were available at that time, and of course a simple warbow arrow will not get through the best best breastplates. But these were really only available to some few elite men being really rich enough to afford the price. Breastplate and Helmet are the thickest in a full suit but there are weak points on the side, the arms, legs, etc. where arrows can penetrate, so it’s not totally “arrowproof”.
@NICKarrowman ...Also, this Lombard plate was really the latest, best and most expensive armour, most people wouldn’t have worn it. At Crecy or Agincourt for example, archery proved most effective against heavy knight cavalry. At Verneuil the archers didn’t have the time to prepare their protecting stakes and the Lombards had the best armour, that was the only reason for the cavalry breaking through...
@NICKarrowman ...What annoys me most is to say that “arrows bounced off the horses’ armour as well”, which is totally wrong, because most horses are not completely protected with armour, if at all. What this documentation also fails to admit is that after breaking through, the Lombards were defeated by the archer reserve that was left behind at the baggage train and that the Scottish allies of the French army –being ill armoured- were completely routed by arrows.
@NICKarrowman …and one last thing…the blunt trauma described later in this series also counts for arrows, not only for some poleaxes. A knight being hit in the breastplate by two good, heavy war arrows might easily be knocked off his horse and be trampled to death.
Ok, maybe this is true for elite cavalry like this. I didn't mean to knock him backwards anyway, but the force the arrow strikes with is well hard enough to have him lose his balance and fall off sidewards. The description given here is just exaggerated. There are always weak spots in an armour where arrows will get through, and there were plenty of arrows shot. Also, no horse was armoured that well. arrows hitting the chest or the legs would have made it collapse.
Not even that. A glancing blow from a mace will already carry more brute energy than an arrow. Hitting someone in plate in such a way that he gets dazed enough to fall off the saddle would be an increadibly lucky hit. And those plenty of weak spots are actually pretty darn hard to hit and evne harder to hit at an angle good enough.
This is not true, sorry. You may speak of a modern arrow shot from a light recurve. But an English war arrow weighting more than 1500 grain and being shot from a bow of 140-150lb of draw weight has an enormous smashing power comparable to that of a medium sledgehammer. And it does not matter wether the spot is hard to hit. some of the many thousands of arrows will just hit there anyway. Arrows hitting the horse will be even more dangerous.
Bullshit. Enourmous smashing power, my ass. Throwing a fist-sized stone will have more brute force than any arrow, ever. A storng guy punching you in the face will have more kinetic energy. And yes, it very much does matter. Given the angling and design of medieval armor, plunging fire has no realistic chance to ever hit any of the weakspots at an acceptable angle.
Those "plenty of weakspots" are anything but plenty and evne with massed fire just about impossible to hit.
Sorry, but do you even know what you're talking about? How would you be able to prove that an arrow has a poor impact? As I said, an arrow is not always the same. The bows used in the hundred years war were very strong
And believe me (I shoot these bows myself, 96lbs atm), these arrows are very heavy & shot with enormous power. Comparing it to a stone is just ridiculous.
So you definitely know nothing of the force a war arrow has. There was a test made to compare an English warbow to a musket. They did a test on ballistic gel, with the result that the musket ball penetrated about 45cm, the arrow 35cm, which is not much less. And the archer was not even using very heavy arrows. Type here on youtube:”Langbogen gegen Muskete” . Watch both parts and you’ll know what I mean.
Heavier arrows would be bad when comes to penetration, though. And yes, a fist-sized stone thrown by a grown man will carry more total kinetic energy than an arrow. Hell, it will carry more total neergy than a modern anti-materiel rifle. That doesn't mena it will penetrate very well, though, because that energy gets spread over a far larger area.
Of course it is true that there were so many other tactical factors in these battles being essential to victory (just arrows without anything else will of course not decide a battle), that's right, but the description in this video plays the role of the archers down extremely (well, I guess things like that can be expected on any TV show). Btw., don't think I'm an Englishman wanting to save National pride, I'm just a passionate warbowman disliking the role of the weapon understated.
@NICKarrowman You are right, those Italian mercenaries are more likely to be porcuepined by something like 50 arrows on the breast plate (Brirtish bowman were trained to fire together as small teams to take out cavs one by one in close range). Actually a lot of Italian got killed that day, but still there were some lucky ones that got through the arrows and became wolves in sheep. The longbow is understated in this programme to make the armor a hero of the battle.
@Magni56 Concering the discussion on projectile force: Ah, OK, you're talking of kinetic energy, I thought you meant the actual impact, which would have been ridiculously wrong comparison :D.
As for the penetration of heavier arrows: Youre right, a heavy arrow alone will normally travel slower and thus have less impact. Most bows, be it traditional or modern design, are thus not suitable to shoot such an arrow effectively.
@Magni56 But with the English warbow, it’s different. The weapon's design is rather primitive, that’s why many people think of it as inferior to other bows. However, it has one big advantage of any other bow: It’s huge drawweight combined with the bow bending full compass(I hope you know what I mean by this?) is perfect for launching heavy arrows a long distance. And once you are able to get off a heavy arrow with effective speed, its penetration capability is far superior to any lighter arrow.
@NICKarrowman For a given draw length and weight, I find it hard to believe that a slight bend at the middle will alter the energy stored in a bow significantly. (A slight bend in the middle will likely not affect the force-distance plots for the draw, which should be fairly linear for that type of bow. Another way of looking at this is that a very small fraction of the bows energy will be stored in the stiffer center even if it does bend full compass.)
@NoOne3234 Proponents of Asian bows will say that English war bows are inferior due to shape and material. If we keep the draw length and final force constant, recurving the bow or adding static bridges will cause the slope of the force-distance plot to level out after a certain point in the draw. This results in more energy being stored, but this is countered by a decrease in release efficiency. The shape of the longbow wasn’t inferior to that of its Turkish/mongol counterparts.
@NoOne3234 Well, I'm not a physicist and I will certainly not challenge people who are on their knowledge. But I know that the heavy english warbow is espescially effective for shooting heavy arrows, which other bows, yes, also composite bows, would fail to shoot effectively. This is the big plus of the warbow, in my opinion, in addition to it being cheaper (well, at least 600 years ago yew staves were cheap^^).
Later in the vid., there is an armour test made. Sometimes the arrow penetrates and bounces off, sometimes it goes further into and sticks to it. So this is a short range test and at long range it will certainly not get through, but in regard to the large numbers of archers and maybe 10 arrows hitting per square meter, there are always some hits where the armour is weaker (on the arms, the legs, the neck, etc.). But, as I said, the real impact is the one on the horses.
So of course there were some cavalrymen killed there, but you can not hold the whole charge by just the arrowstorm, the defensive stakes were needed to put up. But you don’t have a chance of standing against a cavalry charge when the ground is too hard to drive the stakes in fast AND the cavalry charges right then when you are still preparing the stakes. And this was the case at Verneuil. It is this what annoys me here, that they don’t give the correct description of the battle.
Erm, they do note that the stakes weren't driven in due to the hardened soil... Of course, on an open field like Verneuil, the cavalry can just as well go around the stakes. What enabled their effective use in earlier battles were natural chokepoints and the french lack of any kind of command authority able to call off the attacks.
Of course the Lombards had a better discipline than the French. But if they had faced a well-prepared English army in their defensive position, the carge could easily have been halted.
Anyways, do you know what the Lombards did after breaking through the line? They continued further to the baggage train and were defeated / driven away ... by archers (who were there as a reserve to guard the baggage and thus better prepared)!
Well, they faced a well-prepared English army. The charge wasn't halted. That's because the English for once weren't able to profit from the absolutely 100% ideal circumstances necessary. Also, the Lombards at the baggage train weren't driven way. They sacked it and then went back to the battlefield only to find a battle lost. The only thing the vaunted longbowmen did at Verneuill was to get trampled and scattered.
Yeah, that’s what the video tells ya. In all other articles I’ve found, it says they were driven off at the baggage train. However, it’s irrelevant. The true reason they were able to break through was because of the stake failure. If the stakes hadn’t been there at Agincourt, the cavalry would also have been able to break through partly, (OK, maybe not, because of he muddy ground).
Agincourt was also cuased by the British moving forward in the night and setting up along a bottleneck flanked by forests. The original french plan was to have their cavalry ride around the british position and flank them to evade the stakes, which was ruined by that move. The French went ahead with a doomed plan anyway because they literally had no actual general in charge of the army.
But at Verneuil, the hard ground was a major advantage, as it was ideal for a charge and unsuitable for the typical defensive formation of the English. If the English had been properly pepared (which they were not, they had just come out of the woods, the stakes were just about to be driven in, etc.), the arrowstorm would have broken the horses, just as it broke the Scots (who were strangely enough not mentioned here, being a major part of the French army).
It wasn't exactly the arrows that broke the scots. And frankly, even when it was successful, you needed advantageous terrain and an enemy dumb enough to attack you despite it. (Again, see the French lack of any real command at Agincourt; they pretty much defeated themselves.)
If they knew about quenching for swords, why did it take so long for them to figure out that it would work for armour... and everything else... as well? Were the italians and germans so much smarter?
they knew it would do it - it was the technical difficulty of producing the large plate sizes that made the development so gradual - for a long time, the best that could be made werent big enough to create something like a breastplate.
took innovations in forging machinery (water-driven bellows etc) to allow the armourers to easily make plate.
@extragunbon Yeah, if an archer could he would shoot the rider off the horse and nab the horse, and that must have been the preferred option when possible.
But in a battle, if you've got the choice between shooting the rider, the arrow bounce off and then the rider kebabs you on a lance, or shoot the horse then stab the rider in the head later on, I think we know what would happen.
@extragunbon It was possible to armour your horse but of course only the richest of the rich could afford to. A knight's full armour would cost the equivalent of a large house, so full armour for a horse would of course be obscenely expensive.
The battle shown in this programme (I think) between the English and the French with Italian mercinaries demonstrates how the archers wouldn't achieve much against armoured horse, but that was I think a bit later on when armour became more available.
Even the English archer's thick bodkin arrowhead, designed specially to defeat full plate armor, was utterly useless against the new Milanese suits. There's nothing more terrifying. If only the Italian knights hadn't started pillaging the English rear positions and actually supported the main French force, this might have been a major French victory.
Hoot1SFD 2 months ago
i really like documentarys like that it is inspirering :)
jgn69 2 months ago
Tempered Steel, so thats how is gonna work
Assaultwarfare 8 months ago
Great video. Thanks for posting, amigo. Ancient and medieval warfare has always been a fascination of mine, and it can be hard to find good documentaries.
Caradepato2 8 months ago 4
That segment showing the armor forging was absolutely AWESOME
CrimsonEmpire 1 year ago
You have to see that the Lombard breastplates were really some of the best that were available at that time, and of course a simple warbow arrow will not get through the best best breastplates. But these were really only available to some few elite men being really rich enough to afford the price. Breastplate and Helmet are the thickest in a full suit but there are weak points on the side, the arms, legs, etc. where arrows can penetrate, so it’s not totally “arrowproof”.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman ...Also, this Lombard plate was really the latest, best and most expensive armour, most people wouldn’t have worn it. At Crecy or Agincourt for example, archery proved most effective against heavy knight cavalry. At Verneuil the archers didn’t have the time to prepare their protecting stakes and the Lombards had the best armour, that was the only reason for the cavalry breaking through...
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman ...What annoys me most is to say that “arrows bounced off the horses’ armour as well”, which is totally wrong, because most horses are not completely protected with armour, if at all. What this documentation also fails to admit is that after breaking through, the Lombards were defeated by the archer reserve that was left behind at the baggage train and that the Scottish allies of the French army –being ill armoured- were completely routed by arrows.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman …and one last thing…the blunt trauma described later in this series also counts for arrows, not only for some poleaxes. A knight being hit in the breastplate by two good, heavy war arrows might easily be knocked off his horse and be trampled to death.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman
Not a chance. With the large horns of the saddles used by medieval cavalry, you're not going to knock the guy off with an arrow.
Magni56 1 year ago
@Magni56
Ok, maybe this is true for elite cavalry like this. I didn't mean to knock him backwards anyway, but the force the arrow strikes with is well hard enough to have him lose his balance and fall off sidewards. The description given here is just exaggerated. There are always weak spots in an armour where arrows will get through, and there were plenty of arrows shot. Also, no horse was armoured that well. arrows hitting the chest or the legs would have made it collapse.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman
Not even that. A glancing blow from a mace will already carry more brute energy than an arrow. Hitting someone in plate in such a way that he gets dazed enough to fall off the saddle would be an increadibly lucky hit. And those plenty of weak spots are actually pretty darn hard to hit and evne harder to hit at an angle good enough.
Magni56 1 year ago
@Magni56
This is not true, sorry. You may speak of a modern arrow shot from a light recurve. But an English war arrow weighting more than 1500 grain and being shot from a bow of 140-150lb of draw weight has an enormous smashing power comparable to that of a medium sledgehammer. And it does not matter wether the spot is hard to hit. some of the many thousands of arrows will just hit there anyway. Arrows hitting the horse will be even more dangerous.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman
Bullshit. Enourmous smashing power, my ass. Throwing a fist-sized stone will have more brute force than any arrow, ever. A storng guy punching you in the face will have more kinetic energy. And yes, it very much does matter. Given the angling and design of medieval armor, plunging fire has no realistic chance to ever hit any of the weakspots at an acceptable angle.
Those "plenty of weakspots" are anything but plenty and evne with massed fire just about impossible to hit.
Magni56 11 months ago
@Magni56
Sorry, but do you even know what you're talking about? How would you be able to prove that an arrow has a poor impact? As I said, an arrow is not always the same. The bows used in the hundred years war were very strong
And believe me (I shoot these bows myself, 96lbs atm), these arrows are very heavy & shot with enormous power. Comparing it to a stone is just ridiculous.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@Magni56
So you definitely know nothing of the force a war arrow has. There was a test made to compare an English warbow to a musket. They did a test on ballistic gel, with the result that the musket ball penetrated about 45cm, the arrow 35cm, which is not much less. And the archer was not even using very heavy arrows. Type here on youtube:”Langbogen gegen Muskete” . Watch both parts and you’ll know what I mean.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@NICKarrowman
Heavier arrows would be bad when comes to penetration, though. And yes, a fist-sized stone thrown by a grown man will carry more total kinetic energy than an arrow. Hell, it will carry more total neergy than a modern anti-materiel rifle. That doesn't mena it will penetrate very well, though, because that energy gets spread over a far larger area.
Magni56 11 months ago
@Magni56
Of course it is true that there were so many other tactical factors in these battles being essential to victory (just arrows without anything else will of course not decide a battle), that's right, but the description in this video plays the role of the archers down extremely (well, I guess things like that can be expected on any TV show). Btw., don't think I'm an Englishman wanting to save National pride, I'm just a passionate warbowman disliking the role of the weapon understated.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@NICKarrowman You are right, those Italian mercenaries are more likely to be porcuepined by something like 50 arrows on the breast plate (Brirtish bowman were trained to fire together as small teams to take out cavs one by one in close range). Actually a lot of Italian got killed that day, but still there were some lucky ones that got through the arrows and became wolves in sheep. The longbow is understated in this programme to make the armor a hero of the battle.
Warlords0602 6 months ago
@Magni56 Concering the discussion on projectile force: Ah, OK, you're talking of kinetic energy, I thought you meant the actual impact, which would have been ridiculously wrong comparison :D.
As for the penetration of heavier arrows: Youre right, a heavy arrow alone will normally travel slower and thus have less impact. Most bows, be it traditional or modern design, are thus not suitable to shoot such an arrow effectively.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@Magni56 But with the English warbow, it’s different. The weapon's design is rather primitive, that’s why many people think of it as inferior to other bows. However, it has one big advantage of any other bow: It’s huge drawweight combined with the bow bending full compass(I hope you know what I mean by this?) is perfect for launching heavy arrows a long distance. And once you are able to get off a heavy arrow with effective speed, its penetration capability is far superior to any lighter arrow.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@NICKarrowman For a given draw length and weight, I find it hard to believe that a slight bend at the middle will alter the energy stored in a bow significantly. (A slight bend in the middle will likely not affect the force-distance plots for the draw, which should be fairly linear for that type of bow. Another way of looking at this is that a very small fraction of the bows energy will be stored in the stiffer center even if it does bend full compass.)
NoOne3234 9 months ago
@NoOne3234 Proponents of Asian bows will say that English war bows are inferior due to shape and material. If we keep the draw length and final force constant, recurving the bow or adding static bridges will cause the slope of the force-distance plot to level out after a certain point in the draw. This results in more energy being stored, but this is countered by a decrease in release efficiency. The shape of the longbow wasn’t inferior to that of its Turkish/mongol counterparts.
NoOne3234 9 months ago
At least not for infantry archers.
NoOne3234 9 months ago
@NoOne3234 Well, I'm not a physicist and I will certainly not challenge people who are on their knowledge. But I know that the heavy english warbow is espescially effective for shooting heavy arrows, which other bows, yes, also composite bows, would fail to shoot effectively. This is the big plus of the warbow, in my opinion, in addition to it being cheaper (well, at least 600 years ago yew staves were cheap^^).
NICKarrowman 9 months ago
@Magni56
Later in the vid., there is an armour test made. Sometimes the arrow penetrates and bounces off, sometimes it goes further into and sticks to it. So this is a short range test and at long range it will certainly not get through, but in regard to the large numbers of archers and maybe 10 arrows hitting per square meter, there are always some hits where the armour is weaker (on the arms, the legs, the neck, etc.). But, as I said, the real impact is the one on the horses.
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@Magni56
So of course there were some cavalrymen killed there, but you can not hold the whole charge by just the arrowstorm, the defensive stakes were needed to put up. But you don’t have a chance of standing against a cavalry charge when the ground is too hard to drive the stakes in fast AND the cavalry charges right then when you are still preparing the stakes. And this was the case at Verneuil. It is this what annoys me here, that they don’t give the correct description of the battle.
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman
Erm, they do note that the stakes weren't driven in due to the hardened soil... Of course, on an open field like Verneuil, the cavalry can just as well go around the stakes. What enabled their effective use in earlier battles were natural chokepoints and the french lack of any kind of command authority able to call off the attacks.
Magni56 1 year ago
@Magni56
Of course the Lombards had a better discipline than the French. But if they had faced a well-prepared English army in their defensive position, the carge could easily have been halted.
Anyways, do you know what the Lombards did after breaking through the line? They continued further to the baggage train and were defeated / driven away ... by archers (who were there as a reserve to guard the baggage and thus better prepared)!
NICKarrowman 1 year ago
@NICKarrowman
Well, they faced a well-prepared English army. The charge wasn't halted. That's because the English for once weren't able to profit from the absolutely 100% ideal circumstances necessary. Also, the Lombards at the baggage train weren't driven way. They sacked it and then went back to the battlefield only to find a battle lost. The only thing the vaunted longbowmen did at Verneuill was to get trampled and scattered.
Magni56 11 months ago
@Magni56
Yeah, that’s what the video tells ya. In all other articles I’ve found, it says they were driven off at the baggage train. However, it’s irrelevant. The true reason they were able to break through was because of the stake failure. If the stakes hadn’t been there at Agincourt, the cavalry would also have been able to break through partly, (OK, maybe not, because of he muddy ground).
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@NICKarrowman
Agincourt was also cuased by the British moving forward in the night and setting up along a bottleneck flanked by forests. The original french plan was to have their cavalry ride around the british position and flank them to evade the stakes, which was ruined by that move. The French went ahead with a doomed plan anyway because they literally had no actual general in charge of the army.
Magni56 11 months ago
@Magni56
But at Verneuil, the hard ground was a major advantage, as it was ideal for a charge and unsuitable for the typical defensive formation of the English. If the English had been properly pepared (which they were not, they had just come out of the woods, the stakes were just about to be driven in, etc.), the arrowstorm would have broken the horses, just as it broke the Scots (who were strangely enough not mentioned here, being a major part of the French army).
NICKarrowman 11 months ago
@NICKarrowman
It wasn't exactly the arrows that broke the scots. And frankly, even when it was successful, you needed advantageous terrain and an enemy dumb enough to attack you despite it. (Again, see the French lack of any real command at Agincourt; they pretty much defeated themselves.)
Magni56 11 months ago
Wow, It looks that beautiful right out of the forge?!
extragunbon 1 year ago
If they knew about quenching for swords, why did it take so long for them to figure out that it would work for armour... and everything else... as well? Were the italians and germans so much smarter?
Oracurax 1 year ago
@Oracurax
they knew it would do it - it was the technical difficulty of producing the large plate sizes that made the development so gradual - for a long time, the best that could be made werent big enough to create something like a breastplate.
took innovations in forging machinery (water-driven bellows etc) to allow the armourers to easily make plate.
suzerain01 1 year ago
"arrow will bounce off that"
he looks so proud of his tempering skills.
Poperol 1 year ago 9
... But it wasn't the people that the archers shot at, their horses were the targets. Can't have a cavalry charge when your horses are pincushions.
666satanification666 1 year ago
@666satanification666 May be, but if you shot the person and left the horse alive, well, guess what? FREE HORSE!
extragunbon 1 year ago
@extragunbon Yeah, if an archer could he would shoot the rider off the horse and nab the horse, and that must have been the preferred option when possible.
But in a battle, if you've got the choice between shooting the rider, the arrow bounce off and then the rider kebabs you on a lance, or shoot the horse then stab the rider in the head later on, I think we know what would happen.
666satanification666 1 year ago
@666satanification666 Horses were also armoured. =?
extragunbon 1 year ago
@extragunbon It was possible to armour your horse but of course only the richest of the rich could afford to. A knight's full armour would cost the equivalent of a large house, so full armour for a horse would of course be obscenely expensive.
The battle shown in this programme (I think) between the English and the French with Italian mercinaries demonstrates how the archers wouldn't achieve much against armoured horse, but that was I think a bit later on when armour became more available.
666satanification666 1 year ago
Why is there only 86 people around the earth who has seen this video!?
Monkaylova 1 year ago
@Monkaylova That's just a little below half of all my subscribers. I'm sure it'll pick up eventually.
Kisk79 1 year ago 3
@Kisk79 Yeah, hopefully. (: Good stuff.
000majorwinters000 1 year ago
@Monkaylova Its around 11,351 at this time. Not bad for a year.
Aidz82 4 months ago