I love this. I love it! I was
not expecting that at al!l Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler
here and today i'm back with a brigandine, a real proper section of brigandine and a fistful
of arrows, and a lockdown longbow behind me, and we're going to shoot the hell out of this
with everything I've got and we're going to see the different arrow types and what they
do, or what they don't do to the brigandine. First of all of course, what is a brigandine?Well
I'll talk you through it; basically this has been the back panel of one here. It's an armoured
jacket much like a bulletproof jacket is now that you're all sort of fairly familiar with.
It's flexible, it's articulated so it's actually relatively comfortable to wear, they were
relatively cheap because the size of the plates was quite small and you could make them and often
were made from recycled armour, so from armour from previous centuries. Very, very popular,
very popular, in Spain and Portugal and Italy. A little less so, but still popular in France and
England and outside of those areas, not so much. But they're made from small plates; now that does
two things, one is it allows the whole thing to articulate and to move so it's actually relatively
flexible, relatively comfortable armour to wear, very often worn as standalone armour, just on
its own, with like an arming doublet underneath, just a very thin padded garment possibly and
you often see it with archers and crossbowmen with maybe a maille shirt or some sort of thicker
fabric armour and again you'll sometimes see it with spaders. You'll sometimes see it with
proper armoured arms or splints, you know, they're just worn in a variety of ways. They're
essentially a fairly, but not necessarily low grade and that's what we're here to find out, but
essentially a fairly low cost armour. Ran from about 1450 through to about 1500, great variety of
of looks and appearances and this one here is sort of a very much ammunition grade, soldiers kind of
a piece. Now what is also worth mentioning about these when we come to the penetration of it, is
this here is made of 1.2 millimeter mild steel. Now they could be made of wrought
they could be made of proper steel but the plate thickness is a very interesting one.
My friend Ash, who is a fantastic brigandine maker has discussed this with me at length, we're going
to come back and look at his work in more detail I'll show you a little bit now as well, but
we're going to come back and do another film with him where we talk all things and everything's
brigandine. Now in discussion with my friend Ash he was saying that he's examined brigandines where
you have adjoining plates where one was 0.8mm and the other was 2mm, basically they're just
recycling the armour with not a lot of care or or thought about what they're doing, they're just
putting the things together to make brigandine panels. So that means that you can't just sit
here and go "oh well it didn't go through here, so it won't go through there" because actually
it may well have done, because the things were so varied. Now part of the story with brigandines
is who made them and that is a great clue to the quality and the skill of the manufacturer behind
them because it's probably different in different countries, but looking at England as far as we
know, they didn't seem to be controlled by a guild, they didn't seem to be controlled by the
armourers guild, which perhaps you would expect and there does seem to be significant
evidence that tailors were very often responsible for their manufacture, but presumably
again not under the taylor's guild work, so they seem to fall outside of guild work, which
means they fall outside of quality standards. Now I'm sure there are going to be better quality
and lower quality, but your average munition grade brigandine could be anywhere between
'really quite good' and 'really not at all', but what we're going to do now is take
this brigandine, mount it on our boss and shoot the hell out of it with a fistful of
arrows. So what I've got here is my standards, so I'll just show you those now. What we've got
here are the arrows i've been using throughout, but you'll also see that I've greased them
really heavily, I'm going to give them every chance we can to get them through,
so we've got a type 7 needle bodkin, a type 9 plate cutter as it's often called, but
short bodkin. A type 16. Now I've got soft ones, mild steel ones, and I've also got some
harder steel ones at about 0.6% percent carbon and right at the bottom we've got an M2,
often known as a Tudor or a Towton bodkin. I'm back at the range with the Lockdown Longbow
and excitingly for me, a new camera after the plumbata fiasco last week when I managed to
kill one of mine, We've got all four arrow types and hopefully again we're not going to kill too
many of them but that is a hard target down there with the brigandine, so I am expecting some to get
'muellered' by this. Now what have we got going on down there? We have got my brigandine sample with
a big orange triangle on the back, that's roughly where the leg of lamb is that is my target zone,
now I've shortened this because I want to get as many arrows as I can on target, so we're down at
about 15 meters something like that, 15 yards. Now for those of you who've seen previous Lockdown
Longbow films, you know that even out at 75 meters we've only lost about 10 or 12 percent of the
speed of the arrow, yeah this is a short range, but it's going to help me a lot with the test.
So we have our brigandine, under that we've got an arming doublet, then we've got the leg of lamb
then we got a bag of sand to simulate torso weight and it's all on a stand which is just a little
bit wibbly wobbly, so it's got a little bit of give in it. First up type seven needle
bodkin let's see what we can do to it...... Oh my goodness me! Well I don't think
there's any argument about that one is there? Right uh needle bodkins.
Brigandine not looking so happy. Yeah I'm not going to do the third one I'm
really not, I think because I don't want to fill the whole place up too much. So next
up and this I'm really interested about, type 16, so the barbed arrow head. Now why this is
really interesting is because these are the only ones that I've really been able to find which have
a reference for having steel in, for a hunting head that makes no sense, maybe they've got a
different role, let's find out? Now one of these, this one, I've marked up with an H because it is
hard, the other two are in mild. Let's find out I love this. I love it! I was
not expecting that at all. Well I think if the hard one does it, well let's
find out if a soft one doesn't. Let's do it. It's getting a bit predictable isn't
it? Right we're going to go on to the M2, the Towton or the Tudor head that it
is often known as, because that is absolutely contemporary with brigandines, so these two
will have faced each other off. Let's find out. Now I think from memory this was the fastest
of the arrow types in my earlier tests it's a few months ago now, but it'll be interesting to
see what this one does, it's also the lightest. They're all at it! Right let's go
again with an M2, lovely stuff! Right now the last of them is the type 9,
the short bodkin, this is often known as the plate cutter, now the supreme irony here
would be if this didn't go in, let's find out. It went in. So we're going to do one more and then we're going
to go and have a look and see how deep that type 9 went in, because it's not enough just to
go through, it's got to go through deeply. And that one didn't. Interesting, let's go see what we got. Now this has got really
interesting, here are our M2s, they penetrated, they stuck in, we saw that, we absolutely saw
that, but they've fallen out, so they were in, not that deeply. We have got a needle bodkin, one
of them fell out, this one is still there, well it's actually got blood from the lamb on it,
but that is how deep, so in context of my finger it's about 50 mm something like that,
50 mm/2 inches, that through the brigandine, into the body underneath. Probably not a killing
shot, but it could have been. This one here is the type 9 and this is the type 16 the bladed one, the
armour-piercing one. So let's just pop that off. Oh goodness, this this is
messy, this is really messy. Oh fantastic, but this is where it gets really
interesting, the type 9 which is what we know as of as a plate cutter very often; short bodkin.
Presumably, we think against armour, that one has gone through the furthest against this plate
here and that's gone through about 70,75 mm, so heading for three inches, two and three
quarter inches, something like that, but for me what's been very interesting has been
this type 16. This is the hard one here, not the soft one that is the hard one and it has gone
through and into some poor fellow's body cavity, I was not expecting that, but it does perhaps
explain the presence of steel on type 16 heads, so that you they're very effective basically,
against at least thin low-grade armour like this and against flesh. Right back to base to conclude.
Oh fabulous. Now the first thing to say is do you remember right at the beginning, I said these
were a fairly low-grade armour very often made of scrap, this plate might be 0.8 mm, this one
might be 2 mm, one over there looks brilliant, this guy's here looks just as brilliant but
actually is rubbish, it's covered in fabric and tin and you can't know, because you don't
know what's underneath, not until you're shot at. So just because the arrows went through this one
brigandine, doesn't mean that all brigandines are useless against arrows and equally it doesn't
mean that just because somebody goes 'oh his is a high end brigandine that it is going to be
proof against arrows' we simply don't know, we simply don't know, but we know that this one
behaved like this. 1.2 mm mild steel plates, covered in tin, five layers of linen inside with
the arming doublet, linen/wool with the arming doublet, and that is what happened. Now if we
go through our arrowheads, interestingly, Will Sherman myself and the other guys actually from
the original "Myth Busting Arrows Vs Armour" film were wondering about the presence
of steel on type 16 arrowheads, it doesn't really make sense on a head
that is against flesh, it's not required, but here it showed without the steel present,
the arrow did not pass through the brigandine, with the steel present it did pass through the
brigandine and it passed through enough to get into somebody's body cavity and with barbs on it,
that is a messy day. The type 9 the short bodkin; that is the first time that I've really seen it
against metal and really work, and it really did, it penetrated more than the others round about
70-75 mm, so nudging on three inches of depth. That is significant, that is something that you
do not want. The needle bodkin, well that went in maybe about 40 mm, small hole. You know if you're
lucky it's not going to do you too much damage. That was one of them, the other one in less don't
forget, but interestingly one of them, definitely you can see from the hole size, this definitely
crossed two plates, so it's penetrating through two plates and it did do it, but only a little
bit. Making a hole is not enough, it's how deeply it goes through, so you can't look at a plate
and 'oh it's made a hole, it's gone through', it means nothing unless it goes through like
that. And then the last one and this surprised me as well actually, was the M2, the Towton and
the Tudor bodkin, it didn't fare very well and the two are absolutely contemporary, brigandines
and M2s were absolutely the arrowheads and the sort of low-grade bulletproof jacket-style
armour that was present at the same time and yet one didn't work that well against the
other, that interested me. The other thing that really must be noted is I was expecting to walk
up there and just find a pile of bits dust and splinters and arrowheads, that's why I put all
that netting around it to try and catch it. Not one arrow broke, not one, that's probably partly
due to the way the brigandine functions as armour, which protects the arrows, but it also protects
the person inside because it progressively gives you, you do a strike in this place and it puts the
load going progressively out from there across the armour, moving all of the plates and distributing
them a little bit, so yes it might make a bigger bruise here but by the time the energy gets here
it's really largely dissipated and that is a very good factor that is not true of things the fabric,
I mean like gambeson so much, but that's a very good factor that protects probably both the wearer
and ironically the arrows with the brigandine. But it's also when we come back full full circle, I
believe, I'm on very sketchy ground here, but I believe there's a modern ballistic armour called
dragon scale, that works exactly in the same way that it has smaller multiple plates rather than
singular big ones, but again write in and tell me, I'm sure you'll let me know if I'm wrong, but it's
just another interesting point for discussion, where brigandines fit into the world of armour.
But anyway thank you very much, it's been for me again, another absolutely fascinating test,
because it just didn't do what I was expecting it to do, I thought it would turn the arrows
pretty much and it really didn't. So brigandines, Lockdown Longbow and four different
arrow types. Thank you very much.
