Dane Axes and Housecarls

[Music] Matt Easton here scholar gladiatori a--so I'm gonna talk about something that I'm not holding and that's because I don't have one but I'm also going to talk about that so what am i holding well as you know from a previous video this is an Indo Persian Horseman's axe essentially okay so it's a heavy almost mace like axe for hanging from the saddle bow of war horse and smacking people predominantly in armor really hard and very effective weapon is for that purpose but if we go back a few centuries in fact roughly about eight centuries we get to the Viking area now I know area era I know that all of you love Vikings and you know what is well what is Viking blah blah blah well you know all that okay we're not going to talk about Vikings in this video but there was a particular type of Troop that was used in anglo-saxon England called the house calls now the house cars or hoose girls as it probably originally more closely pronounced are essentially household bodyguards now a common I won't say misconception but a common belief about the house cars or who skulls is that they were always equipped with a two-handed axe now there is some evidence in fact that her scars or house guard household bodyguards did not always have these two-handed axes it is my belief in fact that's some of the Huff scars actually didn't necessarily have access and probably had spear and shield the normal combination of the period but I'm not going to go into that too much because it's topic there isn't there isn't a lot of source material we can actually debate this over so I'm not worried about that too much but what I really want to talk about and their axis now we definitely know that in the ten hundreds in particularly in England but obviously in Scandinavia as well and probably perhaps in freesias and perhaps Normandy there was a fashion for starting to use large two-handed axes now first of all why might people be using two-handed axes at that time well I think there's a number of reasons involved if we look at the Bayeux Tapestry witch Lloyd Lindy Bay she's done a fantastic video on recently if you haven't watched that yet I suggest you go and watch it but something we can definitely glean from the Bayeux Tapestry is that - and in fact the texts as well not just the tapestry but the text related to the Battle of Hastings is that the two-handed axe was a fearsome weapon against cavalry now in the Norman era what the Normans were famous for of course was their use of cavalry not only cavalry and we shouldn't sort of obsess on the cavalry too much because they did of course use archers cavalry and infantry' as well hand-to-hand combat infantry and so they were a quite rounded force and really frankly if we frankly alone frankly if we look at Viking an Anglican Viking skeleton avian and Anglo Saxon armies of the period we could argue that actually they weren't very rounded they were still fighting in a shield wall they weren't probably using any cavalry if they used archers it wasn't in any great numbers or in any great coordinated tactical way so by and large the Anglo Saxons probably liked their Germanic ancestors and indeed like the Scandinavians had a there were pretty much what I would call a one-trick pony and so in other words they had they developed a very good shield wall system probably with mixed missile weapons mixed into the shield wall few archers a few people throwing and angles or javelins spears of other kinds perhaps and throwing axes perhaps and throwing maces we see a throwing mace on the bear tapestry but in the 11th century this new troop type comes along using great big two-handed axis now the reason I'm not holding one of those two-handed axes is I don't own one but it is something that I really want now this is where I'm gonna diverge slightly from the main topic and say if you are watching this video and you are able to make a good replica of a Viking it late Viking era Battle of Hastings era two-handed axe and I'll detail what I consider a good one in a minute please get in contact with me because I am actually interested in obtaining one and of course anything that you know if I find someone who is able to make what I'm looking for then of course your product will get good product placement and exposure and be shown on this channel and so hopefully you know it will be a mutually beneficial but so primarily what I'm looking for is a so-called de nax okay so I'm going to address the term I've avoided it so far in this video the term de nax so a modern usage and they don't look like this incidentally I'm just holding an axe because it was the first axe that came to hand the Dane axe is a weapon that is referred to a lot in modern sources now historically I don't believe there's any historical period source which refers to a Dane axe there may possibly be a reference somewhere that talks about a Danish axe but that doesn't necessarily mean it's talking about a large two-handed axe now what's different about a so-called Dane axe or house Karl axe what's different about that compared to other axes well there are a few things which are very specific about the axe but overall and this is that this is why I found it very hard to find anyone who can make me a replica they're really light okay so hopefully while I'm talking here you will be getting some visuals from the Museum of London now we have various so called Dane axes or late Viking era two-handed axes surviving from different places okay the summer scale of Scandinavia there's some in different parts of Britain but in my view the most important find of these weapons are these these few axes that we have in the Museum of London now the reason why they're so important is because they come from one context okay there's my word my favorite now they come from one context almost certainly an attack on one of the bridges over the Thames perhaps the original wooden London Bridge by by Vikings by Viking raiders I think we can call them Vikings definitely who were attacking London now of course Scandinavian it's governor evenings in this were attacking lots of parts of Britain but they did tackle on many many times they took London various points and they failed to take London at various points now the reason that the context of these axes in the Museum of London is so interesting is because they all come together so first of all you have an assemblage of axes and spear heads swords and a grappling hook and various other things you have an assemblage of weapons which come together which are related that is they date to the same period and they come probably from the same group of people I suppose you could argue that theoretically some of them could be from the English and some of them could be from the Vikings who were probably Danes for the most part you could argue that but I think given the proximity that they were all found to each other it's more likely that a bunch of guys went over a bull overboard or a ship got rolled over or perhaps sank I don't know or got fire on it and people had to jump off this type of thing and for some reason I suspect that most of those weapons that have been found in that grouping are probably from either one side or the other and I would say at this date probably from the Danes rather than the English now one thing we should mention at that point is the English or Anglo Saxon Anglo Saxon housecarls which incidentally later on when we get the Varangian guard in the Byzantine Empire we know for a fact that some of the Varangian guard the original Varangian guard were made up of Vikings Viking mercenaries but in the 11th century after the Battle of Hastings and I believe possibly before it as well we know that English Anglo Saxons went and joined the Varangian guard so it's interesting you have a cultural link there and one of the reasons for this is because the house cars themselves were a leftover from the reign of King Canute now King Canute conquered England and he brought with him lots of Danish nests essentially lots of bacon and Lego and so but one of the things he brought with him that was Danish was the house cars now the house cars wildung these big two-handed axes were a Danish institution but after Canute and his sons had died off and we returned to English Kings Edward the Confessor they kept this Danish institution they kept the house cars but the house cars that we see on the Bayeux Tapestry whilst they are almost certainly most of them Englishmen they are anglo-saxons they are themselves a Danish institution so I po I suppose you could if you want to look at the later period you could look at something like the Kings German Legion or something like this you know that we get essentially a foreign King the foreign King brings in a foreign establishment and the foreign King dies off or gets replaced but the foreign establishment stays ok stays part of the English in this case English military so the house cars are very very interesting and there's so much more that could be said about them I might do a dedicated video about them one day when I know more myself but it is a topic which you could get very in-depth at out depth of map but I really want to focus on these axes so these axes were of a probably a Danish or should we say Scandinavian type they were brought to England and then they established themselves in England such that by the time that William the bastard or William of Normandy invaded the 2-handed danish style ax had become an english two-handed axe it become very much an english institution but and again this comes back to why i have found it difficult to commission someone to make one I did actually commissioned someone to make one of these axes for me and after a few months he concluded that he couldn't really make a good enough replica and he was completely upfront about it and gave me my money back and that's absolutely fine I'd rather someone did that then you know and kind of make a crap replica or whatever now the reason they're so difficult is they're light okay so when you've got such a large blade like this one of the reasons that the dana axe is so nimble is that the blade is very thin so these examples in the Museum of London the blade around here is generally speaking really really flat and thin obviously they have to have a certain amount of meat a certain amount of Steel around the socket but when you get into the blade it essentially has lots of distal taper so it becomes very very thin around here and actually if we look at some of the examples in the Museum of London they are so thin that when they've been in the ground and they've rusted they've actually rusted through and it's conspicuous that they have rusted through in the flat of the blade where they're thinnest so think about it a bit like a fuller in a sword blade it's essentially a hollowed out region of the weapon where you don't need it to be thick because you've got a broad blade there you've got a nice amount of width it doesn't need to be thick and heavy and they obviously valued speed and lightness over hitting power if you made it thicker like a pole axe then indeed you probably hit harder but it wouldn't cut as well and bear in mind there's a lot of the opponents of the people using these axes some of them would have had male shirts [ __ ] Burke's Hallberg Ian's and some of them wouldn't some of them wouldn't have had any armor at all so and even if someone was wearing a male shirt if you were using one of these to be two-handed axes it's quite possible you would have aimed at their face at their legs at their arms and all the bits that basically weren't covered with bits of bits of mail so they seemed to a prioritized a long cutting edge and a large head over a concentration of mass okay but the other thing that says well is if you want a cutting edge of a certain length if you made it really really huge it would just be really really heavy and cumbersome pole axes have relatively small heads but they are tend to be quite thick but there is one final detail of these axes in the Museum of London which I think is really really interesting and that is that whilst the blade is really really thin very often they get thicker just before the edge so I just put down this this one for a second so if you imagine you've got the socket here okay and the socket goes down to being really really thin blade so you've got a thin sheet of you know a few millimeters what probably about three three millimeters thick and the main blade but then when you get to the edge if you kept it that thin you would end up if this was really wafer thin you would end up with a very very fragile edge here generally sweet but these axes not all of them but most of them or let's say a lot of them then start to get thicker again just before the edge and then they have a bevel okay so thin thin thin thicken out and then bevel for the edge so what they've done is they've essentially created a diamond sectioned edge on the edge of a flat blade and what is also conspicuous about this as well is that for the most part we're probably looking at a low-carbon steel blade here with a high carbon steel edge diamond edge Forge welded on this has many advantages it means that you've got a shock absorbent body here it's less likely to crack less like it's just snap break because it's softer and then you've got a very hard edge which you can heat treat and essentially edge quench like you would do with a Japanese sword or something like that or even some till was so you have a very hard edge with a softer back brilliant means you can really concentrate on having a soft almost brittle edge bound to a softer shock absorbing back but not only that it's economical because it means your best steel which is very expensive is retained only for the edge and not wasted where you don't need it frankly now what is interesting and again we come back to why this assemblage in the Museum of London is so important so interesting is that not all of the axe blades are the same so for start for the examples in the Museum of London vary through three basic ways number one they vary in their shape and size okay and so that's a fairly simple way to vary secondly they vary slightly in their sockets all of their sockets are slightly different from each other and at least one of them and I think perhaps to have brass kind of sleeves that go inside the iron socket but the third way is how they vary on the edge and what's interesting is if you look across not just the Museum of London ones but if you look across all of the ones surviving from all over Europe not all of them have this reinforced diamond section edge some of them do indeed just go down to a thin edge so what we're looking at here is some is it personal preference or different types of axe for different types of I get we don't really know and just the same as you get different types of swords for different contexts for different environments for fighting different types of opponent the sword you pick for fighting an armor plate armor it's very different to the type of sword you'd pick for fighting in North Africa against lightly armored opponents so an equally imperiaz that changes so period it changes area it changes and yet within the same period in the same part of Europe we find - you could say roughly two types of these large Dayne acts some have reinforced edges and some don't anyway to finish up they're really to say that either these two-handed axes are fascinating weapons they did continue on into two-handed axes later they didn't just disappear after the Battle of Hastings two-handed axes that are clearly an evolution or a continuation of these two-handed axes did continue well into the 13th so you could even say the 14th century you could even say that later 15th century types of acts are ultimately evolved from them but definitely things that were relatively similar to Danish axes or half scale axes continued into the 12th 13th century and they're very particular design very specialized very skillfully made and if anybody out there is watching this video or you know someone who would like to watch this video who thinks that you might like to have a go at trying to reconstruct I'm specifically looking for a replica of one of the Museum of London axes for which I can get measurements and it must have a very thin distally tapered body and then a reinforced edge at the front where it's so it thickens up slightly before it comes to a sharp edge and I'm very interested in trying to get one of these reconstructed so that I can use it for test cutting and just as a nice thing to have and so I can make more videos about them as well Bennu I hope this has been somewhat interesting and I will see you for the next video cheers folks thanks for watching please subscribe we have extra videos on patreon and you can follow us on Facebook

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 202,710

Keywords: Dane Axe, Housecarl, Huscarl, Viking, Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon, Cnut, battle axe, axe

Id: -mjjrCQiuO0

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2017