Knight in battle: How did knights fight on the battlefield?

we've seen the army you where we've seen the weapons you might use we've seen how to control your horse on the battlefield but when that letter from the King has summoned you to the battlefield what you actually do when you're there and how do you prepare for it well let's find out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] we've marked out about 300 yards down the field which is about the length of an effective bow shot yeah maybe people can shoot a little bit further than that and some bows won't go as far but basically 300 yards seems like a good estimate of the effective range of an English longbow so if you are an armored cavalry man with a lance you've got to cross the ground between where they can reach and where you can kill them how long does it take a mounted knight to cross that ground before the Lance can impact on the line of foot well let's find out [Music] [Music] that was I was really interesting gossamer did a fantastic job we covered the 300 yards which is roughly a bow shot from a standing start flatout gallop 15 to 18 seconds I'm not in armor I don't think of it effective very much I don't think would slow her down more than perhaps a second it would mean she can do as many but that's fine when you have to go in a coherent mass of soldiers though and maintain the integrity of the formation keep that line together it's taking about 35 seconds maybe 40 seconds so well over twice as long you as a mounted Knight with a lance charge have to withstand the arrow storm for twice as long as you might expect before you can impact on the foot troops but the point is if you are in a flat-out gallop your impact your charge is not going to be as effective so to have effect on the foot you have to be coherent you have to charge home you have to charge and accelerate towards the enemy that's the only way that the Lance works properly to use an impact weapon properly you need to practice and to practice you need to hit something and one of the I guess classic medieval things we see is a quintain it is simply a target for hitting with a lance from horseback but it has a couple of twists that you might not have noticed it has a weight at the end on a string now we see in the movies that the quintain spins round and if the knight isn't going fast enough the weight hits on the back of the head which is complete rubbish I have tried to be hit on the back of the head by that weight and you just can't do it so they have to fake it in movies in TV all the time it doesn't happen what the weight does is act as a pendulum and act as a resistance lever for your impact because you're training with the Lance you're training to give and receive shock impact through your body through the horse at speed you can't just do that you've got to build up to it so the quintain can be moved around to give you less impact or more impact by moving the center of rotation and moving the weight itself on the end you put a heavier weight on the end it will absorb more energy from you and push back more so it will resemble hitting a man in armor but of course to begin with you don't want to be hitting a man in armor straight away you want to be aiming at the target and doing it gently so you can build up to the big impact and so the quintain is one of those devices that was probably used by a lot of Squires possibly not so much by Knights themselves once they actually had learnt the technique but basically is a graduated way of building up to a full massive impact of a war Lance on a target [Music] the other thing about a quintain is you're training a horse too if you train your horse with an enormous impact is the first thing it experiences it's gonna get scared and it's not going to be a good war horse you build up to it like we all do with sports like we do with all sorts of things you start slowly and gently and you build up and build up and build up if you throw a horse into a battle untrained it'll be useless if you throw a horse at the quintain untrained it'll be useless it'll get scared so you start slowly build up until you can do a full impact charge and you repeat it again and again in the battlefield [Music] one of the weapons we've not talked about much for and night especially when riding a horse is the Lance a Lance started off basically as a spear from horseback and we see in the Bayeux Tapestry basically a footman's spear possibly a little longer can be used couched or it can be used over arm to stab with and these are both very effective techniques because they were used but they developed until the Lance became a bit of a heavier weapon and a longer weapon and was used almost exclusively in the couched position can be used this side and this side but in effect what it is doing is delivering the tip of Steel to the enemy before the enemy can contact you remember on horseback you've got greater speed you've got greater height and theoretically with a lance you've got greater reach it's still a one-shot weapon though because if you hit somebody hard enough with a lance it's gonna dig into them and possibly the Lance is going to break so what you do in that circumstance you either hang around and draw your secondary weapons and flail around you for a bit or which i think is more likely you get out of there and get another lance and then you reset the line and then you have another attack so in a way a knight in armor is a little bit like a missile you shoot it at the enemy it does its job and then you go back you get another one and you shoot it again at the enemy as opposed to a foot soldier who has to stand there and absorb the impacts and basically can't really go back and get another weapon so the lance itself is used in all sorts of complex ways but basically it's a long sharp that would put a spike in here [Music] using a lance properly requires quite a lot of skill it's longer than a footman's spear and you can't really use it two handed from horseback you sort of can but most people don't bother because you're using the reins you might have a shield and it means you're going to have to use it with one hand which means you need to practice with it and I'm pretty sure just back then where they use wooden swords against the pail I'm pretty sure they'd have used wooden or blunted Lance's against the quintain this is nothing more than a pole of wood just like the wooden swords that medieval people use to practice against the pail when they're on foot and using swords rather than using real swords to chop up the wood what you do is use a wooden sword and it develops your own body my hypothesis is that they probably used the same thing when they were doused in practice or Lance using practice because quite frankly white use a solid tip the sharp against a target when you don't need to it's also safer and these things are much cheaper to use so the Lance technique that I'm using is you can brace the locks on your toe to begin with just to hang around and walk around with it that's fairly straightforward when you want to actually take a charge at somebody you have to lift the Lance into an active position which is probably something like this there are saddles with cutouts on them or hooks or cuts on them you brace it like this you can have it on the top of your saddle but basically you're holding the Lance vertically then the Lance comes up underneath your arm and then you lower the Lance down towards the target and it might be on this side which is Wharfside or a might be on this side which is sports side or just a Pleasance but you can see that I'm balancing the lance not really holding it I don't need to hold it in my hand I find I do hold it I tried to keep my thumb out of the way I do hold it but it's effectively braced underneath the arm you squeeze the arm and arguably you don't even need your hand so you can use your hand to guide that's the idea use your hand to guide normally I would have a lance rest which is a hook attached to my caress which makes it even easier to hold alarms like this but you can by squeezing and using your armor the Lance can actually be horizontal anyway when you are aiming a Lance tip a lot of people think the Lance Bob's up and down and it does but that bobbing up and down comes from you the rider and the horse as well but what I find with a metal tip on the end valance the Lance is surprisingly straight and level and if you are a good rider and you balance some of your weight in the stirrups and you lean properly into the saddle and you've got a good horse that Lance Point will stay pretty much on target until you strike it one of these slightly unnerving things about jousting against people is that the one of the easiest parts of the armor to aim for is the ice slot which is of course the place that people can get killed in a joust and one of the reasons why we don't often allow headshots in modern joust is because of the increased danger to the actual face and the head but it is interesting that if you're trying to aim for somebody's head you sort of have to aim I find my eyes going to their eyes and their eye slot and that means the point tends to go to the eye slot again which is very very dangerous indeed [Music] this is a bit more of a sophisticated Lance than the simple polar of a show is using before this has got a shaped hand grip or maybe it's not a hand grip but we do see it used as a hand grip you can hold it like this and couch it and it works quite well you can also use that under your arm so it acts as a kind of grapper acts as a substitute kind of point for fixing the lance to your caress this one uses a false tip this uses a replacement tip on the end depending on what you're actually what kind of style of jousting you're doing just makes it cheaper this particular shape is actually quite bad for your thumb because any impact will drive the lance itself back into your thumb and that thumb will get damaged or broken even so I kind of call these thumb breakers this design and that's why I think they were probably used like that as opposed to that but we see both in the manuscripts so I guess people had their thumbs broken back in the medieval times [Music] one of the things to remember about a mounted knight is that they very rarely fought on their own the idea is you have a massed rank of armed and armoured men attacking in a unit and - to be effective on the battlefield that unit has to be coordinated so would have had to have practiced together and the closer that unit can be to each other the more impact their attack and their charge is going to have on the foot so you would ride knee to knee you would be squished either side so you can't go any way even if you wanted to and all the horses would be stallions of course and they would be really raring to go so the site of a proper charge of nights on the medieval battlefield must have been terrifying the ground would have shaken quite frightening if you're a foot soldier it's quite frightening in reenactment battles let alone when you know they're actually going to try and kill you the crusade era gives us some interesting illustrations of how Knights were seen to fight so they've talked about the Frankish Knights and they talked about a charge of Frankish Knights being able to break the very walls of Byzantium now obviously that's an exaggeration you're not going to charge with Lance's against a solid wall but it shows you the sheer kind of power behind a properly structured Knightly charge there are some interesting illustrations they talked about throwing apples at a group of Frankish Knights so this is the Muslim chroniclers talking about the Frankish Knights on crusade they talked about chucking a bag of apples over the knights which might sound a bit strange but actually commented that not a single apple would hit the ground because they were literally riding knee to knee and the pressure of the horses coming from the side would have created a mass lump of men and horse that would charge at the target in one kind of great clot of muscle so you have to think about it in the movies we see one Knight charging down one foot soldier and going past and riding through the lines but the foot are close together and the Knights that are mounted are close together and they are pushing from the side to create that cohesion because what you need is an enormous amount of energy going into the initial clash your Lance's have a big effect and you disrupt the foot completely once you've done that you might have lost your spear or your Lance you move over to melee weapons and hammers and axes and swords [Music] the medieval night was a major threat on the battlefield of the time they were not invulnerable but they were very very good at what they did when trained properly and led properly there were many challenges they faced though the terrain for one terrain can bring down a mounted Knight because it can be boggy foot soldiers properly trained can coordinate and do a lot of damage and there are more foot soldiers than there are mounted Knights but the most deadly thing that a knight would face was ranged weapons the crossbow and for hundreds of years the English longbow this nemesis of the armored Knight brought down thousands of knights in its time let's find out more about that next time thanks for watching please like and subscribe don't forget to use that notification button and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 820,508

Keywords: history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, horse, lance, joust, quintain, combat, archer, mount and blade, bannerlord, lord of the rings

Id: 5962hQXCLQ4

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018