Late Medieval Shields: I was WRONG!

let's talk about late medieval knights using Shields how I was wrong and how someone else was wrong hi folks Matt Eaton here scholar gladiatory now as many of you know I recently attended the tuxbury Battle of Tewkesbury reenactment event which is absolutely spectacular I had a wonderful time with my friends drak and Lloyd and Gavin and all of the other people who were there on the team protecting the Duke of Gloucester as part of his bodyguard it was all jolly good fun now I'm actually here to talk about shields now many of you will know that in the run-up to this I had an intention to take the field with arming sword and shield and for those purposes I put my yorkist son on my shield I put a boss on it for reasons I come to in a second and my intention was to take the field with sword and shield but it didn't happen because I learned and this is one of the great things so I was wrong about a few things but I also learned a few things and that's the really important part here the important part is that I learned very very quickly that in my full harness my harness did not work with the shield for one very simple reason the strapping Arrangement now stupidly perhaps I've not really tested this shield with my particular armor now my armor is uh Italian export it's based on a German painting of about 1460 but essentially it's a sort of typical Italian what some people call Milanese but it's just a generic Italian style of armor of around 1460. um if not in terms of all the decoration in terms of the way it functions and although I have symmetrical um lower arms my van braces are symmetrical I do have fairly notable um kind of uh counters as they're called okay so elbow protection wings that come up here and moreover I use fairly typical Italian style gauntlets here now I had experimented with putting this onto my gauntleted arm but what I had not thought to do was experimenting with putting it onto my fully plated harnessed arm and I very quickly found that whilst I can with preparation get my gauntleted hand in here and I can indeed get it through here particularly if I undo the strap and then do it up the problem is that strap really collided with the counter on my elbow on my arm now that's a kind of moderately interesting fact I suppose and it did mean that I couldn't use my shield which I was a bit gutted about um and I actually went on the field with a long sword in the end and I had great fun with a long sword um but it did get me to thinking so in the run-up to two spray the reason that I had fitted a boss on my shield is because I had seen lots of heater Shields with bosses on right we're going to come back to that part point in a minute but I'm gonna go on a tangent so I was recently at an event I shouldn't name it where the commentator said in this period the late 15th century Knights no longer used Shields except for in the joust and they were still used in the joust and they were used as a Target in the joust but that was the only time that they used them wrong wrong stop stop spreading this myth okay so you just go to any medieval manuscripts basically and you will find there are fully armored Knights or men at Arms using Shields of various sorts and I've made a previous video about this so in the late 15th century in fact all the way into the 16th century there were numerous types of shields being used perhaps most famously in this period large paverses so large rectangular usually rectangular Shields that could be well actually they could be small or big there were different types some of them have a spike at the bottom and they're usually gripped on a bar on the back in the hand remember that we'll come back to that and on the type of Shield that was very popular was a Buckler and obviously a buckler is a small small shade I've got one here there we go small Shield that is gripped in the fist okay so no problems there we can easily get a buckler or a pelvis into the hand but we know that strap shields were still also used we see them particularly used by Italian infantry the Rotella which became very popular in the 16th century so we see the Rotella used and we do still see heater Shields use sometimes you can see what's on the back and they have n arms as they're called or straps like this however something which I found curious is that when we look at late 15th century sources we see an increasing presence of bosses now many people would think of bosses as something we find on earlier periods of shield in the Viking era you know the the early medieval period we find bosses and they are boss script now I happen to have because I'm taking them to an event with me a Roman scoot him here and everyone will know that a Roman scooter is gripped in the boss that's the whole point of the boss your hand goes inside it there's a handle at the back and the boss protects your hand and provides a pivot point and everything else it's the strongest part of the shield so boss grip Shields had been around since Antiquity okay for literally thousands of years and in fact boss grip Shields probably predate any type of strap shield we do find some strap shields in the ancient period in Roman era but generally most shields in the green Greek and Roman periods are boss script it's come coming back to here I very quickly started to formulate a theory okay in the late medieval period you've now got full plate harness and if you're a knight using a shield it becomes far easier for you to get or get off or re-get a shield that is not strapped and this should have been blindingly obvious but actually I had to sort of experience it for myself for it to really to cement in my brain just how profound that is the fact that we start to see so many bosses appearing even on nightly heater Shields of the late 15th century I think probably indicates that because of plate armor and it wasn't a plate armor had made Shields obsolete shields were still years because of plate armor because of having arm harness on with counters with pauldrons with gauntlets strap Shields are now a complete pain in the butt to get on get off drop them on the ground pick them back up again or pick up if you see it lying on the ground whereas a boss grip Shield is frankly quite easy so much so that even a Roman scutum can easily be held even with a late 15th century goldenstone and if I had my full harness on with pauldrons and couches and everything else I've still got no problem holding a Roman scutum it doesn't get in the way at all I can even quite quickly and easily get my hand out and that's also true of the pavis the pavis actually doesn't have a horizontal grip it has a vertical grip usually but these types of Shields and bucklers are easy to grip if you're in full plate harness and interestingly when we see the strap shields for example the Rotella they're normally being used not always but they're normally being used by lightly equipped soldiers who aren't wearing plate harness on their arms so it's not an issue so there we go sometimes we experiment and that's one of the great things about reenactment and this is one of the reasons is there are many other reasons but this is one of the reasons why I love doing reenactment as well as Hema because sometimes we can test out equipment in humor and it's a sort of perfect scenario but when you actually put all the gear on the period gear and going into a reenactment context or have to walk around all day in that gear we'll have to see up or down or fighting melees in that kind of gear you get insights into the equipment which you don't usually get in a Hema setting so quite simply this Shield is kind of obsolete to me right now um I'm quite happy with the front of it if not necessarily the the but I'm certainly happy with the fitting of the boss but I think it needs proper gilding um but what I'm gonna do is take off the straps off the back or rather I might leave the straps there actually because they're not actually getting in the way but I might take the pad off and fit a grip on the back so this can be used as a boss grip shield and I should also add as well I think a lot of these late 15th century Shields which have a boss on are boss gripped for all the reasons that I've just said but moreover if you actually look at the art very often when people are shown using them they're being held quite far from the body implying a bus gripped position instead of a strapped position which is much closer to the body so there we go you live and you learn um I was wrong in that um that I made the wrong decision to keep a strap shield with my particular armor it might work with other sorts of armor but with my particular arm harness it didn't work at all and certainly that position of straps didn't work but equally other people are also wrong about saying that Shields weren't being used in the age of plate armor in the late 15th century or the early 16th century shields were still being used absolutely loads in battles in sieges in all sorts of skirmishing in the fencing rooms in fencing cells all different types of Buckler and medium-sized Shield morozo shows the use of big shields medium Shields and small Shields two different types of buckler absolutely between 1450 and 1550 shields were used an absolute butt load and let's not forget that the Mary Rose which sank in 1545 even has gun shields on it maybe I'll talk about gun shields in a future video I hope this has been thought provoking and potentially even useful for some of you I am Matt Easton and I will continue to be and hopefully I'll see you back on the channel really soon cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our Facebook a like And subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 78,433

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Id: 0fKIE1HKIcs

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023