Medieval battle axe, the weapon of a thug or a knight? (testing on target)

this is a 14th century battle-ax I'm going to use it from horseback at speed against a human head size target [Music] [Music] this is a reproduction 14th century battle-ax made for me by tour of Tours Forge so you could argue I've had a Viking make this battle ax you may also recognize it from a video that scholar gladiatorial has done Matt Easton did a piece on this type of axe and it kind of inspired me because one of the things that I think that's interesting about it and it is copied from a museum example but one of the things that's interesting about it is the long haft and for me that means that this was used from horseback now I'm in an ideal position I'm gonna go and get on a horse and actually use this and see how it goes but a couple of things about battle axes that you may or may not know about battle axes are quite different from axes used to chop wood I mean they're similar shape perhaps they have some differences and one of the key things is the thickness of the blade now the very first battle axes were Dane axes and great axes of that sort actually have an incredibly thin almost knife like main blade and that means all the weight is in the end but it means that it would be really quite bad to chop wood you you really wouldn't want to use wear it against wood in later periods they actually come back and they come back in a slightly different form they come back a little bit thicker and this is perhaps because they're being used against people who are in more armor basically it's much harder to do any kind of damage against somebody who's covered in plate or male or heavy padding than it is to get somebody who just doesn't have any armor at all and the very earliest axes the Dane axes have a different shape often they're a bit bigger than this not much bigger and certainly not very heavy either but they often don't have this rear spike this rear spike comes in around the 14th late 13th early 14th century as far as I'm aware and the key thing about spikes like this in my opinion is that they are ideal for getting through mail and plate armor a spike in itself if it hits somebody who's unarmored it can go in deep and do quite a lot of damage it's not very killing in fact with enough adrenaline you can get a spike or nail or something like that into a non-essential part of your body and you won't even notice it so you need a blade to do enough damage to actually take somebody down but against armor any kind of armor of substance any kind of plate a decent quality male the blade itself is going to spread the impact over too much of an area and it's basically not going to do anything I mean it might do a little bit it might do bruising damage underneath but again these are not particularly heavy bludgeoning weapons so this one is just under a kilo in weight even with this long haft what you really need if you're going to do damage through armor is you need a spike and so arguably this is partly a transitional weapon this could be used against unarmored people or against people in armor it with equal devastation you may also if you see some of my other videos one about the Horseman's pick in particular you may notice that it's actually very similar to the spike on the end of this in fact what they do with the Horseman's pick is they largely get rid of the blade part of it get rid of the axe part and just say well let's just stick with the the beak the nail shaped spike on the end so Horseman's pick is arguably a derivation of this where you just get rid of the blade part and you're left with the spike part which is interesting because Horseman's pick comes in a bit later in history it comes in around the mid 15th century so another 50 60 maybe 70 years after this was introduced and armor and weapons develop in lockstep better armor needs different weapons so the battle axe would have been very familiar to those people in the early medieval period perhaps less so for those people in the middle of the medieval period and then towards the end of the medieval period axes make a comeback you may notice that the haft of this axe is quite long so really for a hand axe it's probably a little too long doesn't mean you can't use it on foot and of course you can you can basically crab up the haft a little bit if you wanted to have a bit more control but from horseback you want a longer swing because you're going to be hitting targets further away from you perhaps and rather controversial e I've added a lanyard now lanyards and weapons used from horseback are actually in the medieval record they're quite unusual to see in fact I don't know of any but a lot of people say well what happens if you drop the weapon from horseback well the answer is you lose it or you go and get another one but I wanted to experiment with a lanyard like this now problem that is if you put your hand through the lanyard like this and hold the axe the axe catches on something you can be pulled off your horse completely you can be pulled out of the saddle as the axe is embedded in a target that is moving in the wrong direction so it's potentially quite dangerous especially if it's tightened on your wrist so there is a way of using a lanyard in your hand which is used today in polo you have a lanyard on the end of the polo mallet and this is how you use a lanyard in polo because in polo you have exactly the same problem your mallet can get caught on the v not the enemy but the opponent in play can get hooked up on a part of her horse or it can get hooked up on parts of another player and what what is done is you put your thumb through the lanyard and it goes around the back of your hand and then you hold the haft of the in polo in the mallet or in this case the the war weapon like that and what this does is if the weapon is dragged out of your hand it gives you a moment to grab on but it won't actually pull you out of the saddle it will get released because get pulled off your thumb so this is an interesting technique that I wanted to try to see whether it would work with an axe or war axe like this we have no evidence whatsoever that like this was used and I think it's unlikely because most people on horseback were wealthy they'd have had lots of spare weapons and quite frankly that I've had people to pick up a weapon or pass them a new one so all the evidence is that they didn't use a lanyard like this but I thought it was kind of a fun idea to try right enough talking let's go get on the horse and chop some targets this is Talos he is an Andalusian shy across which is an unusual combination I call a king's Lander this is the battle axe that I was talking about earlier and you could see that the length of the haft of the battle axe gives me a certain amount of reach without necessarily leaning over and obviously you spin it round to use the pick part of it the spike part I'm going to use the edge of it on the target shortly but you could see the strike is this way or on this side you can strike this way there are four hand strikes and there are backhand strikes as well now if you are going in that direction and you strike this way that's going to add the speed of the horse to the speed of the impact the boy if you strike backwards you're going to be subtracting the speed of the horse going forwards Tellis is obviously getting a bit bored with me he wants me to actually do something now so this this side is perhaps a little bit more precise this side you've got exactly the same you've got your you know forehand which is a bit awkward you've got to come round and strike and you'll notice my leg tends to turn because I've got to move my hips as well a little bit to strike that way but you could strike this side or this side as usual there's a quarter that I can't really get to very well which is off my left-hand side that's the dangerous bit you don't want anybody in that quarter there but everywhere else you can hit reasonably well so I'm going to just do this at some speed and just go gently use the weight of the axe itself to do the strike not hit too hard because one of the problems with a sharp weapon like this is the follow-through and you have to be very very careful it's very easy to get carried away with a sharp like this and follow through too far so I've got to be super careful I'm going to strike downwards and keep it as far away from Telos as possible while I hit the target good boy I'm also going to use the lanyard as you can see you wrap it around your thumb and you hold it like this so this gives you some control over the the axe itself when you're striking so I'll try that now now I'm going to talk a little bit about the targets because the targets might look like a human head but they won't react like a human head at all what I've used is very cheap polystyrene I think they're probably hats models or wig models or something like that they're quite cheap but they do give you an idea of a human head and face but it won't react at all like human skull or it's not ballistic gel or anything like that at all so this isn't a test of what the weapon can do it's more just a demonstration of the kind of strike that one might make it's about my head height there so that is the height of a foot soldier and remember sometimes when you are on a horse and you're in a cavalry situation you might be attacking foot that have broken so they'll be running away so they might have their faces away from you or you might be crushing into them as they panic the stand there and there's big gaps in there in their ranks and you ride past them and strike down so let's just show you one of those for fun with a real battle axe from the 14th century or [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so my brief experience with the war axe is that it's actually quite a complex weapon to use if you get the angles slightly wrong it bounces off polystyrene I suppose I haven't used to pick yet but also it's also quite an intimidating weapon to actually use because when you're using the blade you have the pic pointing straight back at you which when you're sort of using small blows is actually coming quite close to your head which is not a particularly pleasant thing to experience I suppose with a lot more practice you wouldn't worry about it at all but but it was a bit intimidating I also find the lanyard is very awkward to use so maybe it needs to be shortened or made with more flexible material or I don't know it's not quite working as well as I thought it would do without with a polo with equivalent on polo mallet but all in all it's actually it's quite a technical weapon you sort of think of an axe as a bit of a brutish weapon which is used by thugs and you know and and is much less sophisticated than a sword well in my brief experience with it it's exactly the opposite I actually think that acts like this takes considerable amount of skill to use properly and of course if you get the edge alignment wrong it doesn't do anything it becomes quite a weak Club and you've really got to kind of calculate where the blow is going to go because you've actually got a very narrow piece of blade or point to actually strike the target so it's quite easy to miss potentially whereas with the sword if you miss the the percussion point the sweet point of the of the sword you're still going to hit something because it's a long bar of metal but with this it's a very short bar of metal so I think we ought to consider axes especially when used from horseback to actually be expert weapons I think spear Lance and a sword are actually all marginally easier to use well than a battle axe that's quite an interesting observation I think perhaps definitely not a brutish primitive weapon whatsoever [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 322,766

Keywords: documentary, history, history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, Battle axe, Mounted combat, Mount and blade bannerlord, Lord of the rings, Witcher, Game of thrones, Horse, Medieval, fantasy, dnd, dungeons and dragons, historical, hema, historical european martial arts, mount and blade, video, game, roleplaying, role playing, rpg, lord of the rings, adventure, adventurer

Id: cyLpRLgD77A

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020