This is getting even more interesting
now actually, this is not what I would expect at all. Hi it's Tod from Tod's
Workshop and Tod Cutler here, and today we're gonna have a look at these three
types of medieval crossbow bolt and we are going to shoot them at these
three types of medieval armor from the year 1250, there abouts, so before the
advent of plate armour. This is not an exhaustive test, it is not going to give
us all the answers we need about any of this, but it's just going to give us an
indication and it's something that I'm interested in. I want to know how these
bolts fare against this kind of armour. The bow I've chosen here is a faux
composite so this is actually steel clad with wood it is not a real composite bow,
but the reason I've chosen this look for it, is it's based on an image from the siege
Lincoln Fair in 1217. The bow to me looks like a composite, it was probably spanned
with a spanning belt by a professional crossbowmen, that is not me, so I've made the assumption he can draw a lot more than I can.... so I'm cheating. This is a 350 pound draw weight bow, I am spanning it with the goats foot lever, he probably
would have used a belt. Then we have the maille and the jack. The maille is a
riveted link male around about 10 mm or 3/8 an inch links maybe as good as some
medieval maille, maybe worse, don't really know. It'll be better than some, worse than others. It's the maille that I've got. That would be worn over a garment, because
otherwise it's hellishly uncomfortable, but the garment itself is not armour,
not in its own right. So that's just a five layer wool and canvas jack.
Then we look at the gambeson here. We have late 15th century ordinance that
specifies how is made. Doe skin over the top, 30 odd layers of a soft washed linen.
That is a 15th century source, 250 years out-of-date, but presumably, they did
something similar. It's the closest we've got. This is made of cotton wadding, loose cotton wadding, raw cotton and then a sheet a fabric top and bottom and the
whole lot sewn together with with a linen thread. I might be butchering
this completely, but I believe that Arabic for cotton is
'al qatn' and this is called an aketon and there is an assumption, I think it's
a general assumption, that the two words are related and that these were stuffed
with raw cotton. Raw cotton is this stuff here so it's just the cotton fibers.
That's just built up and then just sewn down in channels and what you end up
with is, you know, a reasonably supple definitely sword proof in terms of
cutting, stabbing not so sure and again is it puncture proof from a bolt? Don't
know. Let's find out? Talking through the bolts. We have got on your right hand
side, a short bodkin, in the middle we've got a barbed flesh cutting head and on
the left-hand side we have got a needle bodkin. My understanding of the needle
bodkin is that it is effective against maille and it is effective against fabric.
That's really what I want to find out today. Then we have the barbed head, this is a hunting head but it's also a head for war, so it's very effective against
flesh obviously you you can't pull it out so easily. But also it should be able
to go through fabric relatively well. The last one that we're going to be
looking at is the short bodkin. Now I've picked the year of 1250, the reason for
that is that plate armor starts to come in after that and things change again,
but the thing is, let's say we pick the year 1400, people will still be
wearing simple maille and padded garments so they will be facing bolts like this
with these garments so it's just to see how this would fare in that situation. My
experiment today is not going to be exhaustive, it can't be, there's so much
we don't know I've had to make so many assumptions. So the armour we don't really know about we don't know quite how the the aketon was constructed, we don't
know quite how the gambeson or the maille and its undergarment was constructed we don't know the power of the bow. We do pretty much know the shape of the heads
and that really is about it. But what this will do will give us a comparator
of one bolt head type to another bolt head type and what they do. Whether this
is exactly how they would have performed 700,800 years ago? Well we simply don't
know. Does it give us an indicator of what's
going on? Well hopefully yes it will. So we're gonna go shoot this stuff now and
if you're interested in any of this this is available on my websites.
Let's go. First up we'll shoot the armour piercing head. Just loading up with my
goats foot. Straight off. Next up flesh cutter I
think. Well that was straight in. I guess the
armour piercer, the plate cutter would still give you some broken ribs or
something though. Now for the needle bodkin so this is the one specifically
designed against this armour and again straight in. So let's go and have a look
at those. This is interesting and not exactly what I would expect. So this was
the aketon sample, now this is the needle bodkin here which has
penetrated around about three inches/75 millimeters something like that maybe a
little bit more. That is going to be into a torso, probably a fatal wound
ultimately, maybe not then, but in the next day, two day. But the flesh cutter
here, let's have a look how deep that is because that has gone in significantly
deeper than.....significantly deeper .....okay so that went all the way
through the back. That went in around about....that deep, so about four inches
something like that. A hundred mm so 100 mm into your torso not this is
ballistic gel but a hundred mil into your torso is definitely going to be
nasty. But against the aketon, the flesh cutter was a better performer than
the needle bodkin, the short bodkin, the plate cutter just bounced straight
off. Next up we're going to shoot the gambeson see how it fares with these
three bolts again so let's go for it. Same bow. Same bolts. Different armour. So this time it's the gambeson. Plate
cutter first again. Again it bounced straight off, broken ribs I think. So flesh arrow again.... straight in. I was
hoping it would be defeated by that. Then the last is the needle bodkin and
again that was in. This is getting even more interesting now, actually this is
not what I would expect at all. So here is where the plate cutter hit, it hasn't
even broken the outside of the surface so this is without a doubt proof against
plate cutting heads. But here is the needle bodkin which I
thought was supposed to be very good against fabric armour, but look at it. So
if I just pull that oh.... it's tough... blimey this is tough. There we go.
What you've got there is 30 mm/inch and a quarter
that's the penetration. So actually through the other side of that was
probably only about here maybe an inch. So this would be a survivable wound with
that. But then let's come down have a look at this. This is the flesh arrow
again, the flesh bolt. I was not expecting it to fare so well. So if we have a look
at this now, this is 40-45 millimetres/ inch and a half in and the barbs are now
inside your body as well, so this is really going to mess your day up, but what's interesting is; I thought that needle bodkins were against fabric armour but
the flesh cutter is working much better than the needle bodkins. Just so you
know, this flesh cutter here, we have a look, i've not sharpened it like a razor
it's relatively sharp but my feeling is that munition type weapons are never
going to be treated like an individual's personal amazingly kept kit, so I haven't
sharpened this like a razor blade and it's still going clean through. Here we
go for the last of our armour samples so we've got maille,
riveted maille over a jack which is five layers of wool and linen, then onto our
foam and the target beyond. Starting with our plate cutter again
let's see how this does. Well bounced off,
not a good day for the plate cutter. I'm gonna go for the flesh arrow. Also bounced off, which I think I kind of
expected. So what is the needle bodkin gonna do? Now I thought that it was good against fabric armour, I don't think it is, in fact we've shown it isn't. Is it good
against maille? Yes it is. Let's go and have a look at that. Well we have some answers.
So the plate cutter was shot first again as you saw bounced straight off. Next up
was the flesh bolt, again bounced straight off. Didn't even think about
penetrating, a little bit mullered on the end here on the edges. And the third
one that went through, not so great against fabric armour, either the aketon or the gambeson, but against the maille it was... Oh...actually this is jammed in there.... that is how deep it went into the maille and through the jack. The others were defeated completely by this armour the needle bodkin, straight on in there.
I found the results of this really interesting it's not at all what I was
expecting. It's not a scientific experiment that's what I'll say again; we
don't have the information to accurately make the armour because there is no
information, but this compares what I've done, I've told you what I've done and
we've compared it and this is what we've got. So the plate cutter performed
absolute rubbish. Bounced off everything the flesh cutter did far better than I
was expecting actually, so it penetrated the aketon, deeper than the needle bodkin
definitely to a killing depth. Gambeson to a killing depth, more than the needle
bodkin, bounced straight off the maille and the jack. Needle bodkin penetrated both
the aketon and the gambeson. The gambeson though, it only penetrated around about
an inch and a quarter or 30 mm, probably not a killing depth. So that was interesting,
because I thought that the needle bodkins were against
fabric armour. But. Against the maille everything else bounced off, that went
through and it went through to a killing depth. So I can conclude from this.
In my experiments here today, needle bodkins, great against maille, flesh heads
against fabric armor and against bare flesh and the plate cutter, bare flesh
obviously, but against plate armour. But we still don't know the whole story of that
because if you look at my Arrows versus Armour video, you'll see that we haven't
yet learned everything there is to know about these things;
we'll be visiting that again. So thank you very much for watching, I hope you've
enjoyed it, it's been really interesting for me and if you're interested in
medieval weapons go check my websites out. It's worth it. Thank you
