Medieval massacre

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I went to the National History Museum in Stockholm and there I attended an exhibition the Maryville Master Craft it was all about the Battle of Gotland which confused me a little bit because I wasn't very familiar with a battle of Gotland but I did know about the Battle of Visby of 1361 and it turns out that for some reason they call the Battle of Visby the Battle of Gotland lisby is a town on the island of Gotland which is today a part of Sweden and in 1361 the King of Denmark Valdemar the fourth invaded and it is generally described as something of a one-sided slaughter and on one side you have a professional army lots of well-equipped mercenaries and so forth and on the other side you have well the newly described as peasants and farmers and so forth who had for a while being rebelling against the merchants of the Hanseatic League who were in Visby and who according to some versions of events actually shut them out of the town didn't let them in the town and just watched from the battlements watch them get slaughtered by this considerably superior army oh dear the merchants inside the town of this V were paying one-fifth as much tax as the farmers living outside the town so the farmers did have something to rebel about now why is this battle so important it's important because of the excavations that took place between 1929 and 30 and it's great shame that it wasn't excavated more recently because our archaeological techniques today are so much better although I dare say that when it was being excavated the people then was saying thank goodness this is a modern excavation can you imagine what a mess they'd have made of it 50 years ago but hey ho so we have lost unfortunately a lot of evidence - rather antiquated excavation techniques but it is extraordinary because we have bodies and all stuff that was with them immediately after a battle because the guys who were on the losing end and died all got just throwed into a few mass graves why was this ah we don't know but the the front-running theory is that it was a hot period of weather and the bodies decomposed something horrendous and people couldn't even bring themselves to to salvage that the scrap iron worth of the armor on them and they just bit the guys up and just roll them into a ditch holding their noses it was that bad that the bodies were not very thoroughly searched his evidence for instance by this pouch of coins that was found on one of them now you would think wouldn't you as you roll them into the ditch you would have heard a chink chink noise from all the coins and someone would have said oh that one had load of coins on him and then someone else said gear do you want to go into the pit after it and dig it out be my guest and okay fair enough let's just leave the coins where they are and it's interesting because we get to see an awful lot of stuff we get to see what people were wearing in those days very few weapons were found you can imagine that a weapon on the dead man would be dropped a lot of the time so you could just pick those up and salvage those more easily but armor a lot of the armor was just left on the bodies and it's interesting this armor for lots of reasons the labeling in the museum referred to it as lamellar no I wouldn't call this lamb Allah I would say that this is brigand Dean it's lots of plates they are they feel like the center of a sandwich so you've got an outer layer of leather or canvas of some stamp material and an inner layer and a rivet going through and in between these plates the rivet goes through the plates and hold it to the outer layers but the rivets do not hold the plates to each other so there's a certain amount of lateral flexibility although this is not very flexible armor it's a cheap way of producing plate armor interestingly you look at these and they're not very pretty they're no two exactly the same some of them I felt looked quite Bronze Age and as I said they're primitive and ugly and look at look at these sabatons now yes sabotage we're used to seeing in museums beautiful works of art like like this for instance and we think oh wow look at the craftsmanship back in those days and yet let's look at those sabatons again it's just a few flat plates shoved on the top of someone's shoe now it could be that we're missing an awful lot of this stuff from museums you see if you you craft a spectacularly wonderful suit of armor is anyone going to oh we could reuse that for horseshoes bang bang bang bang there you go horseshoe I imagine a blacksmith would sooner burst into tears that destroy a work of art such as these these edged fluted masterpieces that end up in museums but imagine that someone has just looked be honest I just want to stay alive do you get me here the load of plates and stick them on me and you end up with armor like this well perhaps this is the stuff that did end up getting recycled into horseshoes and that's why we don't see it in museums so perhaps this is a rare glimpse of some of the lowest status armor that was being worn and it is valuable for that purpose certainly an awful lot of well armored men died so armor on its own won't keep you alive and some of the men on the losing side were decently armored of course we can't say for certain which of the bodies was on which side and they just all got rolled into the ditch now I have to say I did get a bit annoyed by the lack of labels in this exhibition a lot of things weren't labeled at all some of the labeling was I thought rather inaccurate it was as though the curators of it consider themselves curating an art installation rather than anything designed to convey information to the public I would extend this criticism to the entire museum in fact none of the cabinets had any information in them you had to really go searching for information on little bits of paper some distance away and even then you tended to get just one word or something helmet great oh yeah I guessed it was a helmet I want to know a bit more than that how old is it where was it made where was it found how much is it weigh even give me some information if I don't want the information I don't have to read it one frustration was that they said nothing about how this armor was worn so for instance were these coats have plates these brigand Dean's worn over the top of a full male whore burg they would know this surely when it came out of the ground the skeletons would be wearing both kinds of armor but we're just not shown this it is really heavy oh but it is beige at least some of this armor these coats of plates these brigand Dean's would have been worn over the top of mail it seems this is transitional period Armour it's between the male of earlier periods and the full plate of the later periods whereas many people would have you believe that it takes metal to be strong enough to be the nut of the mechanism of a crossbow this nut is made out of bone

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Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 472,807

Rating: 4.9727378 out of 5

Keywords: medieval, massacre, visby, gotland, battle, dead, graves, armour, brigandine, mass, archaeology, sweden, dig, armor, plate, history, 1361, middle ages, museum, exhibition, labelling

Id: kMrTi79D2Js

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Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 18 2015

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