Medieval Swords Used Inferior Steel? - Material Dictating Design

[Music] hey votes Matty seen here Scala gladiatori so really simple video I'm holding a small sword here but I could be holding various other types of sword and this is really a simple video to reiterate a point I've made in previous videos and I'll keep it very short and that is that material science in other words what you're able to make in terms of the material the steel in this case and the way that you're able to heat treat that steel your science your your mastery of science has a huge effect on the weapons that you make and very often I think when we're looking at a weapon design particularly I think people in Hema are particularly guilty of this we tend to look at things purely out of the eyes of function and how effective something is so you know which cuts better which is you know which kind of is best for parrying or thrusting or which is better for thrusting through mail and which is better for cutting through bone and this kind of stuff or cutting through gambeson so we tend to break it down into very physical mechanical causes and effects as it were the kind of what the what the weapon does and how to make it more effective at what it does but the fact is that what you can do in life is very much dictated by what do you have available to you ok if you want to buy it build a skyscraper but you you only have stone then you're gonna have some trouble ok if you want to build a bow but you live in a desert and there are no trees you're gonna face some problems ok so you're looking at an Eskimo boinger which is better Eskimo bow or samurai bow well you know kind of unfair comparison because of kind of the Eskimo bows they have access to animal parts basically maybe a bit of driftwood occasionally but essentially bits of bone and horn and sinew and ivory and tooth and stuff like this ok because that's what's available to them whereas if you look at you go to Japan well they've got basically everything available to them from bamboo to various types of wood - obviously steel and things like that but equally then if we go to the English longbow well clearly they've got you word available to them mostly the best being usually from the Alps or the Pyrenees so mountain you but equally you've got you in England as well and all over Britain so the fact is that were the materials you have available to you largely affect what you can build and let's not even get into there's a whole other topic about durability and you know with bows particularly certain types of bows composite bows that are made of glued together things probably don't work very well in very cold and wet environments and stuff like this long bows probably better but that's a whole different topic but coming back to swords so the steel that you have available does dictate the type of blade you make and that goes for all swords and all weapons but let's focus just on swords because that's what we like to do on this channel all swords throughout history so quite simply if we limit this to Europe we can talk about Japanese swords and their design and be the necessities of the types of metals that they're working with types of Steel that they're working with or we could look at Filipino weapons and limitations there but instead let's look at European weapons now there is a fundamental difference that occurs in the 18th century in Europe and that is the move from bloomery steel to cast steel okay and what does that mean well let's call cast steel crucible steel which is essentially you've lot of you will have heard about wootz and crucible steel from a earlier and contemporary period but mostly associated with India in the Middle East well the one of the main mechanical reasons for there being an advantage to cast steel in other words it's been liquefied and then solidified again in various forms let's not get into the technology of how because that can be done in various ways but it's been liquefied the crap skimmed off what we generally call slag okay so slag skimmed off and then it's been solidified and you end up with a homogenous good piece of steel that you can introduce the impurities you want in the amounts that you want so if you end up if you melt the thing you end up with pure iron you can now introduce the exact amount of carbon you want so if you take it to pure iron near enough to pure iron then you can introduce your 0.9 percent of carbon into it and you end up with 1090 steel more or less okay you can introduce a little bit of nickel or a little bit of crime or a little bit of vanadium a little bit of manganese whatever you want to put in there sulfur phosphorus all these other things you commonly find in steel steel is an alloy just to remind any of you iron is the element and you introduce the impurities into it in the amounts that you want to get a steel that you want if we look at Wilkinson swords steel for example in the 19th century they had steel specifically made for them by a factory in Sheffield which was the main steelmaking center of England at the time to their exact specification with very small tolerances and the steel what Wilkinson swords were made of was roughly equivalent to a modern 1095 steel now how does this relate to how I started this video well quite simply in the 18th century it was possible to make small swords sabers various other types of sword that around at that time from cast steel that is steel that is produced from iron which has been melted and then the correct impurities at the correct percentages of impurities reintroduced back into the metal before that it wasn't that simple in Europe okay whilst crucible steel did exist in the Middle East and India it didn't by and large exist in Europe there are a few exceptions wootz was occasionally imported into europe debatably and the ulfberht swords from the sort of 10th century thereabouts were made of crucible steel but I'm not going to get into that because that's slightly more contentious and complicated but generally speaking most swords in Europe in the Middle Ages were made of bloomery steel now the bloomery steel production process by its varying keeps a lot of the impurities in the steel and introduces others as well so you end up with a lot of slag now what is slag a slag is essentially it's a bit like a ceramic type mixture of impurities that are in the steel they're literally in the steel so for anybody who watches forged in fire for example you know they'll sometimes refer to inclusions will inclusions is a general term that can refer to lots of things but if you think about your piece of if you imagine a piece of play-doh or plasticine and it's a red piece of played or plasticine but some some kid or one of your friends has got some blue bits and when you roll it out you can see some little streaks and bits and dots of blue bits in the red that's like inclusions in blue Murray steel now why are inclusions bad well ironically depending what they're made of exactly an inclusion can actually be harder than the steel around it but also brittle but the point is that when you don't have a homogeneous material when that material comes and any sorts of stresses and strains it's going to be a focal point for magnifying the chance of breaking at that point it essentially means that the bits of metal around it are not stuck together it's a bit like having a bubble inside a piece of concrete or any or plastic or something it is it's something that's in there and it's making the material solid or seems solid but it's not part of it's not it's not bonded with the material around it so it's really really a source for for failure now how this affects the manufacture of sword blades is hugely quite frankly so one of the reasons that pattern-welded blades were made their way they were is because the twisting and the the patterns that you end up with a representative of what you've done the folding and twisting and all of this kind of stuff that that spreads out those risks and also reduces the chances of having fractures going straight lines from any individual piece of inclusion or slag so essentially what you're doing is you're creating a structure a bit like a rope or a cable inside the metal so it makes it more difficult for that thing to break apart because of any bad bit that's in part of the blade and with a mono steel blade if you've got a big piece of slag in it then then you're going to get a fracture more likely at that point when the blade comes under a sudden shock or flexing or this kind of thing so in the 17th century in the 16th and 17th century the production of steel improved such that the impurities that the slag inclusions were generally speaking being able to be reduced and it is notable that this is the same period that we start to get more slender blades now many of you will have noticed that if you look at medieval swords I'll just grab a long sword from behind you they are very often this is from Dynasty Forge this long sword and I will be reviewing it they are very often relatively narrow at the center of percussion and relatively broad at the base of the blade now I'm not going to say that this is only for this reason it's not it's for many reasons but fundamentally it is very largely related to strength ok when you're hitting someone with that portion of the blade that width there is the important part how wide the blade is here is not really important I could bring that blade down to being the same width as here and it would still strike with almost the same amount of energy as having a broad base here now you would say ah but Matt the total mass is higher so therefore well yes that's true the total mass is higher but I'm not hitting them with the back end of the sword I'm hitting them with the end of the sword so we're actually talking about rotational momentum here so actually it's the mass up here which actually gives how much energy the blade strikes with that's why something like a falchion or a machete or a Chinese Dao hits with more force than a narrower ended sword like a rapier or some types of long sword or Chinese Jan or whatever so quite simply one of the reasons that the blade is so wide at the base here is for strength okay now we can say I think with a fair degree of confidence that blades that were narrower the base as well as narrow up here because we've had blades that have been narrow up here for a lot of history but blades that are narrow at the base you need to have a lot of faith in your steel you need to have a lot of faith both in the quality of the steel and the heat treatment well those two things are interconnected because if you know more about your steel then you can learn more about the heat treatment of it if you're able to more precisely produce a similar type of steel time and time and time again remember in the modern world we just go and buy some 1065 1075 1095 whatever if we can we know what it is but they didn't okay if you're able to get steel which is more the same every time you can perfect your heat treatment so those two things are connected so in the 16th and 17th centuries we start to see blades get narrower at the base of the blade they don't necessarily get in hair up here because you'll notice long swords of the 14th 15th century and one-handed swords as well of course are already quite narrow up here there are rape years which are this sort of width and certainly side swords which were this sort of width all the way along but they tend to be much narrower at the base of the blade and my belief and I think all the evidence supports this is that one of the reasons for that is the material science the steel was getting better more regulated more understood and therefore the heat treatment as well which enabled them to make blades which are getting lighter and/or they could keep the weight the same and make them longer and we absolutely see in the 16th and 17th centuries blades do generally get narrower at the base and longer so they're not necessarily getting lighter because a rapier is about the same weight as a medieval arming sword but there are a lot longer so what they did was well I can happily handle a a 1200 gram sword but you know you tell me you the sword maker you tell me that you can now make my blade narrow here saving some weight well hold on I can handle 1200 grams so why don't you just make the blade narrower down here and add six inches to the length and the sword making goes yeah I can do that so and we have to add on to that as well understanding of blade geometry and blade shapes and just the skill the inherited skill the master to apprentice master to apprentice system of improving understanding of how to make good blades also almost uncertainly almost certainly played a part in that as well so to conclude there i've waited on for quite long enough I think which I didn't intend to do but you know that's common with me if you're on this channel and if you're not subscribed please go and hit that subscribe button I sometimes say interesting things I hope I think the material science the quality of the steel plays a very large part on the shape of the blade and when we look at medieval swords we're so used to seeing blades that are broad at the base and this is actually a fairly narrow one but if you think about Viking era swords or you look at that they're really broad at the base kind of type 18 and type 15 type blades which really sometimes very broad at the base you think but why why is all the width down there when you're hitting someone with this bit up here part of it is undoubtedly about how the total weight of the weapon and the balance and all of that kind of stuff but generally speaking you look at later period swords you look at other cultures swords whether it's Japan or China that's not something you find very much I think a very large part of why we get blades which are so broad at the base is to do with the strength that they wanted after their weapon they wanted to minimize the chances of them breaking and the fact is we know from medieval artwork that swords did break a lot and we read it in texts as well and part of the reason for that is slag so so there we go the reduction in slag and then the move in the 18th century really to cast steel really changed a lot so don't think that just because the blade is narrower at the base that it is somehow less a less powerful blade if we take something like this is actually an 18th century blade mounted on the saber health but that is actually broader at the center of percussion then they then the maybe will star alongside okay and so just because just because a sword is narrower at the base doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to hit with less authority and just a final piece of anecdotal evidence in terms of cutting it cutting tatami mats or pumpkins they did recently or water bottoms or whatever we often find that blades which are narrow down here cut just as well as these broad-based medieval swords it's more to do the cutting capacity is more to do with the edge geometry and the width at the center of percussion the base of the blade not so much anyway oh that's been somewhat interesting feel free to I'm sure that some of my science is not explained exactly right but the fundamentals are the less laggy having a blade the more reliable steel is them therefore the more reliable heat treatment is therefore you can make narrower blades and quite simply in the medieval period they could not have made reliable small swords by the 17th century they could this type of blade you can only make with good practically modern a quality steel and they didn't have that in the medieval period with a few exceptions chess folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook alike and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 26,567

Rating: 4.9578013 out of 5

Keywords: medieval sword, rapier, renaissance rapier, italian rapier, duel, sword, fencing, medieval weapons, sword steel, sword blade

Id: 6DTagRM35oI

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 01 2019