Medieval war lance: Can I make and successfully use a heavy medieval lance?

I want to talk a little bit about that quintessential knight's weapon the Lance we have quite a lot of pictural reference for Lance types and the weird thing about Lance's is they vary hugely over time and from place to place one of the particular interesting reference points for me is the Battle of San Romano a painting by a cello it's an Italian painting some time around you know the 14 30s to the 14 sixes we don't know exactly when it was my guess is it's slightly later they have extraordinarily long war lances in that particular painting beautiful armor beautiful horses fantastic reference in it the Lance's are about 12 foot long and I'm going to have a go at making a solid Ashe war Lance now the problem with Ashe is well this is 14 feet long this is 14 foot piece of ash and it may only be 2 inches by 2 inches this is fully dry one of the things you've got to remember is you've got to hold the lance in one hand and just that is incredibly heavy there's no way you could no way you could use a piece of wood like this on horseback I can barely hold it with two hands and I'm not riding a horse and it has no weight on the end these are two Lance's or Spears that I use quite a lot this is just a - thou has no shape to it the red end indicates the sharp end and the gray end indicates the blunt end so that I can try spinning things around and I know which direction it's pointing in obviously for this particular training weapon it doesn't make any difference but it's good because Lance's and Spears have a sharp end and a blunt end so that's something I use quite a lot this is ten foot two and a half meters ish long piece of ash it's fairly dense because the wood is solid it's about an inch and a quarter around and it works quite nicely as a short spear that's quite useful very very handy this this is my torment Lance it's about nine foot long so it's quite a lot shorter than the Lance's of the Battle of San Romano you could use a nine foot Lance for war but obviously a 12 for Lance arguably gives you more reach this is perhaps interesting for you because there's some types of jousting we do for theatrical purposes or for display where you use a breakable tip tip made of split wood which breaks a bit more spectacularly and so we have this ferrule on the end that the tips are inserted into it's made of poplar so it's fairly light so compared to ash this is actually a very light weapon and I could hold it fairly easily in my hand it has this cutout and it's cutouts interesting because there are two ways of using it you could have this under your arm and then hold the Lance that way we see that in some illustrations you can also have your hand on that as if it was a hand grip and have the Lance a bit longer so lots of different ways of doing it typically I think this is used for the hand grip but if you want to you can use it that way and we know from a lot of fight books that Lance's can be used in some quite unorthodox ways this is not very heavy for me it's a little awkward especially when it has a tip on the end but I can pretty much handle this easily on a horse because it's made of a light wood I think this one is poplar maybe pine it is so much less dense and less heavy than an ash Lance the problem with ash is it's incredibly springy used for making long bows these use of making spear shafts it doesn't shatter very well and it's very dangerous so if you want to kill somebody with a lance you use a solid ash shaft but solid ash this fat would be very very heavy so I've got to play around with the piece of ash that I've got and try and trim it down and make it work much longer length but it'll probably have to be much thinner and I've got a couple of ideas about what I want to do what I've done is I've trimmed down the length of the ash and I've trimmed the edges off and I've sanded it down to something that's a bit more round let me show you this is the beginnings of my battle Lance it is still quite a thick piece of ash it is dramatically more manageable than the solid piece I think it's probably half the weight literally taking those corners off rounding it over has meant that it's dramatically lighter and I will be using it like this on horseback it's still a bit too heavy to be honest and if I look down the main shaft of the Lance what I'm going to try to do is take the thickness down a lot more on this far tip because ultimately I want this Lance to balance further towards where I'm holding it if I hadn't shaped this piece of wood obviously it should balance more or less in the middle of middle of its length which means there's quite a lot of energy downwards when I'm holding it at one end what I'm going to try and do is a bit more shaping to try and move the weight further back that way I'm going to trim down the end there and keep it quite fat at the far end so that the point at which it balances is as far down towards my grip as possible you need the point of balance in front of where you're holding it because you need to be able to control the Lance up and down and you don't want it and you don't it perfectly balanced under your armpit but this is substantially bigger than any other Lance that I use so it's going to be very interesting now what I'm doing is fairly simple I am just slowly going around it with a hand plane now I am NOT in any way shape or form an expert in woodwork so if I'm doing this wrong I apologize but it is working it's slowly reducing the diameter of my Lance to the point where I want it to be and for all of those people who are expert woodworkers who might be watching I apologize if my technique isn't perfect but learning is about doing and I'm learning about shaping Lance's and I'm learning about the balance of lances I find it better than using machine tools or power tools it's quieter and it's kind of cathartic and I've got to do this slowly I don't want to thin it out too much but I also have got to try to make it an organic shape we know that medieval people when they made arrows for example wore arrows when they made bolts for crossbows they didn't just make them tubular they weren't just perfectly symmetrical tubes they had fat parts they had thin parts so the idea of shaping lengths of wood to move the center of balance one way or the other is actually completely normal for the medieval person I've not really seen enough details about Lance manufacture of the period in fact don't think there is any to know whether they did it with Lance's perhaps they did perhaps they didn't my guess is they would have done there's always another possibility I could put some weights the other end of the Lance just to move the weight of balance further back when you look down a piece of wood like this a sword a spear or anything by putting your eye right next to the surface you can see imperfections in the line which you can't see when you look at it from a distance so you can really see tiny differences in the surface and where there's a little bit of a hump that I need to trim out but let's have a go and show you what I'm doing I'm literally working my way around the piece of wood trying to take off thin slices as I go trying to keep it reasonably circular I haven't clamped it because I find you need to actually rotate it with one hand while you're sanding it with the other so if it's clamped it just takes you ten times as long what I don't want to do is make this end too thin so I'm just going to trim back from this bit and keep going until looking down it's substantially thinner around this area I'll just keep going over it little by little by little this will create slight facets where the blade cuts into it but I'll sand those off if I can be bothered later whether they sanded it off or not I don't know I imagine for war they just made them as practically as they could probably for tournaments they made them all fancy and painted them and made them impressive but for war which this is they probably just had them raw like this what I'm constantly trying to do is move the point of balance well that's say five minutes of hard work has moved the center of balance since me to half an inch this is good because I'm making progress so I really want it to be back here so probably got another few hours worth of work to do on this because I'm actually trying to find out how I want the shape to be I can I can't be quite as confident as I would be if I actually knew what thickness it needed to be where and obviously with wood you can't put more wood on especially not with this kind of thing if you've taken off too much so I'm going a bit cautiously we'll we'll see how it comes out it already feels a bit lighter in the hand just moving the center of balance back a couple of inches or a few centimetres which is interesting doesn't take much to make it feel a bit better there's a beautiful smell coming off the dry - which must be very familiar to people in the medieval period it might be interesting to consider whether because this is such an organic process every piece of wood is different everything that shapes is different I wonder whether Knights had a favorite Lance which does beg the question would there be an upset if it got broken in battle maybe they didn't maybe they just expected to use Lance that they had but Sir I can imagine and one Lance feeling right when you use it in practice and then being quite disappointed when it broke in battle I suppose if you survived the battle maybe you wouldn't have been disappointed at all maybe you'd talk about losing your favorite Lance once you survived or maybe nobody cared who knows but it does occur to me that every Lance would be slightly different and their food have a slightly different feel and part of the skill of being a mounted knight in a mounted charge would be to be able to adapt quite quickly to the weapon you were given this is full-length war Lance modeled after the Battle of San Romano the length of the Lance in those it's about 12 foot long solid ash and it's really quite heavy it's unfinished but I thought I would test it out on Talos part of his continuing education and part of my continuing education it doesn't actually have a tip on the end yet I'm having that made so that may shift the balance completely and it is relatively easy to control although it has a lot of momentum because it's so long it's about four and a half kilos so I can hold it outright but not for very long and it seems to be quite manageable there is a fantastic reference work from the Middle Ages around the 1430s 1440s Dom Duarte king of Portugal wrote a treatise on Knightly arts jail sting fighting that kind of thing he actually mentions Lance's and he actually mentions what kind of Lance you should have but it's rather vague he says take a lance that is as heavy as you can manage now I take it from that he means not something that's too heavy and also not something that's too light so this is probably not quite as heavy as I could manage but it is quite heavy compared to my other Lance's and because it's so long it's quite awkward this one I think is probably right on the edge of what I could manage repeatedly I could handle a heavier Lance but for a much shorter period of time but this feels about right we'll see when we get a metal tip on the end and I brought Talos out because talus is still in training and he needs to learn about Lance handling and Lance impacts as much as I do you might notice that I've got the Lance on my toe which is actually quite a common way of handling it means the Lance is a little bit lower and a bit easier to handle a lot of medieval saddles we see the lance actually resting on the saddle like this just trapped by the thigh of the rider and the front part of the saddle that's also another way of handling it but that means it's a bit higher so I think the tip of that Lance is probably approaching 20 feet off the ground so if you were going through the woods you wouldn't want to carry it like that but obviously in the open it would be fairly reasonable and this does to me resemble the length of lances that we see in the Battle of San Romano paintings incredibly long look fairly cumbersome but let's try it out and see whether they're practical or not good boy this is my trusty target used it indoors a lot I brought it outside to get some fresh air I'm going to try hitting that it's a slightly unusual target for a horseman because it's actually slightly lower and in the painting itself we see Lance's mostly used against other armored Knights but this is the target I've got so I'll try it the difficulty with a heavy Lance and a lower target is that you have to drop below the horizontal to hit it which puts quite a lot more strain on your arm and on your equipment now I'm not wearing armor and that may make a huge difference and I don't have a breastplate on so I'm gonna have to couch this against my skin under my arm so we'll see how it goes I will do some tests with this in harness with a lance rest and I think that might make it much easier we'll see we see how I do with it this way and obviously I've got two places I can put the target I can put it on my offside which is on this side which is the Lance which will be a harder hit or I can go across the horse's neck like this and hit it on tournament side or doused a piece side there are also lots of techniques where you can use the Lance two-handed on on this side remember there are no real rules back then it's just a lance and you want to hit your target so if somebody says you can't use the Lance two-handed they're completely wrong you can use the Lance two-handed but of course then you can't control the horses easily with the reins there are lots of different techniques let's just have a go and see how this heavy wall arms does against the target good boy come on you [Music] well that hits with quite a ferocious impact actually I wasn't expecting that the tip hasn't done any damage to it but it felt dramatically more impactful than my lighter Lance's and I guess the amount of energy going into a target is based on the weight of the projectile itself so a very light bullet has to go very fast but a very heavy thing like a Lance maybe doesn't have to go quite as fast so I will good boy good boy he wants to anymore I'll put the target up and I do a couple more runs and have a go and then I think I've proven to myself that this is manageable just and then we've got to get a metal tip on it and try it in harness but that will be for another video and bashed his eye slot on that that time I have to say the heavy wall answer is a bit of a different technique it requires a lot more preparation and quite a lot of strength to get it in the right place at the right time good boy come on welcome let's do another you well it hits with a hell of a punch but it's also taking quite a lot of energy out of my shoulder you wouldn't want to be doing this dozens of times in close succession because it takes quite a lot of energy but it hits like a train it feels like it hits much harder than a hammer quite a weapon actually it really is quite an impressive weapon when you have one full weight and full length good boy come on then that'll do I live for today well done tell us [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 256,634

Keywords: history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, lance, joust, jousting, king, horse charge, horse, destrier, mounted, bannerlord, mount and blade, witcher, game of thrones, medieval combat, horse training, lance impact, smash, Medieval, fantasy, dnd, dungeons and dragons, history, historical, hema, historical european martial arts, video, game, roleplaying, role playing, rpg, lord of the rings, adventure, adventurer

Id: hKhB0lxv4Zk

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019