Military Flails Didn't Exist? - Lets Take a Closer Look!

sticks and stones may break your bones but flails will flay your mind all right so today i want to do a discussion about flexible weapons and no this is not about the nunchuck drama that chad started it's about a different type of flexible weapon which is also highly contentious apparently very controversial topic the flail or as some people call it morning star now from what i can gather this is a morning star apparently it's more accurate to call a mace with a spiked ball at the end or even a spiked club in some cases a morning star whereas the ball and chain attached to a handle would be a flail or a military flail or war flail something like that so why is this controversial apparently some historians think this thing didn't exist which is ironic because it's you know very often associated with medieval knights is a very iconic medieval weapon and i found a blog post that goes into detail about this this author has several reasons for making that statement one practical considerations two the fact that a number of flails and museums turned out to be quote unquote fakes meaning they were made at a later time after the middle ages and third limited pictorial evidence i disagree with that and i'm gonna tell you why so first off practical considerations and i was i've been on that fence the weight on that side of the fence however you want to put it i've been in that camp as well of regarding flexible weapons with skepticism because they're they can be dangerous to the user they are harder to learn etc etc that applies to all kinds of different weapons and what changed my mind a little on that was that i actually made a hussite flail myself which is the polar version of it essentially a two-handed pole flail and i felt that to be remarkably effective really it takes some getting used to for sure and you have to figure out how to strike there's also different ways of striking with it you can either follow through all the way and uh strike that one basically the way you would with a staff or you can try to stop it in front of the target and let the momentum basically propel the stick at the end of the chain forward and strike the target that way and that seemed quite effective i found that it can strike powerfully and because i made the striking end fairly heavy with a lot of metal reinforcement even if you didn't strike at optimal range and it wrapped around it still seemed like it was hitting pretty hard and it is not an easy weapon to defend against and it can also be a little difficult to predict the path you know the way it comes at you however the two-handed pole flail is not the controversial one there's actually plenty of evidence for that type there are a number of them in museums you have quite a few depictions uh they've been made famous by the hussites who use them as already mentioned so that's not the issue those are well established the single-handed type that usually has a ball at the end of a chain or rope or something else that ball can be spiked or it can be smooth or it could be a different shape what about the practicality here and this does cross over a little bit with nunchucks because one of the arguments is you can easily hurt yourself if you strike something and the thing bounces straight back at you so i found that actually with the who side flail as well it can bounce straight back now if you have it at the end of a pole it doesn't matter because it's far away from you and some people say with the single-handed flail it the chain should never be so long that the the ball await at the end could hit your hand however there are flails found in various parts of the world from various time periods longer than that so apparently people didn't really care so much why is that well it's as is so often the case it's a matter of technique and i found a video which is unfortunately in russian so i can't understand it but you can still follow along with the demonstration just visually and so this guy shows how to strike with a flail that is longer than the handle and do it in such a way that it doesn't hit himself even if it bounces in in your in your direction if you follow through you're just going to pull it along and it's not really going to threaten you and that's what you can see in this video as well and i found that too when i did a test with a flail that had a smooth ball at the end which is legal in canada spiked ones aren't makes no sense but whatever so on certain strikes when i fall through enough i could also tell that yes you just keep pulling it it doesn't really come straight back at you so this is really a matter of technique although depending on the angle of the swing and the shape of the target it can still bounce back sometimes you can minimize the risk but probably not eliminate it entirely i almost forgot the tests i did with experimental blade flails which were weird but the same principles showed themselves there as well within a follow through it doesn't go all over the place it can bounce back to a degree just not as much and the blades generally didn't seem to threaten me but as you can tell i was wearing a gauntlet so i still didn't trust a thing entirely if you combine that with how you would normally use a blunt weapon to begin with be it a stick or a mace or what have you you would generally use continuous movements like that i've shown that before and talk about bludgeons that makes perfect sense now does a flail hit harder than a mace of equivalent length and weight i don't think so there is no specific reason why it should really you're accelerating the weight at the end of a lever one way or another because as you swing it the chain is straight so during the swing as you generate momentum it doesn't act all that differently from a solid shaft with a weight at the end on impact that's where they act differently i can see one way in which a solid weapon could potentially hit harder and that is if instead of swinging in an arc like as a percussive arc you kind of drive it forward in more of a penetrative attack if you will and you put your body weight into it the entire time so you push off with your legs and your feet the energy travels all the way up you know from the ground that you push against through your legs through your hips the body arms etc so you really drive it with your body weight and because it is solid you can keep pushing the entire time so even when you hit you can still kind of drive forward so that could possibly make it a bit more effective however that comes at a price and that is a lot of force comes back into you as well and this is one of the disadvantages i've mentioned in the other video hand shock is vicious with these more so than with swords so if you strike something really hard with a blunt weapon you get a lot of vibration and shock transfer into your hand and it can even be jarring to the point where you might risk dropping it that's amplified on horseback so this is why the single-handed flail is actually quite an effective horseman's weapon and this also makes a lot of sense considering that turning it into a single-handed weapon makes most sense if you are on horseback because you can't as effectively use it with two hands when you're riding a horse in parts of asia surprisingly long-handled flails were used on horseback but still with one hand so you combine the velocity from your swing with the flail with the velocity of the moving horse and that can hit extremely hard so at that point as soon as it strikes something this is not transferred immediately into your hand and particularly if you ride past the the ball can move independently of the handle so if the the ball or weight connects and you move on then it just gets pulled and you know because there's flexibility in it it does it's not as likely to get stuck and then you know transfer force back to your arm right that reminds me i need to be aware of my hand sometimes i get very animated and talk a lot with my hands and then i might be hitting the microphone sorry if i have done that so far i'll try to avoid it now so as a cavalry weapon that is quite effective just like with other blunt weapons you have the disadvantage that they're not as good for defense and you can argue that aflail is worst of all the way it's shown in this video again i don't understand what he's talking about but he's showing you know pairing with this short handle and i'm pretty sure he's saying something like this is not very effective because you just don't have that much to work with but he shows an active defense where he meets the sword cut with the flail which wraps around with such a long chain and deflects it off to the side so there might still be ways of defending yourself just more actively by striking into the attack with a flail but ideally it would be combined with a shield or buckler of course for protection i'm sure you could discuss the practicality a lot more but because i personally don't have as much experience with using a flail i'm going to leave that to somebody else who has more experience so as far as i can tell yes it has drawbacks it also has some advantages just like anything so it's not a horrible weapon as far as i can tell so on to the next point fakes or flails made later possibly as ceremonial items rather than combat weapons as such so there are a few examples mentioned and you have that issue sometimes in during victorian times for example they sometimes made copies of medieval weapons and they did them pretty well to the point where it can get a little confusing but sometimes they also made something up that they thought existed in the middle ages or wanted to exist or who knows what i found a number of examples and made in the 16th or 17th century or later and you have to excuse me for looking at my phone here i've got so many pictures i just gotta remind myself of what there was this one here is a very iconic form a german flail from the 15th or 16th century with pretty long spikes attached to the ball there's one from the 15th or 16th century now 15th that is still middle ages i mean 15th to 16th now we're looking at the transition from the middle ages to the renaissance but i think that would still count you know if this was indeed intended for combat here's a swiss one from the late 16th century it's called holy water sprinkler but as far as i know the term holy water sprinkler is used for the actual morning star which is you know a spiked mace here's a flail with a spiked wooden ball from the state museum of upper austria 1625 i found a few others and this is the general tendency they're typically from the 16th or 17th century so after the middle ages now you could argue especially in the 17th century and later firearms were quite dominant on the battlefield and the 16th century also saw plenty of firearm use already however i don't think we should dismiss them all and then just claim that oh they weren't redesigned for use there are some sort of fanciful looking examples where i could think okay yeah maybe this this was a novelty item or a ceremonial or what have you that's always this this naughty naughty word ceremonial anything we don't understand is ceremonial for ritual use anyway so it can be hard to say exactly which of them were actually intended for use and which weren't but there was quite a number and i don't find it easy to believe that they were all just decorative and not intended for use here's a flail from russia supposedly from the 14th century that's the earliest example i could find i couldn't verify it this is indeed from the 14th century so i'm just gonna have to take it at face value and russia has quite a bit more to offer than just this one example in fact the kistan is a flail that was popular in russia was also used in poland and other places apparently the earliest mention in russian sources of this weapon is from the 9th century but it seems that it originated in asia and was brought over to central and eastern europe by avars in the 7th or 8th century so those have been around for a while there were apparently civilian forms which are essentially just a weight at the end of a string which was apparently wrapped around the wrist and the weight was stored in the sleeve until it was needed for use and they were called wolf brush or wolf batter apparently because they were used to defend themselves against wolves but they also existed as a military flail interestingly early ones were made of organic material like bone horn or wood and they could be rather light surprisingly so from what i could gather now apparently they could weigh between 100 and 300 grams or in a few cases even under 100 grams sometimes these little weights could be used for decorative purposes and apparently the original form brought by the avars was more of a battle whip hell yeah there's a modern day equivalent marketed for self-defense the monkey fist which is essentially the same kind of principle and of course you can also draw comparisons to the chinese meteor hammer for example and there are in fact forms of this flail that don't even have a handle as such but perhaps have a loop and you can easily imagine something like this being used just held at the end of the leather strap or string or chain or whatever it might be and this is one of the benefits it's a very very simple weapon and one that you can easily carry because it doesn't take up any significant space especially if it doesn't even have a handle or if it has a very short handle here's a pair of meteor hammers where you can see this kind of really short handle they don't always have a handle apparently so if you just take something like this that either has a short handle or none yeah you can easily roll that up coil it up stuff it in your pocket like this is extremely easy to carry to conceal and this by the way is also a practical benefit of nunchucks over a stick they are essentially less than half the length that an equivalent stick would be and you can easily fold them up and carry them much better by the way did you know that there is a flail tank in the second world war which was apparently used to detonate mines alright so back to that blog post that considers flails to be fake which is shared by some historians the author is pointing out that there are only a handful of depictions of these and they are generally shown in the hands of exotic peoples the argument is they were trying to show something that's weird that they didn't use so i did some digging and fortunately i found an excellent source for medieval manuscripts on a website that allows you to search by tags so you can actually search for the tag flail and guess what there's a lot of depictions i mean not relative to other weapons but there are definitely quite a few so i'm just gonna keep showing them on the side different forms interestingly uh the ones with multiple chains and and weights or balls seem to be predominant which i really wouldn't have expected i would have thought that this this would be even less practical if you consider it to be impractical in the first place now in some cases this could actually be a scourge which is more of a whip torture implement so you have to distinguish there however they are seen in battlefield context in these depictions [Music] yeah some medieval artists really couldn't draw a horse to save their life there are also a few that seem to have multiple weights on the same chain which is quite odd on second thought these do look an awful lot like scourges and you wouldn't ride into battle with a flagellation device so this might be symbolic and is probably not relevant evidence however we're still left with a good amount of imagery here's of course the problem with looking at the pictions in general yes you have all this you have you also have that you also have stir chicken night which of course is not evidence that people wrote on chickens and fought with play-outs that way of course but i mean at the same time you also can't discard it just because you find it odd i mean knights fighting giant snails and all that with swords that doesn't mean that those swords didn't exist so yes sometimes things were symbolic sometimes they just drew things for shits and giggles quite frankly you know as jokes and whatnot so yes it is difficult to say with certainty but there are a number of battlefield scenarios depicted i can't really imagine that literally all of them are just supposed to be oh something look at this weird exotic thing especially considering the existence of these flails in russia and other places since at least the 9th century so if those were known in eastern europe and they show up in various manuscripts i don't think we can just dismiss them i think there's a little bit too much evidence now they're pretty rare compared to maces and even the actual morning stars spiked maces and the two-handed pole flail also shows up quite a bit more in manuscripts so clearly this form wasn't as common but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist and wasn't used at all and you can also find this type of flail in other parts of the world at other times which again questions the assumption that these are just impractical and ineffective and weren't used because of that for example here's a depiction from the ming dynasty which shows a rather classic looking flail there's also the japanese shigiriki which i've probably butchered horribly and you have other weapons that use a weight at the end of a chain like the kusarigama that i talked about just recently if you haven't seen that video link down below shameless self-promotion in india you have the combustin kabustin i don't know how to pronounce it but that's what it looks like so also a flair and with a remarkably long chain so clearly they weren't concerned about hitting themselves at least if these were indeed made for combat these are examples from the 19th century so it's i don't i don't know for sure if they were intended to fight with you also have korean flails but they're really more like the agricultural type more like a pole flail although there are shorter versions so this is essentially kind of like a nunchaku except that one of the sticks is a lot longer than the other so this is essentially the pole flail as a single-handed version that you can use on horseback and they are indeed shown used by cavalry does this prove conclusively that the ball and chain flail was used in medieval or even renaissance europe no there's always some uncertainty you never know exactly especially considering that so many of the fines apparently were from later time i remember back in europe visiting a number of museums that had medieval weapons and that most of the time showed flails as well but could they have been from later time i don't know it's been a long time i can't remember i remember seeing them but i don't remember with what time period they were exactly dated too it's just they're so ubiquitous they're everywhere a museum so i find it just difficult to believe that they are all fakes or you know all decorative or ceremonial items and all from later time periods it it seems more plausible to me that they were rare but were indeed in use and did exist anyway that's just my perspective based on the research i've done as a non-historian i could be wrong feel free to have a discussion in the comments below let us know what you think but either way i hope you found it interesting and thanks for watching have a good one folks [Music] you

Channel: Skallagrim

Views: 380,513

Keywords: Skall, Skallagrim, military flail, morning star, flail, real or fake, historical weapons, spiked mace, nunchaku, hussite flail, polearm, cavalry, horseback, impact weapon, medieval warfare, middle ages, battlefield, historical evidence, manuscripts, knight

Id: 0PHASxS8Voc

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021