MONSTROUS CROSSBOW, what could go wrong?

this is a thousand pound draw weight medieval siege crossbow it's a beast of a weapon let's see what this devastating weapon can do in real life and see whether it lives up to its terrifying reputation [Music] my research in various places has suggested that the siege crossbow has a range of 200 to 250 meters 220 270 yards you know roughly that kind of range about the same as a longbow supposedly but i have my doubts so i'm going to test out this particular siege crossbow let me measure 100 paces in that direction in the traditional way of striding out 100 paces and we'll see how it goes one two three four five six eight nine ten 95 96 97 98 99 100 so that is 100 yards away downrange i don't think that's very far but it does look quite a long way at the moment and this is going to be my slightly fancy starting point so we shall attach this now this is where i'm going to be shooting from not firing from because firing is a word that comes from firearms and gunpowder which of course they had at the same time as these kind of siege crossbows here is a beast of a crossbow this has a draw weight doesn't mean the weight of the machine itself but it means the strength it takes to draw the string back of just under a thousand pounds depends on how you measure it but 980 a thousand pounds so it sends a thousand pounds of force into the bolt over a span of about five and a half six inches so the power range the power stroke is only about five and a half six inches compared to a long bow which could be 30 inches the prod the actual bow itself is made of steel and it's fairly hefty it's at least half an inch thick up here and it is probably inch and three quarters inch and a half wide so it's a fairly ferocious piece of steel it has holding device here to keep the bow in place and it's on a wooden shaft it has a very simple release mechanism this lever goes up releases that to send the bolt forwards the actual machine itself this crossbow weighs about 21 pounds or nine and a half kilograms and it shoots a bolt this bolt is made of oak and it weighs something of the order of 180 to 200 grams this is about twice as heavy as a longbow arrow the head is quite chunky and it is designed as a smashing weapon as much as anything this is going to deliver quite a lot of energy to the target and it is loaded you can't spam this by hand i can literally move it a couple of inches by hand there's no way you could do this by hand you use what's called a windlass and a windlass is a device which is really awkward actually uh it's a force multiplier of human strength windlasses have been around since ancient times so the technique was completely well known this sits over the end like this and so these hooks go over this bit here you tighten it up slightly make sure it's hooked on is that hooked on and balanced so that's hooked on and balanced now and then you foot in and you wind it up see how long it's taking me this is taking me a lot longer than a a bow wood or a simpler crossbow hand-drawn crossbow but it is substantially stronger most hand-drawn medieval crossbows 190 200 pounds if you use a belt this is six times that almost it's actually quite easy the mechanical advantage is over a hundred to one so whatever you're drawing there this is actually not very difficult at all but you can see i'm already having a problem this is one of the things i've found in using the windlass system it's a pain to do and if you get it wrong it goes very wrong this has to be over the pulleys depending on how the pulley system is arranged the ropes seem to sometimes come off it and they have done again so i'm going to have to reset it there's a reason this kind of crossbow i think is known as a siege crossbow or a rampart crossbow because all of this fiddling around means the shooting rate is incredibly slow let me just get it set up the ropes have to be set on the pulley see how it actually works now is that going yes that's going do it a little bit more briskly right we're in now that is now loaded and this is also one of the problems of this kind of crossbow this stuff gets in the way normally medieval crossbow men would have worked in teams of two one person to hold if you're in the field one person to hold a shield or a pavise it's a big solid shield probably about five foot high sometimes with spikes either side that ram in behind you and you can shelter behind it while you're fiddling around with this awesomely powerful but quite slow mechanism so there is the windless mechanism you can see how it is it's actually quite heavy and putting it down neatly so it doesn't tangle up is one of those things that is now loaded uh well it's prepped ready to fire obviously i don't have a bolt on it and i'm not going to do that just yet but i can't dry fire it so what i'm going to do is do some tests now and see how far it can go at maximum range i think so i'm led to believe a crossbow of this power shooting these kind of bolts should be able to go so they say 200 250 yards i have 100 yards marked out there because i am a bit pessimistic about these things i think books and tails are sometimes a bit tall and i don't think it'll go that far i just have a suspicion it's going to not go as far as some people say i'm going to shoot it for distance first so i'm going to shoot at an angle 45 degrees try and get maximum range which you would be doing if you were trying to drop plunging fire on an opposing force so let's say i'm shooting at knights in armor who are safe over there out of range how many shots can i get off before they meet my line i think the answer is with this kind of device probably not more than two and i think probably one because i think the point blank range is going to be less than 100 yards and i think you would hold on to your one shot until maybe the horses and the other enemy were 50 yards away and then try and do as much damage as you could as quickly as possible and then hopefully your foot will uh keep them at bay while you reload that's why these were devastating but slow firing the crossbow is now ready to shoot it doesn't have a bolt on it i am now going to put that bolt on it be very careful and shoot it down range making sure you keep your fingers out of the way and trying to get this at 45 degrees i think does that look like 45 degrees i think so shall we shoot we'll do a countdown three two one shoot it's got quite a kick and the trigger is really quite robust i pulled it didn't actually trigger and then pulled it harder and it shot so it's a bit of a delay there but that's interesting it's got a very simple mechanical trigger and with all of the power that's pulling on it it um it is not a subtle trigger release and there's quite a chunk of vibration went through my body when i released this there's a lot of power in it it hasn't gone as far as i thought it would do so that went about 118 120 paces which was a bit disappointing i thought it might go a bit further than that but still a fair range and it went that far into the ground the ground's quite hard at the moment so i had to pull it quite hard to get it out of the ground now i don't know what that means in terms of the ability to penetrate flesh or to get through any kind of armor of any sort but you know it would still it fell and it was at about that kind of angle so it wasn't maximum range but it still went into the ground quite deeply which i thought was interesting but it didn't go anywhere near 200 yards let's try a few more to see whether that was a fluke whether it was underpowered or whether i was doing something wrong [Music] [Music] huh you wouldn't believe it but the rope has perished and broken so i've had to tie it up this is another problem with this kind of equipment there's a lot to go wrong so i'm going to see whether i can actually get it working again i have to do some kind of battlefield emergency repair i have a suspicion though that tying a knot will unbalance the whole thing and it won't work very very efficient system but there's a lot to go wrong with it which is interesting all right let's try that one more time well my expedient repair seems to have worked uh it's loaded let's have another go three two one shoot a hundred pesos so roughly 100 meters roughly 100 yards i mean who cares we're using paces they went to reasonable distance past it went about 30 paces beyond so 125 130 paces that is a reasonable distance maybe my siege crossbow is underpowered or isn't doing working particularly well i don't know maybe the bolts are heavy particularly heavy but it's nowhere near the 200 to 250 yards that i've read about in various books um maybe people just sometimes assume these things and nobody actually goes out and tests it but 120 530 paces is a lot short of 200 to 250. it's still a decent range though if you're on foot that's going to take you some time to to cross the distance but remember those bows those crossbows don't shoot very frequently very quickly either in fact they're really quite slow i think if you're against horse the horses are going to be 200 yards away and fairly safe they are going to be able to close the distance to you as a crossbow line in i don't know 15 20 seconds is my is my estimate doesn't give you very long i reckon you're going to be shooting not at extreme range but at point blank range against a mast cavalry trying to bring them down in about 50 yards away from you i don't think you're going to be lofting if you loft you're going to be lofting into foot that are marching in close formation towards you and that might mean you'll get two three shots off who knows it's an interesting experiment the bow itself is quite ferocious it's got a real kick and i imagine the impact would be fairly significant you're just not going to get many impacts so i'm going to go and gather up the bolts and discuss in a bit more detail my thoughts about this whole thing this video is a bit of a funny one because i was in two minds about even putting it out i thought we might as well just abandon it because so many things went wrong and then i thought actually that's interesting in itself things do go wrong on the medieval battlefield and the more complex the device you have the more things there are that can go wrong and that reflects on battlefield efficiency and the ability to win wars this is the crossbow and we didn't do all the tests we wanted to do with it partly because i stopped because the crossbow itself was beginning to fray in places that was a bit alarming you really don't want to mess around with a thousand pound draw weight piece of steel if it looks like it might break because when it breaks piece of metal expanding thousand pounds it could hit you in the head and do some serious damage if not quite frankly kill you so we decided to call it quits and get thing repaired this crossbow itself was serviced very recently and in the experiments we were doing over a day it frayed in various places and i think that's interesting because that possibly means that in one battlefield encounter one battle itself some of the crossbows would be very close to failure if not actually failed on the battlefield of surprise to me was that this particular crossbow and the bolts i was using didn't shoot nearly as far as i thought they might 250 yards perfectly standard range i think for a heavy crossbow this went 130 yards that's substantially less now it might be that the bolts are not matched to this crossbow properly it might be that this crossbow is not working as well as it should do which is maybe why it's fraying in places so it's possibly not a perfect crossbow for that kind of thing or it may be my technique is wrong or any combination of those uh those things a crossbow is an individual machine and i imagine provably some are better and some are worse so you would hope on the battlefield that your crossbow was as perfected as possible if you had a number of crossbows like this in your armoury of a castle i think they would need to be looked after quite often they certainly need to be serviced on a regular basis and before you were going to take them into battle you'd probably want to make sure it was serviceable make sure that the string itself hasn't perished like this one and make sure that the trigger action works nicely and everything is greased so perhaps if you had a moment before a siege you could repair that and prepare it in the days before but if you just grabbed one of these from the armory and expected to use it and expected it to work perfectly i don't think that would have been the case i think you would need to maintain this kind of heavy crossbow quite a lot more than you might expect how fast can a skillful crossbowman load and reload this kind of crossbow well i think roughly 20 seconds 25 seconds however if something goes horribly wrong if you put your windlass device down and it somehow lands funnily and it gets twisted you're going to be spending quite a few moments trying to untangle that and untangling things as you know the more panicked you are when you're trying to untangle things the worse it gets i think if you tangled up your windlass you would probably not get another shot off in in that battle because when you start you're going to have the crossbow spanned and ready your first shot is arguably going to be whenever you can take it you've then got to reload which is going to take 20 25 seconds the cavalry at 300 yards are going to be able to close that distance in about 30 seconds i think it's likely that you would have one lofted shot at the cavalry if you're really lucky with light bolts perhaps to get to the 250 yards and then you're going to be frantically trying to reload and get a single other shot off at point blank range before the cavalry are upon your line that means that this crossbow if it was in a battlefield scenario an open battlefield scenario is probably only going to get two shots off if the enemy are serious about trying to run you down with lances things break on battlefields swords get chipped and blunted lances break bits of tack on the horse get broken as well and armor falls off and the crossbow is no different crossbows get worn out and start to break i wonder whether if you started with 500 crossbows whether 450 will be able to shoot the first set of bolts and whether at the end of the battle let's say the battle lasted an hour whether a hundred would actually still be functioning to any degree i think it's quite likely there was a sharp fall-off in the ability of crossbowmen to repeat uh repeatedly shoot which i think is probably a bit different than a longbowman and it might be one of those hidden things that needs a bit more investigation there is so much to go wrong with a crossbow and if for example your crossbow string breaks you need a special device to re-span it you're not going to be doing that on the battlefield you'll have to go back talk to a specialist engineer and get it restrung which means you're out of the battle with the longbow you can carry a spare string with you and if your string breaks well you can put another string on and keep shooting and that wouldn't take you too many minutes the thing with a broken crossbow is that it resembles well it's a very badly designed club you could probably hit somebody with it it would be an expensive club probably isn't very efficient it's quite heavy though so you know you crack somebody over the head with this and they'll know about it but that's not what it's designed for and it's certainly not what the quartermaster is spending their money on supplying to you being a crossbowman was a profession i expect they had particular ways of handling the crossbow servicing it maintaining it and using it on the battlefield people talk about crossbows as something you can pick up and use and and yes you can you can't just pick up and use a longbow you just don't have the physical strength to do it you could pick up and use a siege crossbow but would it be practical in the long run would you be breaking it would it be breaking i think for a beginner a crossbow is much easier to use than a longbow but i think it would probably break down a lot more than a longbow which is an interesting balance of abilities and potential i think for a weapon

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 1,626,913

Keywords: documentary, history, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, crossbow, siege crossbow, disaster, D&D, role playing games, Kentucky Ballistics, Medieval, engineering, medieval crossbow, windlass crossbow, powerful medieval crossbow

Id: T-ONNJ4HIIE

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021