Six Medieval Arrow Types - What are they for?

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hi its Tod of Tod's workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to talk a little bit about longbow arrows of English longbow arrows now the first thing I'll say is that the myth and legend that surround the English longbow it just makes it obscures so much hard information because there's so many people out there who just absolutely say this is it this is fact I'll tried quite I'll try not to be one of those people and that's not what my channel is about so I will say it the way I believe it to be and explain why I think that and then we'll take it from there I have six different arrow forms here and they're all during various points fairly normal kind of arrows so we will start with the armor piercing bodkin this is fitted to war bow shaft let's say between 30 and 32 inches long depending I think Mary Rose is about thirty and a half inches I think and traditionally the cloth yard shaft was supposed to be 32 inches I believe so in a way 30 and a half to 32 inches for an a shaft iron or steel head upon it which has four faces now the four faces are quite important because if you imagine taking a round arrow and trying to shoot that through steel what then has to happen to the steel is you you deform it you have to break through you have to deform it and stretch it until it's wide enough to allow the arrow to pass. Now that takes a great deal of energy, it takes less energy if you cut four cuts in it and then those steel panels get bent back in a very characteristic shape. The sort of four triangles get bent back leaving enough room for the arrowhead to pass. But... and here's the but... to try and pass arrows through armor I have yet to encounter anybody who's really successfully done it through what I would consider to be a decent piece of armor so if you take something like a Agincourt they would make armour out of iron largely at the time perhaps is a bit of Steel there but upon the breastplate for instance in the front of the helmet the thickness can really get quite high so sort of maybe three millimeters or up to eighth of an inch kind of in that direction and I see people on YouTube or wherever it might be and they're putting arrows through one point two millimeter steel they've even seen cheats where people have pulled out an aluminium plate and go look it shoots through steel! It's like uh, wrong colour. So again you look at the historical treatise and you talk about French Knights for instance fearing that the arrows will go through the breaths of their helmets not through their breastplates but through the vents of the helmet well that of course might be a bit of a lot of a weak spot so yes he would consider that but towards the end of the Hundred Years War what the French were doing to effectively defeat the English archers was heads down walk slowly bunch up maybe but basically makes sure all the gaps are covered and they were pretty impenetrable so the whole thing about English arrows shooting through armor yeah sure it happened occasionally if the armor was bad or it's a weak spot or is a lucky shot but essentially essentially it didn't really happen that's my understanding of it. Now the other thing that's very interesting about these arrowheads is of course wrought iron is the cheap material to make them from but wrought iron doesn't keep a good cutting edge here and you do need a good cutting edge and again most modern reproductions is just done at mild steel which is a bit harder than the wrought iron but not a great deal you could fashion them completely out steel but that becomes an expensive process so what you see in records is you see arrowheads where it says arrowheads at X price or if they are 'steeled' they are a higher price now we don't really know the definition of the word steeled, what they mean by that, my guess because it would be appropriate to the arrowhead and they certainly could do, is that it's case hardening so you can take five hundred arrowheads pack them in a box full of charcoal clay pot bake that in a fire or eight hours ten hours and a very thin film of carbon impregnates itself into the surface of the iron or the other low-grade steel and you end up with a absolutely super hard steel jacket around the arrowhead. Now, metallurgical analysis hasn't shown that in any arrowheads that I know of but there is the argument that the layer is so very thin of high carbon steel on the outside that actually it just be rusted away in all cases so I think it's never been proved definitively but if you ask my opinion these things only ever stand a chance of working if they are made from a super super hard steel or in that case case hardened a super hard steel jacket on fundamentally a wrought iron core so that would be my take on the armor piercing arrow this is a Needle Bodkin, now as plate armour came in so this is very much a 13th 14th century item now as plate armor came in this long needle upon the end it's just going to bend so that's going to be no good at all for plate armor which is why it got shorter and stubbier for the plate cutting arrow heads now this long one is to defeat maille (mail) so actually it is less important it doesn't cut so much as poke its way through the rings but essentially that's just got one ring that it needs to defeat before it can pass deeper yes it's got the padded jack beneath it and so on but this makes it an easier Arrowhead to make the technology of it the steel that's required is fundamentally a low-grade wrought iron would basically do it so there's no need to steal these ones or to case-hardened them but this of course fell out of use as mail fell out of use so by the time you get to about 1400 these things are not you're not facing mail on a battlefield anymore or not so much and not against knights anyway and so these sort of arrowheads have fallen out of use then we get the last of the military head so have here which this is quite an aggressively barbed one but nonetheless it's it's true for sort of type 16 as the classic ones where the barbed sort of comes in I suppose you'd call this an open type 16 I guess you've got to cutting faces here now that of course will not defeat Armour it will not go through mail and it will not go through plate just simply it's just the wrong shape but it is of course very very good at going into flesh that's the whole point of it you've got these barbs here now as you can tell from my dress up here I'm on a reenactment at the moment and one of the questions that often comes is well how do you get the arrowhead out and people go "oh do you push it through?" it's like well, that's what it's an inch wide 25 mil wide that cutting edge if it's in your leg let's say it's not that deep in but it fits in your leg if you've got to push that through yeah it's gonna hurt it's going to do all those things but the other thing you've now absolutely committed yourself to perhaps a devastating arterial injury that you simply didn't have before and you're making a much bigger wound you know so basically you're not going to do that. Can you cut it out? Well yes you can cut it out because you can't really pull it but you could put a slit there and sort of like probe into the slit but yet again you're just increasing the wound size that you've got and if there's one thing about medieval people we know they didn't necessarily have the technology we had but they had the same brains we've got they feel the same pain and they weren't stupid so they find a way and one of the ways which i think is just beautifully simple is that the arrow goes in and and as you can see now it's catching on my flesh I can't pull the arrow out without it ripping my hand apart now if it goes in well, you need to find a way out to get it out so you can take a pair of feathers these it's just a goose quill and if you poked within the wound you can just poke it on going deep into the wound and you see there it now lodges on the end of the barb and the barb now can come clean off my hand without any danger of it hurting me. Now what I will say about this feather technique is, and it's one of the dangers actually in truth of not being an academic and not following my sources up, is I've known this "fact" for 20 years that this is how people would remove an arrowhead where I came across that I actually simply cannot remember I have no idea how I know this or why I know this and as a consequence I can't actually tell you that it's true, however when people are getting shot continuously with arrows, as happens in warfare, you find ways, you find solutions to problems and I would put quite a lot of money on it that this was would be, one of, the methods for withdrawing an arrow particularly if you can't find a barber surgeon who's got all the specialist tools and so forth because of course they existed but if you can't afford them you can't find one where you make do don't you and some clever guy in your band is going to work out that that's all you need to do and you can pull your arrow. And the next we'll talk about is a very simple leaf shape, now this sort of form was certainly used by the Saxons presumably the Vikings also and to be honest probably went back way before that and it just carries on and carries on through the medieval period and it's just a simple leaf shaped Arrowhead it's wide it's got a cutting surface so it's going to be good for sort of good levels of penetration but also is going to be good about against moderate sized game so something like Boar perhaps, certainly in Saxon and Viking times and I'm guessing in medieval, I don't know, but it would also be a sort of a war head as well so both hunting and war I'd put that type down as. Now this is an interesting one. I know it's a Swallowtail head and it is a very broad cutting head. Swallowtail because it's like the shape of a swallows tail and it is typically a hunting head. Now this is fitted to a hunting shaft. Now what I will say actually about all of these arrows is that they are the most disgusting condition possible and they're just part of a reenactment kit that's just been left in a garage for 20 years or something and it is embarrassing but it's also there. Now the thing about hunting and we're going to come to Gaston Phoebus we're going to talk about him in a minute, he was an author around about just before the Year 1400 who wrote some fantastic books, Illustrated, all about medieval hunting, extraordinary things if you can find them and what you see there again and again is that men are not shooting from 100 meters away or 50 meters away they're doing it from really close. They're stalking, they're getting right in there and the reason for that is, and I can tell you because I've done it, is at 25 meters (25 yards), if you're watching the man who's shooting the bow you can step aside from the arrow (I did it with blunts by the way I'm not that brave or stupid) but you can step aside from the arrow and if I can step aside from the arrow at 25 yards sure as hell a deer is going to hear it and start and run and you'll miss so you've got to get very close now the other reason that you get very close is that these big veins on the front they steer the arrow itself so the long shaft length allows some stability and it's good stability because of the long shaft but still you've got these big vanes on the front and that wants to steer it in other directions and so it is never going to be a very accurate arrow, now what is particularly the case, and I discovered this myself, is I wanted to put them on to crossbow bolts. Big swallowtails like this and you see it throughout things like manuscripts like yes of phoebus you see these big arrowheads on these crossbows I shot that at five six meters yards and I shot the Swallowtail straight at the centre just testing it out and no kidding aside it literally it went down and it rose again and it's what swept in and so this whole bolt this crossbow bolt over such a short distance went like that Italy unusable and very annoying because that's what I wanted to fit now I can only come to the conclusion that the illustrations that you see in works there guess the fever's what they're doing it's a very medieval thing but they're highlighting the fact that these crossbows had hunting heads on them and so they're drawn bigger than they would otherwise be that's my premise on it because I've tried it and I just cannot see it I had to cut mine right down to about 28 millimeters (inch and a bit) something like that in width before it would start behaving yourself this has large cutting faces that would be sort of chopping up razor sharp really and so when that goes in the chest of a beast a deer or something what you really trying to do is to make the thing bleed out as fast as possible so like an armor-piercing head although that stuck through the heart of a deer or something it's not going to do it any favors it's still gonna run and it in dense woodland it can run far enough that you can't find it and it's not leaving a massive blood trail because the arrow shaft is plugged in the hole that it's made one like this you're cutting 50 mil 2 inches wide or maybe more with a small hole plugging it so you get a good blood trail that you can follow but the other thing that's interesting about these is that when they go in if you imagine that this is the chest of the beast and this is the muscles on the side as they move as the thing runs it stirs the arrow shaft around and so if it is sharpened up razor-sharp it does move around and and you can kind of see that it can actually walk itself deeper so the actual action of the beast running causes it more damage so this will allow the beast to drop as swift as possible and then the last of the arrows were going to come to is a mystery or at least I believe it to be a mystery now talking of Gaston phoebus again you see this crescent-shaped head again on hunting crossbows you see that quite a lot why it's this shape I have no idea I can't imagine but they're not necessarily as people say for hunting birds because they're not shown in that context they're shown in the context of beasts boar and deer in such things I haven't seen a manuscript with this on a longbow so I don't know for certain that they are longbow arrows maybe somebody out there does but you do see them on crossbows I've heard so many different versions of it I've heard that there for birding I've heard for goodness sake that they're for cutting rigging on ships I've heard many different things but there are two things about them that I know one you see them Gaston Pheobas in hunting scenes where they're hunting beasts not Birds the other thing I know about them is if you do shoot them onto the ground if your roving in a field or something like that and your arrow if it hits the grass will just otherwise bury itself these do stop catch and fall over they act like in the modern archery sense, a judo point, they keep the arrow on the surface and that is also correct saying that a wooden blunt upon the end and I think they would probably used a lot actually a wooden blunt upon the end does exactly the same thing it doesn't bury itself in the ground so there we have it really we have six different arrowheads longbow heads six different varieties all fitted to very poor condition arrows, I'm sorry about that, and that is my take on what they are, what they're for and and how they did it, thank you very much.
Info
Channel: Tod's Workshop You Tube
Views: 1,619,568
Rating: 4.9129171 out of 5
Keywords: Arrows, Archery, Medieval, Reenactment, Longbow, Bodkin, swallowtail, todsworkshop, rope cutter
Id: McnKrV0aDjo
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)
Published: Wed Jun 05 2019
Reddit Comments

We make videos about Medieval stuff, including archery and crossbows. We've got more archery related stuff coming soon.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/Stoma_Cake 📅︎︎ Jun 17 2019 🗫︎ replies

Good video, very informative! We will excuse the poor quality arrows, but only just this once!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Splintzer 📅︎︎ Jun 17 2019 🗫︎ replies

Just watched this video last week! loved it. The half moon arowhead appears in many cultures, but no one seems to know for shure what they where for! they really intrigue me. I think a roman record told about an archer that beheaded ostriches in the coloseum!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/fractalake 📅︎︎ Jun 17 2019 🗫︎ replies

I loved the info in this video. The feather removal method is fascinating.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/wenisforever 📅︎︎ Jun 17 2019 🗫︎ replies

i watched that video already it was fairly interesting

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/higgs_bosoms 📅︎︎ Jun 17 2019 🗫︎ replies

Great video. I still want to know more about armour piercing arrows though. There seems to be so much contradictory stuff around.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/So_average 📅︎︎ Jun 18 2019 🗫︎ replies
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