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.
We make videos about Medieval stuff, including archery and crossbows. We've got more archery related stuff coming soon.
Good video, very informative! We will excuse the poor quality arrows, but only just this once!
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!
I loved the info in this video. The feather removal method is fascinating.
i watched that video already it was fairly interesting
Great video. I still want to know more about armour piercing arrows though. There seems to be so much contradictory stuff around.