The Secret Fight Master Of The Middle Ages | Medieval Fight Book | Chronicle

[Music] in 1459 a book was written that contained images so bizarre that even 500 years later their meaning is still shrouded in mystery it depicts improbable medieval siege engines and machines of war figures and extraordinary apparatus and bloodthirsty jewels but key information is missing from the manuscript and the author is displayed cryptically holding a broken chain why was this manuscript ever written and who could have unlocked its full potential this book will reveal the secrets of a medieval age far more advanced than future generations would ever imagine [Music] deep in the vaults of the royal library in denmark is a book over 500 years old it's time-worn leather cover bears one simple inscription talhoffer the mysterious fightmaster of the middle ages this enigmatic book is written in swabian an ancient german dialect and contains 300 colour pages of images and text offering an astounding account of life in the middle ages [Music] this is talhoffer's actual 1459 manuscript beautifully executed with colors as fresh as if it were painted yesterday and there's talhoffer himself in the center dictating to his scribe the coded imagery and text within this manuscript has the potential to dispel the very beliefs the modern world has about the medieval age was combat and warfare technology really as primitive as we imagined did knights act as chivalrously as depicted in victorian times and was the population as unsophisticated as history suggests this is an incredibly important document because it tells us so much about this mysterious world it's really a kind of box of secrets that we can open for the first time the royal library in denmark have allowed the manuscript to be filmed and a team of experts from around the world will investigate the mysterious images and text within by using cutting-edge computer graphics and attempting unorthodox fighting techniques it's actually making me sick to my stomach decoding the book's puzzling designs and constructing its enigmatic machines underwater now the team will test the methods and technologies in the manuscript and attempt to establish just how authentic talhoffer's depiction of the medieval age really was talhoffer's fight book has laid dormant in copenhagen's royal library for over 200 years but 500 years after it was written the manuscript has reemerged in the public eye with martial arts students worldwide seeking its medieval fighting techniques one fight master who has dedicated his life to learning the fighting stars of the middle ages is john clements clements is one of the world's leading experts in the field of medieval martial arts we know very little about talhoffer as a man about his life so he's a mystery in that regard but we do know he's a master of the art of arms that he's a knight that he is a teacher and instructor of nightly fighting arts talhafer has dedicated nearly half the manuscript to medieval combat and within these pages are numerous plates focusing on the violent and mysterious world of judicial duels they are clearly identifiable by the marked area the combatants were forced to fight in many of the images in this manuscript are concerned with fighting in the judicial duel now the judicial duel was a curious institution when somebody had accused somebody of something and there were no witnesses there was no evidence then trial by combat was the way you found out who was telling the truth on the eighth plate of his fight book talhafer describes why a person will be called forth for judicial battle murder treason heresy disloyalty betrayal falsehood or using a maiden or lady those that broke these laws would often be forced to face each other in judicial combat [Music] illustrated in talhoffer's manuscript is a bloody portrayal of the medieval population locked in these lawful battles violently dispatching their opponents with a deadly array of weaponry including one traditionally designed for defense that had been modified to kill aaron pineburg knows all too well the advantages of a shield against an enemy i'm a swat officer in appleton wisconsin i carry a ballistic shield in front of me as my primary duties that shield and this shield share a lot of common traits in that it can interfere with your vision with your ability to see your enemy if you can't see your enemy you can't kill him so it's important that when you use a shield you understand that there are times when you give up that protection or that defensive capability to see your opponent [ __ ] this huge spiked shield or pavis from talhoffer's manuscript is believed to have its origins in the 12th century where shields were regarded as an acceptable weapon in dueling for the common non-noble classes its cruel spikes and sight-like hooks are used to devastating effect in talhoffer's manuscript and john and aaron will test whether the shields could really be used as the fight masters claimed we're going to try these weapons out we're going to see how they move how they perform how the plates from tauhoffer hold up to physically reconstructing it and applying what we know of the fighting arts that he displays to ensure any chance of victory in a judicial shield battle two techniques outlined in talhoffer's manuscript hooking with the shield to expose the opponent and planting the base firmly in the ground to create a more effective barrier would have to be utilized i can see how that's what you'd be doing and look at how quickly they lock up yeah i saw that i thought i can lock and pull planting that shield and then working around it using it as a barrier between me and the enemy is incredibly fast you see the holes because the holes are created between the two junction of the shields such was the shield's effectiveness as an offensive weapon that a sword was not even required to dispatch an enemy and leave the judicial ring victorious i can say we clearly could see that the the techniques from talhoffer's manuscript absolutely apply under the over the the displacing the warding the hooking the thrusting uh all the footwork all the motions they're all there this is a vicious ugly type of fighting and i have a lot more respect for it although unusual to see combatants fighting merely with shields it's not the strangest image in talhoffer's manuscript another set of plates involving judicial fighting redefines the battle of the sexes contained within this section of the manuscript is a fight between a man and a woman it's a type of duel a dispute that has to be settled by combat to the death it's the first appearance of man woman dueling in a fight book this image of a woman battling a man is a far cry from the image of the medieval woman uninvolved in the violent world of men medieval women were much more powerful than they've been given credit for and especially through the 14th century they gained more power and were able to run businesses and things like that and it was only the renaissance when things started to go wrong and women were seen as more passive and inactive the evidence in the manuscript suggests that in some cases women were even able to fight a man in a judicial jewel this is a really really difficult image to decipher because certainly what you do have at this time are very strong women i mean women are left to run castles while their men are fighting it's laid out as if this is something that did happen but you wonder what the kind of legal reason for that would have been a man and a woman might be forced to fight like this because of any number of disputes it might involve property it might involve inheritance it might involve accusations this is a ritual combat it's a semi-religious affair and they know that only one of them can emerge alive even more disturbing than judicial battles often being fought to the death is that some interpretations of the text imply that the combatants may have even been husband and wife a recreation of the duel could provide valuable insight into why the couple was forced to fight in such a bizarre manner it would be interesting to reconstruct one of these judicial combats as a living archaeological experiment to understand something about the physical components of the fighting actions and the techniques and also something of the mental and emotional component of the combatants [Music] the hole in the weapon fulfilled multiple functions firstly they balanced out the fighting inequality between the sexes and secondly just like the judicial shields the weapons were deemed suitable for commoners they gave her a heavy rock inside of her veil to use it like it's a flail it's not a manly weapon it's not a war weapon it's not a self-defense tool but they're clearly saying here you can use this it's going to be lethal bash's skull in bethany hughes will test the effectiveness of a rock and a veil against the skull of a sheep when you're up close with all this gear you realize this was certainly not play fighting i mean this thing is heavy in my hands and i imagine just one of these is going to be a killing blow [Music] [Music] that is actually sickening because if you can imagine that would have been a real man's head he would never have survived a blow like that so if tauhoffer was depicting reality rather than just some theory then this would have caused a huge amount of suffering in the medieval world this 1542 image of a judicial duel between two nights suggests that such violent justice was part of the medieval world and in 1228 there is even a case in switzerland of a woman defeating a man in the same violent manner as depicted in talhoffer's manuscript [Music] the garments worn by the combatants which they were literally sewn into ensured that they could not conceal anything that could be used in the fight it was also possible they were made of leather and treated with oil to be made slippery so non-fatal grappling moves would be ineffective and only a decisive killing blow would end the ritualized combat first off i'm sewn into this garment i'm buried it basically halfway up in a hole i'm not going anywhere i'm literally figuratively stuck here i feel absolutely demeaned the reach advantage i thought would be to the woman or to the person outside the hole but in actuality i'm not having a problem it's kind of like a strike for a strike almost i'm learning that it's a hard to strike the head at the same time as be aware of the club you have to be very fast on your feet to do both but with a little practice i think it would be okay and practice was exactly what combatants could get this is a type of combat that these participants would have entered knowing when they're gonna fight how they're gonna fight and who they're gonna fight weeks in advance that has to affect their psyche and it has to affect their training [Music] a closer examination of the manuscript reveals that talhoffer wasn't just depicting a generic image of the jewels each plate contains specific moves that with specialized training could be used to defeat their opponent i'm dumping her on her head and i'm bringing this club down right after her and i'm gonna probably crush her or stab her there's nothing she can do from here it is possible that talhoffer included these specific images in his fight book to train the combatants and earn an income it is recorded that he had the responsibility of being judge in judicial duels a perfect vantage point to learn the most effective death dealing techniques combatants could learn these methods from talhoffer most likely for a fee to ensure victory in the eyes of both the law and god the conclusions that we can reach tentatively about this kind of duel it's let us understand it's brutal it's set up to cause a decisive outcome this is the world they lived in a violent age a violent world but talhoffer's vision saw beyond the restricting circle of the judicial duel not satisfied with merely recounting in bloody detail his field of expertise he turned his attention to the machines born of war the 16th plate of talhoffer's manuscript depicts a siege engine used extensively throughout the medieval period this is a great trebuchet where with one may throw stones and break cities and forts talhoffer was a fightmaster not an engineer so why would he include siege engines in his manuscript and where did he get the designs for these machines of war taloo was not the only secret war book we have in the medieval period in europe when you look at all the manuscripts you can see different machines copied in in all the manuscripts these images in talhoffer's fight book have been taken from conrad kaiser's 1405 belly fortis and peter wemming thinks he knows why talhoffer included them within his manuscript i see them more like a cv or something this writer engineer wants us to present his work to a king or whatever to get a job simply as that siege engines could tip the power balance and would be vital for warring factions attacking castles and fortified towns that covered the medieval landscape a machine from talhoffer's manuscript could provide the key to ensuring victory in this war-torn land it was in effect a medieval arms catalog [Music] talhoffer lived in what was called the holy roman empire which makes it sound like it's one consolidated block but actually these were warring tribes boring kingdoms where everybody was at each other's throats the whole time unlike the original roman empire where you had one centralized military force everybody had to fight for themselves and in these battle-scarred lands men who claim knowledge of the mightiest of siege engines would more likely be in demand from wealthy and powerful patrons this is a manuscript that's been very deeply researched it must have been incredibly expensive to produce and talhoffer you imagine must have expected some kind of financial kickback from all of his work talhoffer didn't stop with merely claiming knowledge of common siege engines the fightmaster's ambitions saw him present even bolder designs in his arms catalog and no machine was too radical for his visionary mind so many exciting machines in this book and this one is one of the more ambitious of the designs the swabian text above the image when translated reads one shall make two wagons of this form as viewed from below from there within the wagons folk combat those outside they fight with the guns and the lances the lorrication is all around them in two dimensions the machine is difficult to comprehend but once it is fully realized in three dimensions its mystery is revealed [Music] the design and telhoff's manuscript is almost unbelievably depicting an armored tank the reference to lorrication in the text is a term describing plated armor but how could such a heavy protected vehicle ever be moved it's a tank it's possibly the first tank we have to interpret things you can see how this comes off the page here well the text tells us that there are two carriages that it's pushed by horses so there are horses in here harnessed up so it's going that way this is a machine designed to go into the enemy but what's it do when it gets there well look it's got one two three four five cannon on each side this is 1459 but gunpowder has been around a while these cannon are drawn with such detail you can see the touch hole on each of them driven by a team of horses and mounted with cannons such a war machine seems improbable in medieval times did this tank really exist and how vital was the heavy armor protecting it a replica of a medieval cannon similar to the design and talhoffer's manual has been built by historical experts in denmark by 1459 cast iron had been invented in the west but it was only really used for cannonballs and they couldn't yet bore and drill through a solid block so they made it in the same way they made buckets and barrels they made it with staves single slats of iron that are held together by hoops just like they are on a barrel and that is why it's called the barrel of a gun [Music] by 1459 cannon technology was available that would allow multiple firing of the weapons from within the safety of the tank a technology that is the distant ancestor seen on today's modern battlefield by around 1450 they had developed the breach loading cannon that meant you could put the cannonball or the hail shot in at the breach end and the secret to that technology was this the breach pot in here you pre-prepared you poured your gun powder in there and that was sealed with a wooden tamper the breech loading technology could allow a gun crew to fire two or three rounds a minute but how much damage could these medieval cannons really deliver look at this look at this it's just smashed through these boards it's made a great big hole here we go look there it's gone right through that in a musket shape oh it's this could have been a paper screen so one thing that tells me is our tank would have to be an armored vehicle if you're going to take that vehicle into the enemy because the horse is behind and the wedge in front look like you are then you must be armored because the enemy have got cannon just like that [Music] it's hard to imagine such a sophisticated machine in the medieval age an age perceived as containing only primitive technology but other historical sources besides talhoffen depict medieval tanks suggesting that they were more than just the fightmaster's imaginative fancy but not all objects in talhoffer's manual have such evidence to support them alongside the tank is an object even more difficult to comprehend [Music] we always get very excited about inventions of greece and egypt and rome but actually this book is packed with incredibly ingenious inventions um one of my favorites is a very weird thing that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie and we think it's called the crayfish this rig is called a crayfish it conducts itself upon four speeding wheels it shears front and behind if one kindles munitions then it shoots stones before it steel buckshot is a hail where with once mites load the foes historical reproduction expert richard windley will attempt to decode the image of the crayfish and bring it to life talhafer's crayfish is one of the most puzzling and enigmatic designs in his book he tells us that it was made of iron so that's helpful and that it runs on four speeding wheels and there's some kind of munitions inside it and frustratingly he says you make this rig as big or small as you want which really doesn't shed too much light on it so really it's trying to work out what it could have been and more importantly how it could have been deployed so bearing in mind all the various clues that we've got from the drawing i've produced a design which incorporates as many of these elements as possible from the designs and talhoffer's manuscript richard will build the model to get a true sense of the object's capabilities [Music] here for possibly the first time in 500 years talhoffer's crayfish is revealed [Music] it's got all the main features that we get in the telhofa illustration we've got the big spikes at the front we've got the cutting scimitar blades here and also the extensions on the wheel which will cut and maim if anyone gets in the way [Music] richard has proved that the crayfish is a realistic design but its construction doesn't answer the question as to why or where it might have been used [Music] in a medieval castle or fortified town one of the most vulnerable points was the gates and these would need to be protected from attacks at any cost mike loads believes the crayfish could have been the perfect defensive system how about if this the crayfish was in a castle gateway or a gateway to a fortified town then you could see the ropes that made it go to and fro were embedded in channels in the flagstone floor that would be very effective because you could have a man inside the wall working a windlass to make it go to and fro if there were four five six of these going like this who would ride a horse through that who would dare to run through that it would take you off at the ankles and what is more the text tells us it has explosive devices in it that would send out a hail of shots richard has incorporated this devastating explosive weaponry in his design of the crayfish there is a removable panel on here which means we can get at the fusing for the grenades now these are made to simulate cast iron and it probably would have been full with metal fragments something that's going to cause debris to fly in all sorts of directions you really want to do some damage with this and take out as many enemy personnel as we possibly can tal hoffa saw enough in the design to include the crayfish in his manuscript by combining all the team's research we can now visualize in computer graphics what such a device may have looked like in action defending a stronghold [Music] in theory the crayfish was capable of repelling an enemy at the very threshold of a fortification but for an attacking force to get that close in the first place was never an easy task talhoffer again appears to have the right tool for the job but the question remains did it work there are a number of ways you can take a castle or fortification you can dig tunnels underneath it undermine it you can do an escalade which is taking ladders and siege towers up to the walls and piling over the top or you can simply try and blow the gates off but how do you get your bomb to the gates well one idea is to use jamie here in his armor and say well you're wearing armor just walk up to it but up there are going to be archers [Music] the power of a war bow at short distance against a knight's armor could penetrate it at certain points and if an archer was skilled enough he could find the joint in the plate male and kill the man inside [Music] risking nights like this would have been far too a costly method to storm a city's gates but talhoffer's manual seems to offer a solution terry jones one of the famed members of the monty python team is renowned for more than just comedy he's an expert in medieval history but some of talhoffer's depictions of siege warfare appear strange even to him talhoffer's manuscript shows a lot of surprising images i mean there's one here and these people walking up to the castle under these sort of metal bells i mean how did they get them off in the first place very pythonized to me and here's this castle that's being protected by two huge cushions outside the front door very odd the description above this cryptic image gives little information away see they are going towards the fortress with the basket they should lurch around within the shelter of the basket they go we know that so much in talhoffer works because things like trebuchets have been built and tested so we know that he's talking about workable things but when we come across something like this that's so bizarre so weird you think well would it work and of course the only way to find out is try and replicate it using the clues that are there so let's build it let's shoot things against it and test it and this is what the team thinks the medieval siege device may have looked like we've had to guess at the material some people say it would have been cast like a belt others say it would have been plaid in plate armor i think that would have been far too heavy one material used in medieval times could have provided the strength of iron without its excessive weight hardened leather is tough it's what armor was made of during the middle ages a lot of poorer nights were clad in creole boiled leather hardened tough leather so much importance is placed on what this device is made of because of what scholars believe the structure was used for getting men to the very walls of a castle under siege and surviving as the siege bell drew near to its target it would have to repel attack from very close range if the men inside were to survive so i'm going to give this the ultimate test we're in extreme close range less than 10 yards and ben here is shooting a very very powerful bow of 80 pounds draw weight with a heavy war arrow do your worse ben [Music] i expected that to punch right through and it hasn't it's penetrated but it hasn't really penetrated that much certainly one of the guys inside is bleeding but he's not dead that is remarkable stopping power i think if we were to double this thickness we really would have something of genuine defensive capability [Music] a second layer of leather would reduce arrow penetration significantly and still allow the siege belt to be carried by two men it is feasible that such a device could make it to the walls of a castle with its occupants alive perhaps for those looking through talhoffer's arms catalogue and desiring the siege bell it is possible they could acquire the information about its construction from the fightmaster at a price the satisfied warlord could then deploy it in any way he saw fit placing a bomb delivering a letter of ultimatum or retrieving a fallen comrade in the field of battle but a castle under siege would have more than just arrows at its disposal when i look at that it's designed for one thing and that is to withstand an aerial shot if you're coming up to my walls and i've got broken masonry then i am going to hold them on top of you [Music] that has got a good structural shape and even very big boulders i think with that central strut in the middle the guys inside their heads are going to be okay [Music] but the correct military knowledge these drawings and talhoffer's manuscript have been transformed into a two-man siege bell but it was the armor on a medieval night that took this protection a step further by allowing the individual inside a far greater freedom of movement the knights featured in talhoffer's 1459 fight book are primarily involved in violent and bloody activities talhoffer was trained as a knight and would know their ways intimately [Music] the knights of the middle ages are far removed from the honorable warriors that we perceive them to be today [Music] they were more akin to brigands some even robbing and killing rich merchants that cross their lands or battling each other in violent and deadly duels ah we think of the middle ages as the knights in shining armor fighting under the laws of chivalry but of course the truth was actually different [Music] chivalry was an idea but the whole concept of knighthood it was a cult of violence it was violent young men killing each other or preferably killing innocent citizens honorable knights rescuing damsels in distress isn't the only dubious portrayal of these medieval warriors it was lawrence olivier who was responsible for the misconception that armour was terribly heavy in his film henry v he showed knights being lifted onto the horses by cranes but in fact of course you couldn't fight if that was the case [Music] with many of talhoffer's plates dedicated to knights it suggests he was targeting serious fighters to sell his services too but more specifically those with money for a night's armor was expensive the term for an armor in the middle later with a harness and you can see it's like a harness it's all different bits that go on and every single bit has to be tailor-made for the body anything that's not quite right will pinch and rub this is probably about 60 pounds of metal on him but it's evenly distributed and it gets a lot of its strength from its shape these are glancing surfaces a sword will glance off them so these curves give quite thin plates remarkable tensile strength [Music] for it to be truly effective a knight's armor had to allow the freedom of movement to match the swiftness of a lesser armored opponent on the battlefield [Music] and also let a knight climb or mount a steed quickly but the design couldn't compromise on its protective capabilities and it had to be able to withstand what is perhaps the pinnacle of medieval metallogy the long sword in many of his depictions of fighting techniques talhoffer reveals the weapon's deadly efficiency the craftsmanship that went into these blades meant that they had the potential of being the most formidable weapons during the middle ages what i've got here is a talhoffer long sword it's based on one of the illustrations in his 1459 manual this sword has a balance point about two inches in front of the guard which means that the blade can rotate easily about that point the heat treatment on a medieval long saw blade would have been incredibly sophisticated they were making a blade that would both hold an edge and would also flex during use is quite amazing very very sophisticated workmanship the heat treating on a sword is a two-part process which is the quenching which makes the blade hard but ever so slightly brittle and then there's tempering which is a lower temperature process of about 200 centigrade which makes the blade flexible again [Music] it's combining an awful lot of things it's got devastating cutting power and fine balance [Music] but despite a medieval sword blades technology they still weren't able to cleave through the hardened plate steel of a knight's armor with a sharp historically accurate robust blade designed for fighting armor you're simply not going to get through to wound him with an edge blow it doesn't matter how hard i hit him or where i hit him i can't cut through the armor with edge blows but a single plate in the fight book reveals a long sword technique against at night almost forgotten by the modern world an unarmored man might be forced to fight an armoured opponent due to rules stated in a judicial duel or in the field of battle or beyond the city walls trying to escape from the robber knights tahofer gives us the way of fighting a knight and beating him and that is through the techniques of half sorting where we're going to try and get that point in his visor underneath his helmet into his groin behind his knee under his arm where he would normally have a chain male armor protecting him but even then the point is going to penetrate this technique of half swording used on unarmored opponents and relied on the fact that some medieval blades were not sharp their entire length and could be gripped when using specific fighting techniques and one such move would make an opponent's armor almost irrelevant the interesting features about this sword are that not just the blade is able to be used offensively the guard and the pommel are both pointed and if you wanted to you could use those as an active part of the weapon telhofar shows that besides the point you also can use the hilt effectively to knock him about the head to bash him with the pommel or the pummel may even be where the phrase to pummel someone to death comes from striking with a hilt like this is like smashing with a warhammer it doesn't look very lethal but the mass and the weight on it is actually has a tremendous amount of force behind it and it will knock him senseless john clements is going to try these half sword techniques against a knight in full armor to test their effectiveness [Music] [Music] [Applause] i'm so dangerous and potentially deadly in this thing that there's really not much i can do to try and hold back at all i mean i'm committed and once i'm committed the suit has a weight and deadliness all to its own fighting unarmored against armored knight such as tel offer shows in his plate i felt obviously more agile and quicker but it didn't make that much of a difference he wasn't so slow that i can take advantage of it i saw openings but i can't get to them because he's all over the place but what i was able to do was hit with that hilt we know these techniques we train these techniques to go all out and fully do it and to see that pommel smash and put a dent in his armor and see him pause because of that blow that was uh that was enlightening you're good well in honesty i'm still feeling the effects of that pommel strike from the from earlier when he hit me with the rear of his sword the pommel on the end of it so much momentum carrying right through the armor that's actually making me sick to my stomach and i'm having a hard time catching my breath and staying in the fight because i'm just sick i felt it through my whole body this is the helmet he was wearing here it's a historically accurate reproduction it's the right thickness of metal the right kind of metal and uh the dents that were put on it it's not easy to dent this kind of helmet this kind of metal and when i threw the blow i could see him react i was frankly pretty darn surprised that uh i could get it in there with that kind of force we train hard we train in these moves from tau hoffer and tel hofer specifically shows this technique in his image of an unarmored fighter against an armored fighter it really does validate that technique despite its brutal imagery and title talhafer's fight book was not entirely focused with the martial arts and warfare contained within its pages is material from many facets of life in the middle ages including this bizarre image its purpose like many in the book is shrouded in mystery these illustrations are extraordinary here we've got frogmen people in diving suits this is 1459. [Music] the head is covered with a hard helm be it that the water runs strongly then you should burden yourself with weights so that you may submerge and emerge again too talhoffer tells us so much in this manuscript there is so much information but there's also little key bits of information missing and this is a classic example we've got a diving suit but he doesn't actually explain where the oxygen comes from perhaps he needs us to go to him to pay him to tell us what that missing bit of information is but could a diving suit actually exist over 500 years ago at the medieval center in denmark historians have built a diving suit from images taken from another 15th century source but does this technology really work this helmet is slightly different to the one that we see in the telhoffer manuscript what we see depicted there is what's actually known as a frogmouth helmet very appropriately for a frog man it's a frogmouth helmet which is used for jousting the point is you need a solid helmet to put the air in it basically what's going to happen is this is going to act like an air bell a very simple primary technology the first of its kind and i'm very glad that he's doing it and not me although the secret to supplying air to a man underwater is not revealed the likely technology required is contained within the manuscript a set of bellows attached to an air bladder historical engineers found that getting this technology to work wasn't as easy as they initially perceived when you have a big amount of air in a big bellow that you need to compress to get it down to the diver you don't have enough force to press it into the hose and down to a diver so we had to go back and make three small bellows with very long levers on so you have a lot of power to pump the air it's a lot of hard work to work the bellows they need to be pumped really hard and fast to to get enough air down to the diver but i think we're about ready are you ready guys ready one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three we've got to buckle that front and back because as the air goes in then this would float off it once it's in water but already the guys are pumping away here he goes down we've got to keep this pipe straight and there he is in the water really get pumping he's underwater now you can see the bubbles it's working this is fantastic you can see this technology technology that was thought about probably before 1400 and it's working that man is underwater and he's breathing and he's breathing through this pipe for those guys pumping on those bellows it's quite extraordinary the test you see here is limited to 10 minutes but in medieval times a diver could stay underwater for as long as there was a supply of men to pump the bellows this is the technology that put men on the moon the idea that mechanical contraptions can override our biological limitations your whole face is dry it's extraordinary his whole face is dry the diving suit is one of the medieval world's great achievements and the version depicted in talhoffer's manuscript appears to be more advanced than the suit the team in denmark has just tested it is closer in design to the closed air systems we have today and is more maneuverable and better fitted with the air likely designed to escape from the sleeves and not around the face talhoffer does not reveal why the diving suit was used and possibly this and all the other information the fightmaster excludes from his manuscript is the answer to the image of him holding a broken chain could it be that talhoffer was the missing link that made his 1459 fight book complete for this manuscript offers us a glimpse into the violent and complicated world that we're only just beginning to truly understand

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 47,109

Rating: 4.8937583 out of 5

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, talhoffer, talhoffer manuscript, talhoffer fight book, medieval combat documentary, the art of medieval combat, medieval mystery, bettany hughes documentaries, bettany hughes medieval

Id: A_zte0l-WFc

Length: 50min 7sec (3007 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 28 2021