Underappreciated Historical Weapons: the Bec De Corbin / Crow's beak / Raven's beak

oh hey guys hey yeah you guys hit a five shot as well yeah yeah yeah maybe 5 30. 8 30 but i was going to watch a movie afterwards what did you bring ben trusty bastard sword this beauty has never let me down wow well i got my uh my mace of course and my dagger and my redwood looking pretty swagger so ready to go nice i bought the katana because it can deflect anything are you a weeb more like a dwave suck who's best oh that's just unfair greetings i'm shad and in this episode of underappreciated historical weapons we'll be looking at a vicious and deadly one in fact i think it deserves to be included in that iconic kind of medieval pole arms that people more often refer to and what are they well usually it's the hull bird the polax and the bill hook now the bill hook usually sits apart in kind of distinction because it's a more affordable one that was used by the more common soldier and the pollux and halberd are a bit more prestigious because they're more expensive to be made and is more commonly associated with soldiers and knights who had a bit more money well i think this weapon deserves to be included with the hull bird and polax because it's a prestigious type of one it costs a bit more money to make and it also kind of bridges the gap between the hull bird and the polax and so what is this weapon well it is called the crow's beak or raven's beak yet having said that there is a french name for this weapon that is kind of caught on and is actually being used a bit more often in reference to it and it is the bec de corbin which literally translates to beak of the crow which basically is the same as calling it the crow speak or even speak and so you can you can call it whatever you like okay and back to corbin gives it a kind of a unique flavor but look crow's beat gravespeak is also fine and you can see why it's called that because it's very distinct and iconic almost beak-like spike yeah you silly english man come at me with your practice come to my castle with your practical bear excuse me i am getting sick of you i am sick of you what are you going to do i'm done i'm sick of you i'm sick of you come and stop me don't tell i'm like i i do you see what i have here come and get me english man i fight i will what's going on the castle this is fake i can't even touch it i'm using a virtual private castle what do you mean a virtual private castle you see me right here yeah yeah well yeah you're here i am far away in france you're but you're here though no no you only see me because they want you to see me here i am in france in reality a virtual private castle makes you appear here it makes me appear anywhere i want to be and no one can stop me no one can see me i am intangible like the wind what if i really try and and find out where you are uh and just like maybe maybe if i i'm sure you've got an address no you cannot my address is hidden from everything and everyone no crying i will catch me virtual private castle can't beat that very 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corbin sounds cool so i'm probably going to be jumping between the two names in all honesty now as i mentioned i think this is a polar that deserves a bit more love and attention just for how incredibly deadly it is what sets it apart from i guess other other pole arms that can be used especially the primary three that are pretty popular and well known the hull bird the polax and the bill hook there is some interchange between the utility of these weapons which is why i think this one deserves to be you know classified in the classic you know really popular types because of it's equally as useful in a couple of different ways now if we were to compare what's the difference between a vector corbin say a hull bird well a hull bird would usually have an axe head and a spike on the tip and the back now and it's interesting the definitions can get a little bit skewed because usually people say that hull birds are taller okay um and one of the main differences between a hull bird and say a polax is that a polax can be more in the victor corbin kind of size range but then some people say no it's about the actual head and not a hull bird will have an axe head and a spike and a polax would have an axe head and a hammer and so the victor corbin is literally kind of like the the the one that is halfway between both because it has a hammerhead like the polax but instead of the accent on this side has a spike and like the hull bird instead of that the exit has a hammerhead and has the spike like a hulbert and so it's literally like it should be in the family of hull bird and polax because it has one of the combinations that is kind of missing and so it really deserves to be in that group and so some people define the differences between um a hull bird and polax by the configuration not necessarily the leave the length which i generally think is probably a more um a better way of classification because that means you could have a particularly long polax which of course they were or a shorter one just like the spectrocorp in here and also and then it's still you know a polax essentially and same with hull birds and so what we would probably better say is that a hull bird is more usually or as or is more typical for them to be a bit longer but you can get shorter ones and polaxes more typical or maybe it's more 50 50 because i have seen you know a lot of longer pole axes but usually pole axes are a bit shorter and with the vector corbin a bit the same but of course you could have had ones that were much longer as well now the length of the the shaft does affect the type of utility that can be used to because you know the shorter it is the better it is for a close kind of you know con confined spaces but i'd also imagine that'd be a bit more useful say using him on the battlements of the castle so you don't get you're not knocking people behind you but also what about on a battlefield battlefield is interesting because if you have a lot of people side by side having a weapon that's a bit shorter so it doesn't get tangled could be really useful yet you can still certainly strike and get over certain lines and things like that shield walls or any type of infantry formation now that we've come to the battlefield that's where i want to kind of jump on because this is very much what type of this is a battlefield weapon like so like it is it's big it's heavy it's dangerous it's cumbersome and and so it's not one that you're just going to be carrying around for self-defense and on top of like my own experience is that these spikes are dangerous and it's hard to be safe with this thing because everything is death and it's like well uh i'll spike there we'll hear spiders and like just if this fell on someone it would do serious damage like this is a severely dangerous weapon so much so than a lot of my swords because the swords are so in your sheath on the thing there it's hard to put sheathers on this like you need one there one there see if i got spikes on the side for crying i was like everywhere is death and so it's like what are the most primary examples of a true war weapon a weapon for war right here okay a true battlefield weapon like and i have i have cut myself on this because i was putting into the car when i was transporting it right and just because every round is death i got hooked right on that and cut myself so it's dangerous and we have to be really careful storing this thing as a result but also as a result can you imagine how that would you know translate to a battlefield where like you can strike an egg and strike there you can stop like it is a swiss army knife of weapons as honestly halberd and pollaxes are um by the way just mentioning the bill hook um even though the bill hook is uh you know in as a part of these weapons it's a bit more like a hull bird than anything else because a bill hook will have depending on the design there's multiple designs of bill hooks by the way and so generally have an axe kind of head with a hook a bit of a spike on the end and they don't always have a top spike but bill hooks were a very popular uh pole arm especially battlefield weapon because they are much easy to make you could kind of smash them out of one bit of metal where things like this look at all the parts this is actually far more complex things to make i mean have a look at the metal bracing i have here to help secure the actual pole arm head there you've got a discard that's going to be helping your hand from sliding down and so there's a lot of and just forging it all together in one solid piece is going to take a lot more work and as you could imagine it would be a more expensive weapon as a result now if we want to be more specific about the terminology these metal bracing okay would be the lanyards and this the round disc guard is a rondel okay and so yeah all these additional features would make them more difficult to make more expensive and a bit more prestigious honestly than the good old humble bill hook the bacter corbin or crow's beak is a high-to-late medieval weapon and it shouldn't necessarily be confused with the lucian hammer if i'm even saying that word right by the way uh because there's a lot of interesting overlap and some confusion because if you look this up online you actually find the words and names seem to be crossed over i even heard uh or seen what is very much looks to be a bigger corbin or crow's beak identified as a polax and then i've seen what should technically more be a lucian hammer defined as a vector corbin now what's the difference so ellucian hammer is a later weapon very similar to the vector corbin usually with a much longer top spike and the hammer splits into prongs usually four two up two down so there's like four prongs which helps it get decent purchase on when you're striking smooth surfaces like armor and things and that seems to be the more accurate definition or difference between a lucian hammer and one of these and the beco corbin was present more prominently in the medieval period and late modified revolution hammer uh appears in a very late medieval period and is more of a renaissance weapon now then there is the matter of size because size also affects a bit of the definition but this also kind of plays into the same way when you look at say a hull bird a hull bird is essentially a really big medieval battle axe and one of the only differences that has a top spike and then it's really large large enough for two hands and that's basically it because the difference all the other properties the axe heads you know there are different angles and designs but it's got an axe head the spikes are pretty much the similar and then you've got the top spike and so the hull bird is essentially the large two-handed battle axe of the medieval period and we see an interesting thing in regards to the pector corbin it is essentially a very large war hammer and if you look at the war hammers at the medieval period this is a very good representation of what they were like they were smaller than people assume but you've got a hammerhead and the more prominent you know actual warhammers had a spike on the back end an additional hammerhead a spy cat spike end which increased its utility now what's interesting some people have actually identified um warhammers essentially that have a really long spike to be either a war pick or even a bacter corbin and again comes into that kind you know muddle bit of like what's the actual distinction in the definitions is the bechtel corbin a two-handed large-ish type of warhammer or is it defined by the large spike it can get a little bit tricky but essentially the vector corbin is the medieval two-handed war hammer of the time and because of that i think it would be perfectly fair to also call this the pole hammer okay because it's got a hammer head but it raises an interesting kind of discussion as to what end was used more predominantly and if you actually look the victor corbett up on wikipedia it says that the the actual crow's beak and the spike was used as more predominantly than the hammerhead i have no idea where that information comes from um i think that might be free because sometimes they say that the spike is made very stout and solid but of course it would be you would want it to be and there are a lot of situations where i think the spike would be not as useful and you want to prefer to use a hammerhead so to say that there was one side more predominantly used than the other no i think it's like in context i think uh it depends on what you're fighting and there's never going to be i'm always going to prefer using a spike regardless of what i'm fighting no that's going to affect it because people say that this you know big spike here on the vector corbin was primarily made for punching through armor was it let's discuss that but it also brings up the notion of the spike because the spike on the vector corbin is actually more prominent and usually larger but not always but usually larger than the spike on say the hull bird if you have a look at the spike on the back spike on halberds they're usually a bit more stout usually wider and a bit more stab not always but i'm just talking about in the generalities and so people i wonder if that's where they get the assumption well this spike is made bigger more predominantly to be more effective than a lot of the other types of spikes that we see on similar type of pole arms and so it must be used more really not sure because even if even if the armor you were combatting with one of these was weaker made out of a weaker metal that had a much higher chance of actually punching through it would actually need a hit with a significant amount of force not just to punch through but to go deep enough to inflict a lethal wound and that's one of the things that people miss because it actually depending on the type of metal even if it's weaker metal you can punch through with spikes like this i've seen people do tests i've seen people do it tests with smaller one-handed war picks and look are they back to corbin's are they not if they're one-handed like you could call it a better corbin i suppose because it's in the same range because this is like the war pic again of medieval period but so anyway i've seen tests done and they were able to punch through by about that much and this test this documentary concluded that it was an armor-defeating weapon when it punched through by that much it wouldn't have killed the person and what i found really interesting in this test when they hit it in they had to really leverage it to get it out it got stuck that would be a terrible thing to do if you're in a battle like if you actually struck someone and like on a flat plate and it got buried in it and then it got stuck and the person's still alive and you've now nullified your weapon you can't get stuck and that's a really big problem and so to say that this spike is an armor combatting element lacks context because i think there are types of armor that will be phenomenal against but people always assume when you say it's an armor combating you know element of thing they always leap to plate this will defeat plate armor but no because first of all it needs to the metal would need to have been weak enough to even be able to punch through a decent amount and you need more force so all the things i mentioned but then if the metal is even stronger okay because there are there's a spectrum of medieval quality in the middle period that started from mild steel to medium carbon to high carb and then to actually you know properly quenched carbon steel and quenching tempered hardened steel all right and if you get to the cream of the crop the top top you know quality armor this spike is not gonna punch through it with let's see i imagine what type of strength and power you really need to put through it to actually get through but more often than not this is metal against metal okay if this is hardened and that's hardened you know it's like it's going to be blunted or be damaged and more often than not it's not gonna get through hardened steel this is not made to get through plate in my opinion what's it made to get through mail and gambeson's this would be devastating against mail all right and then combat plate was it the spike was it the hammer that's what i think this is for okay this is a multi-purpose weapon that helps you combat armor of different types and it's not that the spike is universally good against all types of armor no because if it was why would they have a hammer there this is a multi-purpose weapon and so when you're coming across armor that's really thick and robust and solid plate you would hit with the hammer the hammer would be out of transfer a tremendous amount of blunt force you hit someone even if they're wearing a helmet in the head with this that's gonna strike with so much concussive force like the the person's head is going to be accelerated from the knock so much that their brain is still going to ricochet on the inside of their skull from being struck with the hammerhead like this that that's what it's made to do and you could knock someone out even through a helmet with such a powerful hammer blow you wouldn't be able to do that with the spike and more often than not because especially a helmet that has curved surfaces the spike is going to skip and get knocked to a side and slide off because armor was made to try and encourage that with this curved surfaces and so no the spike in my opinion is not a universal armor combating part of this weapon and it not necessarily was the main striking part of the weapon to think and i wonder if it goes from the name where it's called a crow's beak back to corbin so people assume that that's the spike that is the the main thing no it's both and that's why i think you could call this a war hammer or a pole hammer just as validly because the hammerhead is as lethal in certain contexts in science and context more lethal than the spike okay one should not be raised above the other but it kind of is in the name but it is the defining feature as well but in terms of utility that's my view on it when i really start to think about it both depending on context and yeah like this spike against mail and gambeson because one of the other things what is uh more what's better at trying to absorb blunt force shock well gambeson's are man i would still whoa i'm not sure how well actually that's just as i tap this is a thick padded gambeson so it's got padding right and as i tap my arm like that that's a decent amount of force coming through that could do siri even the hammerhead so definitely the victor corbin both the hammerhead and the spike are the main deal of course the top you got the top spike like look at that unlike a lot of weapons that i look at in underappreciated historical weapons i actually own a properly made real version of it which gives me a unique opportunity that i haven't really had in other episodes of this series and that's to show you some of its actual damage potential and so for the sake of science but also fun of course let's uh let's just see how much damage you can do to this uh old set of drawers that uh is set to be thrown out as you can already see and so first up let's do a hit with the spike [Laughter] no resistance at all that was vicious now this isn't really scientific you know perfect i set up for some science but this isn't you know we're not doing its mail and it's not like you know uh specifically accurate to anything really like this is the crappy wood but it is to just kind of show by implication the amount of driving force that this thing has and so you can kind of extrapolate it based on how much results we get here to what you could kind of expect to see in other mediums and so now let's hit with the hammer oh oh something happened that i actually wasn't fully expecting then the hammer penetrated the wood completely as well as breaking it in half and so i was actually almost expecting that it would just break the wood in half not actually penetrate it now that is really significant because it goes to show you how much force is situated on this small hammerhead okay now this actually has the decent like it's so concentrated that it just busted through the wood like it wasn't even there that's that's huge anyway let's do a side hit now like it busted through completely oh i guess it's a perfect square-shaped hole um again it concentrates force on such this is why hammerheads you know in the medieval period like actual warhammer heads they weren't massive small ones look there were actually more weapons made out of wood but the ones that were far more effective and deadly the ones that had smaller hammer heads concentrating that force on a smaller area and all vicious oz the great jester or the meme lord any of the above yeah of course you know he's working with me and filming with me and he really wanted to go so all right i was out now we're being cautious about safety so i've told him you know the rundown just be careful with it wide swings be very mindful of that spike all right and uh have a go you can smell it i had to pick it up like so pause pause now careful of the weapon of spike but let's just see how mangled that it's just it is it is shattered now look it's not super strong wood to from the get-go but you can still get some i guess uh information as to how powerful it is based on how much damage it's doing but this isn't the only thing we can smash up we've got something else more smash more smash ah more smash uh this is why i got you here if you can this is why i've got skies cleaned up this mess hey while you're here chad can you think you could use the hammer to fix that motor yeah i mean usually hit things to try and fix it right yeah yeah okay off and on again with the hammer good idea see that's what i was expecting can you yeah now this is of course plastic and electronics but it also speaks to the point that i have raised in this video about getting stuck in the material you're hitting if it's particularly strong okay now it's going to be easy to get this out because plastic is easy to deform but metal you could be like let's see this actually it might might be maybe i have to say even this is a bit stuck but i'll get it out there there we go but that goes to show you about considering how difficult it was to just release it from this as it would be to metal not a scratch of course all right the printer i forgot it is glass in it yeah so we're gonna have to be do a very careful cleanup because we don't want anyone to step on that certainly did a number [Laughter] psy back to corbin bane of printers and modems and technology everywhere vicious so it is a multi-purpose weapon of death just all around and uh seriously when we think about the classic pole arms right because this is like the missing combination i find because polax as i mentioned towards them at the beginning of this uh video the pollux and halberd have is they're missing a combination you know there's not a combination that has the spike and the hammer together it's either an axe head or a spike or an axe head and a hammer but not an axe head and a spike it's a missing the missing classic pole arm in my opinion which is why it's unappreciated and should be included in the the three the trinity of medieval pole arms and then you have yeah you have the bill hook because there were hook but it's still cool so there we go thank you for watching um i hope you've enjoyed it and you know they're making a very cool weapon very fun to make and also it was a lot of fun doing those skits with the game nights yes uh if you're wondering of my other channel game night is where you will get to see more of them and more skits as well so check that out if you haven't checked it out already but uh thank you for watching i hope to see you then until that time [Music] farewell [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 352,282

Keywords: bec de corbin, polearm, halberd, pollaxe, pollax, polax, polaxe, billhook, knight, knightly, medieval, middle ages, history, historical

Id: 2JBYNcoqZns

Length: 29min 10sec (1750 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021