Why are medieval KNIGHT'S SHIELDS that SHAPE?

why was the medieval knights shield so often this shape hey folks matt easton here scoreless gladiatoria now this is such a famous shape of shield we've got another one up there a symbolic one with the club logo on and it's such a famous style or shape of shield that in fact we just kind of recognize it as a knight shield whether it's a lego man or playmobil or a cartoon anime whatever if someone has a shield even the early captain america that is this shape you think of a medieval knight but why well why first of all is because they were used by medieval knights there's no question about that and i'm not gonna uh like pull out any great twists to the story in this video but the question is why why was this shape of shield so universally associated with the european medieval knight why did they end up with this shape of shield and why did no one else have the shape of shield well indeed the first thing we have to establish is yes absolutely categorically this style of shield sometimes known as a heater shield incidentally and we'll talk about the way that it's held and strapped in in a bit as well but this particular shape of shield known as a heater shield in the victorian period and since largely because it looks like a victorian period cast iron iron for ironing your clothes not at all a period term we don't know in fact um certainly i've never seen any medieval references to this shape of shield just simply known as a shield so as far as we know they didn't have any specific special name for this style of nightly shield possibly because it was just so common and so normal they just called that a shield but the fact is that yes absolutely this was used by medieval knights or men at arms we should more correctly call them because not all of them were knighted between the let's say the 12th century and the 16th century now caveat that slightly the ancestors of this shield were actually used before that and we'll talk about that in a second and where this shield came from and equally by the 16th century this wasn't a very common type of shield to find around these really this shape of shield kind of saw its last heyday should we say in the 15th century but for nights and men at arms shields whilst they were still being used in tournaments and they were being used on the battlefield various types of shields this type of nightly shield wasn't used very much in war anymore by the second half of the um 15th century but certainly still around quite a lot in the first half of the 15th century so it saw several or a few hundred years worth of use and if we include um if we include the predecessor that to this it really stems from the 11th century you could even perhaps debatably say the late 10th century so really we've got several centuries there of use of this style of shield but we must also be very categorical to state that this was not the only style of shield used by knights in this period there were other styles of shield which i'm not going to go into in this video because they are worthy of a video of their own topic but yes absolutely elongated long sort of rectangular shields were used highly curved rectangular shields were used round shields were used and variations of this type of shield as well and i might talk a little bit about those but there were specialized versions with cutouts and flutes and such like and we'll talk about that maybe towards the end of this video but i want to say before i go on whilst i'm going to go into in some detail about the development of this where it came from perhaps why other people didn't have it i am going to give one uh reason while i've been formulating this video and thinking about the topic over the last few weeks is my opinion of why this type of shield is not seen more widely widely outside europe for example so where did the heater shield as well call it because that's a fairly common modern name for it even if it's not historically correct where did the nightly heater shield come from well quite simply we we know that it's fairly easy to answer and many of you watching this will already know it came from what's commonly called the kite shield again the the norman kite shield is not a historical name for it it's just the type of shield that was popularly or should we say most famously used by the normans now we should also mention that the normans weren't the only people using these styles of shield this style shield which is held in the same way as the later um heater shield these types of shields came about probably around the year 1000 a.d okay such that by famously by the battle of hastings 1066 bayer tapestry we see pretty much everyone on both sides there are some exceptions you see some round shields and some uh kind of um oval type shields almost uh almost sort of oblong um but most like 90 something percent of people on the bear tapestry using this kite shield but we do also find it in other artistic sources from the period we don't have as far as i know any archaeologically remaining incidentally but we do find it in other art sources and we find it from art sources all over europe we find it from the west to the east from the north to the south and of course the normans did and their predecessors the vikings did of course have contacts all over europe whether it's down in the byzantine empire and down in sicily all the way up to scandinavia all the way across to russia and all the way across to spain and in fact beyond to north africa as well and the islamic states on the north of africa and of course remember spain at that time there's quite a bit of spain was also under um muslim control so this type of shield is also to be found incidentally outside what we'd commonly think of as europe today and it is found in certainly in north africa and you could say almost stretched to what we'd conventionally now call the middle east um so this type of shield did see a wide amount of use and although we commonly refer to it as a norman kite shield it actually spread beyond that and if we look at the first crusade at the end of the 11th century we actually see that this type of shield was probably being used it was certainly being used by the crusaders by all of the crusaders regardless of where they came from but it was probably being used by some of the forces they were fighting against as well so this type of long shield did see an awful lot of use and i think there's very little doubt that this did give rise to the heater shield and we can see the development from this to this shape now before we talk about the development from the kite shield to the heater shield we just want to briefly consider what is special about this kite show because this actually was a big leap certainly in most of europe this was a big leap from what had gone before so what had gone before well the the so-called viking shield as lots of people would call it is actually pretty much the universal type of european shield at that time and most importantly it is boss gripped okay so your hand goes into around a handle in the center and it is covered by a boss now this is a type of shield that goes all the way back into antiquity all the way back to the bronze age and we can find boss grip shields right the way through the roman era early migration era and this was this kind of universal word gripping shield now they weren't all they weren't all flat they weren't all round they weren't all the same size so commonly we find that the viking shields surviving archaeologically seem to be bigger than the should we say anglo-saxon shields from the same period so it does seem that size varied depending on where you were equally a lot of artwork shows these as being convex and curved and so that's another variation but the one thing they all have in common is they are gripped in the center now as you'll see in the towards the end of the viking era so we're talking about the 10th and 11th centuries we move to having a strapped uh strapped in arms as they're commonly called so straps whereby you're on go through one or two and holds the third one now there is some debate this is possibly a slightly later arrangement of straps and there are is some debate so this strap which goes around your neck the geese there is some debate about the arrangement of the original straps but we won't get into that detail in this video again that's worthy of a video of itself but you'll notice and lots of people ask this on my channel matt why does your kite shield have a boss on it well quite simply because the early ones in art are shown with bosses on and almost certainly this is tradition and this is a vestigial remnant of boss grip shields and you know people are sometimes slow to change with technology sometimes they just have in their head well you know a shield's supposed to have a boss in the center there are some people argue that this has a practical purpose for uh somehow stopping weapons or spear shafts sword axes whatever sliding down the face and it might have a benefit even to binding against another person's shield possibly some people even say it's about striking the opponent i don't believe that so much because you can do that with anything pretty much especially the shield rim i think this is probably just a leftover of technology you'll notice it's become very small so even if this had a grip in the center you couldn't your hand wouldn't fit into this little boss so i think it's a leftover it's just a bit of tradition i believe but i accept that other people have other ideas and i'm very interested in those ideas but the important thing is this is strapped in some way now the question is why did they move from boss grip to strapped and this does connect to the fact that we've now got this long tear-dropped shape of shield well i'll come back to that in a second but first of all i want to say well where did this idea for having a strap shield come from now i believe that it may have been a norman innovation and introduction to europe due to their contact with areas outside europe because actually if we start to look outside europe during this period then indeed we do find shields which have straps of various kinds on the inside and they are from predominantly islamic areas which the normans were in contact with so the normans were in contact with the with north africa and obviously islamic spain various areas near to the byzantine empire and some of these the possibly the persians um and some of these areas did use shields that had or sepa as they'd be called in persia that had styles of strap on the inside and i think that might be it's not categorical but that might be where the normans or whoever else the byzantines maybe got the idea for these strapped shields so i think there was a lot of different cultural exchange going on around the year 1000 a.d and this led to strapped shields now the question that we come to next therefore is why did the normans want to switch from what their ancestors had been using a boss gripped round shield either convex or flat why did they want to switch from that to a teardrop shield with straps on it and my answer is probably not at all revolutionary and a lot of you will be shouting this at your monitors right now your phones wherever you're watching and that i think is probably predominantly to do with cavalry okay so the one big thing that the um normans did with their style of warfare was highly mobile cavalry forces supported by fortifications known as castles uh modern bailly type castles that they sprung up in areas they wanted to control and they operated highly mobile forces cavalry forces from there now this wasn't an entirely new thing of course there were other cultures doing that in other parts of europe further to the east in fact in the islamic kingdoms as well to the south they were doing that and the west they were doing similar types of warfare this kind of highly mobile cavalry forces with multiple weapons and importantly the normans were a product partly of their viking ancestry which was perhaps not as big as some people have made it but also of the the various peoples that made up what's now france and so the franks and so on and so forth so the the people of normandy had this uh frankish style of warfare from carolingian times now under charlemagne um in the 8th century he had had knights as they would later be known um like like his hero roland who operated highly mobile cavalry forces and they did actually operate in some ways very similarly to the later normans and they were inspired partly by islamic forces that they had fought against as well as other people to the east like the avars as well and so they had highly mobile cavalry forces just like the normans why didn't they develop special shields because they were using boss grip shields um i can't answer that question i don't know if you've got any ideas i'd be um happy to hear um those but what's interesting is a lot of the forces that did use uh outside of europe that did use highly mobile coverage forces did have strapped shields now in case it's not obvious why do you want a strap shield if you're predominantly a cavalry force well quite simply because it enables you to use the reins of the horse more easily okay so it frees your hand up to hold the reins it means that you can move you can move the reins around and still have the shield close to your body and in front of you it is more inconvenient should we say to do that when you've got a boss grip shield not to say you can't do it and in fact not everyone held reigns so of course we do know about some people using bows from horseback when they're either not holding the reins at all or there's some tales about them holding them in the teeth there's people that use glaives and naginatas and things like this in the far east from horses without holding the reins and indeed there's uh earlier if we go back to the roman era there's certain types of saddles which have prongs on them so you don't have you don't have stirrups either but you may not hold the reins in those situations either so there's there are ways you can get around it and there are ways you can operate as a cavalry force with with boss grip shields but i think that the normans probably wanted a shield which sorted their very specific style of cavalry warfare but also something very specific about their style of cavalry warfare so for centuries people had been using shields and spears on horseback uh in warfare this was nothing new however what the normans seem to have done is they seem to have combined the use of the uh longish spear known now of course as a lance i'm just using a wing spear here for because the i don't have enough space between me and the camera to use a lot um and the shield and they couched it now this is not something that they did universally and i have to say i think that some historians have made a little bit too much of this the fact is when we look at period artwork and we see the normans using uh on horseback using the spear and shield we see it used in the conventional old overhand stabbing way we also see it used in the underhand stabbing way as well so and this obviously depends partly on whether you're in gay if you're actually doing a cavalry charge or if you're engaged in a melee or if you're attacking um infantry on foot for example and you're trying to get over the top of their shields over the top of their shield wall so there's a lot of context wrapped up in this whole thing but the fact is that we know that in this period the couched lance on horseback together with the shield were two things that started to become more important and also the use of stirrups as well which have been around for a while but which seem to have formulated into this more shock hit heavy um heavy cavalry charge that we start to see in the norman era start to come in and i think that that almost certainly is where the importance of the kite shield comes in because by tucking yourself in behind it and this coming down the side of the horse it forms a very complete protection and you can have your lance right against the shield and your helmet which leaves only a small opening behind here which means that you're essentially presenting to the enemy a spike out the front and a fast moving wooden wedge essentially because your shield is completely sloping off to this side with this edge of the shield on this side and completely sloping off there so in theory their lance can come in and hit here and slide off and if you can find an opening with your point you'll impale them or their horse in the same moment now of course this tail protects your leg it provides a full protection all the way down your abdomen and thigh when you're on the in the saddle on the horse but it also to some degree protects the side of the horse as well and importantly if we're actually attacking over here so if the lance is going over the neck of the horse and we're striking someone on that side it means that the shield is presenting a full protection all the way down my body and protecting part of the horse as well so it's a very very good shape shield for that purpose so the kite shield is very very well suited towards this type of heavy shock cavalry charge where you're trying to hide yourself as much as possible behind the shield now one of the questions we have to ask of course in the middle of this topic is given that the normans developed this kite-shaped shield why did most of the rest of the world who were also using cavalry forces also with lance's similar type of horses similar period type of warfare why did they not develop a similar type of shield um in in other places for example why did the persians not use this style of shield well i think there's a number of points we need to address about that and it's a very complicated topic and almost certainly i could do a big video just on that topic alone but i'm just going to skip over it with some a few points a few light points first of all i think it was the normans and this era in europe that specialized in this heavy cavalry shock uh using the couch lance using the stirrups um to to to deliver these very heavy shock charges and it's in that context that this long shield probably makes the most sense additionally unlike charlemagne's earlier cavalry and unlike should we say most um you know persian cavalry or indeed if we look at north african cavalry the norman knights or knights of the norman era doesn't necessarily need to be from normandy were quite specialized in their weapons and equipment okay they wore heavy mail as much of it as they could get for the period that they were in um they were good helmets with nasals quite protective again for the period they in some cases probably wore some type of chest protection as well as as early as the uh late 11th century we have references to there being additional breast defenses probably underneath the mail but certainly underneath the circode and in addition to that they only really used the lance and the sword yep okay occasionally they had maces occasionally they had axes but essentially they their primary weapon was the lance their secondary weapon was the sidearm the sword or the axe now in contrast to that a lot of other places that made extensive use of cavalry the cavalry often had other weapons they didn't have such perhaps they didn't have such um sort of heavy lances perhaps such long lances but they used bows and they they fought in numerous different ways so they were multi-role they weren't as specialized as the norman era heavy cavalry were so it's my belief in my understanding that this shield is very much it's kind of think of it as a heavy shock cavalry shield um and whilst it can be used in foot and it can be used in other contexts and you could say it's an early ancestor in the way of the pavis and it's not that different if you use it on foot to something like a roman scutum it is a bit but not hugely um so it can be used in foot but i think for cavalry most cavalry wanted a shield that they could sling on their back or their horse and use a bow um they could easily dismount and mount up quickly with it they didn't necessarily have squires and attendants to help them um with with all of their stuff so that it was probably they wanted more versatile lighter smaller shields because they had a multiple role whereas the norman type european cavalry heavy cavalry was more specialized in its role so that i think that's why it ended up with a specialized shield so gradually this developed into the nightly heater shield as we'll call it the simple change was that the top was essentially cut off now initially we start there is a change in size and i'll talk about that as well here but we do see a slight shortening of the teardrop of the of the bottom and we start to see the top initially it gets less and less curved and gradually it becomes straight sometimes as i mentioned earlier you even get cutouts and stuff and later on really in the 14th late 14th century we start to see sometimes a cut out here for the lance to come through which some people might think of as a specialized jousting sort of affectation but in fact we do see these cutouts and other funky shapes uh on certainly an artwork shown on the battlefield as well so i actually think that the the heater shield sometimes with cut out shapes to the edges sometimes with some degree of fluting and more or less curved was relatively uh universal certainly through the 13th and 14th centuries um now the two questions are why did the cut top get cut off and the second one is why did the shield get smaller well i'm actually going to address the the second question first here so as for why did it get shorter and shorter i suspect that this is strongly related to the armor that men at arms or knights were wearing at this time so the general tendency was in the norman era for them to actually not have male on their legs so if we look at the bare tapestry for example they've got male down to their knees and then they've got some type of leg bindings below that so their legs were more or less vulnerable in the era of the kite shield but already in the 12th century we start to see male all the way down the legs full male long sleeves and long shorts or trousers essentially and then going into the 13th century we actually start to see um in the 13th century the first leg defenses plate leg defenses greaves come in and pullings for the knees and so on so forth so actually some of the first plate armor we see with any regularity is actually on the legs so i suspect that essentially as leg armor and bear in mind male is uh is a pretty good defense just by itself if it's well made male so male chauces and then later plate additions to those male choices meant that you didn't need such a long shield so i think that's relatively easy to to uh address and also in the 15th century we get the shields get smaller and smaller in general and again that's related to armor development i think so as you've got more and more armor this becomes less and less critical and eventually of course it was abandoned by not always but it was abandoned by lots of knights or men at arms on the battlefield didn't carry shields at all they never fully disappeared they were still around but they were just less common less frequent so armor i think is the answer to that why was the top cut off well that is much much more difficult to answer and i'm not fully sure i have a good answer for you but i've got maybe some ideas okay so first of all i think if you're on horseback and you're wearing a or carrying rather a norman kite shield and your idea is to tuck yourself in behind the shield like this okay what does happen is by having that arch that rounded top you actually block out your vision quite a lot over here but you still want where you want the shield's protection kind of in front of your face here is lacking and then this bit over here blocks out your peripheral vision off to the side so it kind of i think is a vision thing when we cut the top of the uh shield off to create the heater shield here you'll notice that now when i tuck myself in behind it okay i can actually look all the way around over the top of my shield and still have this part of my shield in front of my face what's going on at the back doesn't actually make very much difference although i will point out to you that you'll notice that point actually protects right the way around my shoulder blade so if i'm tucked in here not only can i see over the top and all the way around there but it covers essentially both my shoulders if i'm getting completely tucked behind the shield so i actually think that this particular format ends up you wouldn't necessarily think it but it ends up when it's in this position giving quite a good amount of protection both in the front and in the rear and allowing vision all around which the arched top i think it gets in the way of vision and then it doesn't have protection in the two places where you where you need it so what i'm arguing i suppose is in a way don't necessarily think about the top of the kite shield being cut off but rather think about these corners being built up and if you build up these corners to match the top i think that's actually closer to what we see with the development of the heat shield so there we have it as always i'm very interested to hear your comments your thoughts your contributions obviously a lot of what i've expressed in this video is based on historical knowledge historical fact and some of it is just educated guesswork the fact is some of these things we just don't know we can only have theories but obviously some theories are better evidence than others um so that absolutely categorically the nightly kite shield is very distinctive to uh europe during the medieval period the the sort of what everybody thinks of is the medieval knight shield this is the shape of it and i think categorically it came from the norman kite shield we've looked at why possibly the norman kite shield developed when it did and why it did for specialized heavy cavalry use and probably with inspiration certainly for the way it was held from outside europe i think there was a strong islamic connection to how the straps were held at the back and the idea for doing that and indeed why did this hang around for so long well it obviously worked very well didn't it so it worked as a shield but also i think there's a degree of cultural kind of um recognition even in the period that this was a night shield if you were a knight you had a straight cross-hilted sword most of the time and you carried a lance and you rode a horse and you had a shield that was that shape and it's funny because when we see specialized shields in the um 15th century for jousting or just for warfare in general they almost struggle to try and keep the nightly shape and i think this is partly due to a preconception of well a knight should look like x and so that's what a knightly shielders look like so even though they built in flutes to it and even though they had a cut out for the lance and things like this and sometimes other weird and funky shapes that i think the strong idea of the nightly shield was still present even then and you do still see these in 16th century art and as we know if we come forward in time to the 17th 18th 19th 20th centuries and we look at her you know heraldry and heraldic ideas remember these shields and this is very important as well carried heraldry on the front and in some cases the exact arrangement of that heraldry was designed to fit on a nightly shield so that was another thing keeping the knightly shield in service as it were because it's like well my heraldry has been in this shape for uh 300 years i don't want to change it now so when you have your heraldry painted on your um your grand hall's um you know wall or you have it on your signet ring or you have it painted on the side of your carriage it's still in a shield shape and even today when people win sporting trophies very often they're on a shield-shaped plaque when you shoot a gazelle when people in the 19th century or 20th century shot gazelles in africa are mounted on the wall they're often on a wooden plaque that's in the shape of a shield so the shape of the nightly shield is extremely embedded in all of our culture and sometimes for that reason we don't think about the why and the when and the how because it's just well that's just the way it is and it was the same for them as well so anyway i think it's a very interesting topic probably one i'll revisit as well and i think there are some of the things i've covered in this video which i can unpack into separate little points and go a bit more in depth into some of those but as i say as always very interested to hear your inputs and comments below if you're not subscribed why please do so now give us a like and i will see you back on this channel really really soon for another video on historical weapons and warfare and other things of interest to you guys thanks for watching folks and i'll see you again soon thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 117,749

Keywords: medieval knight, knight shield, medieval shield, medieval war, medieval battle, history documentary, knights in armor

Id: tsK8hYajPKQ

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021