Posts: 1,525 Location: Sydney, Australia
Tue 03 Apr, 2012 11:29 pm
also at
crecy in particular, what KIND of
shield was used by the men at arms and how OFTEN were they used
and what kind of shields were men at arms, particularly ones dismounted to fight on foot, use around the time of
agincourt?
ive also seen this suggested to me quite often,. to do a rough test of the effect of arrows on armour, get a dummy of wax or ballistics gel, stand him up, put him in a reasonable approximation ofa harness of the period or even 2 or more dummies in a variety of armours for example, a crecy armour side by side with an agincourt armour
, and have archers plug arrows at the dummy at successively closer ranges, i.e start at 200-150m, shoot a number of arrows assess the effect, then move closer by certain intervals.
this primarily would be to test the agreed phenomenon of the fact that a large number of arrows fired at a host, increases the chance of hits sliding into armpits through vision slits etc.
one guy shooting at reletively close range at a target doesnt give much of an idea of the group mechanics of a cloud of arrows striking a target
or of arrows raining down onto a target in terms of parabolic arc fire,it would also assess the grouping of arrows at longer ranges, although that factor isnt as hard to quantify
the only issue with adummy in a harness, is that a dummy lacks certain normal movements which might suddenly expose elements like the face, the armpit, the throat etc. i.e the normal movement that rocks the arms back and forth during walking, the sudden raising of the visor.
in australia, the greco roman society the sydney ancients conducts a similar experiment during their battle of marathon reenactments every couple of years inviting people to bring along a bow and safety arrows, (though due to safety regulations, of combat archery, the bows could only have a maximum poundage of 30lb's and arrows were rubber combat archery blunts) and shoot at a column of hoplites as they advanced, to assess the frequency that arrows would hit vital areas i.e legs arms, heads etc. iin 2011's reenactment, there was about 16-20 archers and 16 hoplites
the archers made VERY few direct hits on any part of the hoplites legs were hard to hit, shots to the helmets often just glanced off, andthe rest of the body was protected by shields.