Arms and the Man
From Science - 3 June 2005 pg. 1406
Edited by Constance Holden

Swinging swords around for hours on end left its mark on the bones of Medieval soldiers.In fact,their right
arms resemble those of baseball pitchers,according to researchers at the University of Bradford in the U.K.
Forceful, repetitive movements make bones bend and thicken in response to the stress. So anthropologists
Jill Rhodes and Christopher Knusel reasoned that Medieval swordplay should have produced skeletal
distortions.They looked at the excavated skeletons of 10 men who had died of sword wounds between the
10th and 16th centuries.The right arms showed changes in shape and thickness similar to those found in
professional baseball pitchers, Knusel says.“Swinging a sword is very, very similar [to pitching]. It’s an overhead
type of motion,”he says.The changes weren’t seen in nine uninjured male skeletons in the same York
cemetery, they reported in last month’s American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
The authors also reported on 13 skeletons buried in a mass grave after the Battle of Towton in 1461.
These men showed different changes:Their left arms were bent and thickened. Knusel says the skeletons
may be the bones of archers who held their powerful longbows with their left arms.
Kelly DeVries,a specialist in Medieval military history at Loyola College in Baltimore,Maryland,says this
technique should be useful in the emerging study of battlefield archaeology. It could help sort out the
archers from the swordsmen, or knights from the casual soldier he says.

This is very interesting. That just shows how long and hard Medieval solders trained.

Nice to know someone is applying their common sense to these questions. Maybe someday they will excavate the future graves of Rod Laver and Bjorn Borg and conclude that we still used swords for warfare in the 20th Century.

Here's a link to the article: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary...06a?ck=nck

I wonder if the stress was actually from swinging a sword? Still cool information though.

I know I sound like a skipping CD sometimes, but I'll take this opportunity to recommend getting Blood Red Roses. Scroll down this page, read the review and click on the title to go directly to the appropriate Amazon page:

http://www.myArmoury.com/feature_books_team.html

It's an outstanding resource, with detailed forensic data.

One of the interesting things about the new findings is that they suggest not continuous warfare, but continuous training. The left arms of the longbowmen were so dramatically altered because they trained with the weapon from the earliest possible age. I would assume that the same is true of the the right-arm changes seen in the current research. So, this could be forensic evidence of orderly, sophisticated training in Western swordsmanship. That may not add much to what we already knew from artistic and literary sources, but it's always good to have science on your side....

I double-checked, and you're right, with some slight exceptions.
Starting on page 108 there's a nifty entry called "To lay my body in my bow": The Physical Consequences of Archery. According to the conclusion, "The left arm (bow arm of the right-handed archer) seems to posses hypertrophy of the elbow; whereas, the right humerus (the draw arm) demonstrates hypertrophy of the shoulder"
So, it seems that the exercise did cause some change, just not as asymmetrically or profoundly as I thought. Cool stuff....

Thanks Sean, nifty stuff! I recall way back when, in an old National Geographic from around 1980 or so when Wolstenholme Town was excavated, that they did a forensic reconstruction of the skeleton found there, and by the over-development of his right arm concluded that he was a professional swordsman, and therefore probably the Lieutenant of the settlement who was known to have been killed there at that time. Boy, the wounds on his skull were ugly though...

Cheers,

Gordon

I Got a big question about sword play

i will try to explain this as best i can
this question mainly pretends to a swing after death
can one sword holder who just took a massive death blow to the gut or chest be able to if still swinging his sword kill his Enemy? in any why shape or Form or will his sword basically fall from his hands because he just got to week from the mortal wound ?

Bodies do tend to change shape if an activity is pursued over many decades: On a personal note, I've been training with weights since around 1984 and if I look at my back at a 3/4 angle in a mirror there is a great deal of a V shape going from shoulders to waist. Most untrained people viewed at this angle just look like a vertical up and down from armpit to waist.

Now the effect is sort of spoiled by being overweigh and I don't look so great from other angles. ;) :lol:

With archery using heavy bows for decades there should be a difference if both sides of the body are compared in arms and shoulders since the exercise is asymmetrical, but both arms/shoulders would show the effects of years of stress and effort.

This is an old Topic thread so I'm certainly repeating some things that where said before, just summarizing and hopefully adding a little something different.

As others have said, it depends......

Here is a link to a nice article on the subject, that uses modern medicine and forensic science, along with historical accounts.

http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.php

The Dubious Quick Kill, part 1 Sword wounds and the circulatory system
by Maestro Frank Lurz

Make sure you read part 2 as well.

it is important to keep in mind that people are rarely perfectly asymmetrical and genetics play a large part in how our bodies develop. I'm played contact sports (rugby, judo, kickboxing, and BJJ) and done weight training for years now and have a fairly well developed body (ego trip here :p ). However the right side of my body is considerably thicker and stronger where as my left side looks more lean and athletic. I have a fairly pronounced V-taper (46" chest 33" waist) and my back looks quite strange as my right lat connects about 1-2" lower on my torso than the left side. While this would make it appear that I train my right side more heavily the reality is that my training is quite balanced and most of the men in my family have this muscle imbalance.

That's not to say that the findings of this study are wrong in any way, it's just that it is quite normal for people to show more development on one side than the other.