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Daniel Staberg




Location: Gothenburg/Sweden
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PostPosted: Sat 12 Jul, 2014 12:39 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

The majority of the 1185 bodies found at Visby were unarmoured as only 20-25% of the skeletons were found with armor on them or nearby. Coifs were by far the most common find with 185 found and that they had been left on the bodies by the looters is not surprising given the damage to many coifs as well as the limited value they represented. Also their design meant that they would not have been easily removed from the rapidly decaying bodies.

The majority of the square skull injuries found among the Visby dead were cause by crossbow bolts rather than by back spikes, in several cases the iron head of the bolt was still embeded in the skull or found next to it.

"There is nothing more hazardous than to venture a battle. One can lose it
by a thousand unforseen circumstances, even when one has thorougly taken all
precautions that the most perfect military skill allows for."
-Fieldmarshal Lennart Torstensson.
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John Hardy




Location: Saskatoon SK Canada
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PostPosted: Mon 14 Jul, 2014 2:02 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Daniel Staberg wrote:
The majority of the 1185 bodies found at Visby were unarmoured as only 20-25% of the skeletons were found with armor on them or nearby. Coifs were by far the most common find with 185 found and that they had been left on the bodies by the looters is not surprising given the damage to many coifs as well as the limited value they represented. Also their design meant that they would not have been easily removed from the rapidly decaying bodies.

The majority of the square skull injuries found among the Visby dead were cause by crossbow bolts rather than by back spikes, in several cases the iron head of the bolt was still embeded in the skull or found next to it.


Ah. Thanks for that information. I guess most of the stuff I've read about the Visby bodies has concentrated on the armour finds - and comments about how much of it was found - so I always assumed the majority of the bodies still had their armour on without really thinking about it.

I was pretty sure they hadn't been finished off with polearms to the head after the battle though. Happy

Actually, thinking about it now:

As I understand it, the first and probably most important piece of metal armour any medieval soldier ever acquired was a helmet. After that, it was based on means and status. For a poorer soldier or militia levy, the helmet could be his only piece of metal armour, and he would otherwise rely primarily upon either body armour of padded textile and leather or else (in earlier eras) just a wooden shield.

Virtually no helmets were found with the Visby skeletons, which makes sense to me, as a helmet would not only be the most universally usable piece of armour but also the quickest and easiest one to strip off a corpse.

But if only 1/5 to 1/4 of the skeletons had armour on them, do you think that was because the others were looted before the hot weather ruined the loot? Or is it more likely that they simply weren't wearing any metal armour in the first place? After all, if the defenders killed at Visby were the local Gnutish rural levy rather than the wealthier townsfolk, what percentage of them would likely have been able to afford the 'full metal jacket' treatment?
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Wed 13 May, 2020 2:36 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I've been thinking about this subject again. An important dynamic to note is that swinging a heavy two-handed spike appears to be the most likely way to pierce armor with a close-range weapon. Thrusting probably can't hit as hard, with the possible exception of implausible charges into stationary targets at a full run. Professional baseball players can deliver 200-300+ foot-lbs with their bat swings. Even 200 foot-lbs (271 J) would be enough to defeat (pierce an inch or more) 2 mm of hardened steel according the numbers from The Knight and the Blast Furnace, assuming a perfect perpendicular hit.

A test of a period halberd against a period lower-quality breastplate - both 16th-century I believe - achieved penetration of the breastplate with a thrust from the top spike & penetration of the helmet with a strike from the back spike. Thus, calculations as well as experimental results indicate that swung blows from spikes could pierce plate armor. (It would take more energy than this reliably incapacitate through such armor, especially with a spike that quickly widens, as many do.)

Why then is there such limited evidence for this technique? I suspect it's because of the difficulty of landing a perfect perpendicular hit with a swung spike in practice. We know from test cutting that even aligning an axe or halberd blade is surprisingly difficult against a static target. People sometimes mess up & hit partially or entirely with the shaft. I've done this a number of times with short-handled axes & splitting mauls myself when splitting wood. Hitting precisely at full power against a curved surface with a much smaller point in combat seems dramatically harder. A hammer or blade strike offers greater odds of at least getting a decent hit in & stunning or knocking out an opponent. But the spike was potentially more dangerous, so there would also be an incentive to try it at times.

That's my current theory.
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Henry O.





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PostPosted: Sat 16 May, 2020 10:34 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

From what i remember, Di Grassi claimed that the bill was invented by putting the hook on the same side as the blade so that it could do more damage while hooking, tearing armor, attacking towards yourself, etc. Which might imply that bills which continued to include a back spike as well may intended it more often for armor piercing.

I'm agreed on the likely difficulty of hitting with the back spike even though it had a lot of armor piercing potential. When hitting a round surface like the top of a helmet or a pauldron, even just comparing it to the axe blade, with the blade you mostly have to worry about glancing off if you hit too hard to the left or the right, although with the spike you might hit to the left, right, front or back.

It does seem like the kind of thing that might depend a lot on the "beak"'s shape though. For a full-on, baseball bat style swing to hit squarely you'd probably want a spike pretty much perpendicular to the shaft. With a spike that's curved downward more you could still get it to hit squarely by swinging the staff with a closer center of rotation, which i suppose might have it's own advantages and disadvantages, but one of the latter would probably be less overall kinetic energy. Additionally, for piercing plate armor you'd probably ideally want a spike that is fairly short and sturdy to make it less likely to bend or break when striking and able to transfer more of it's kinetic energy to the target, although some of the really short, almost triangle-shaped spikes seem like they conversely wouldn't have been quite as useful for hooking.



I've been looking through a bunch of examples of halberds from different periods and it seem like maybe there's a trend for halberds from the 15th-early 16th c. to have spikes that are bit better shaped for piercing armor, while late 16th c. halberds more often have much more elaborate and sometimes even bladed beaks? although there still seem to be quite a few outliers either way.
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Mark Millman





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PostPosted: Sun 17 May, 2020 12:24 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dear Benjamin H. Abbott,

On Wednesday 13 May 2020, you wrote:
I've been thinking about this subject again. . . .

Why then is there such limited evidence for this technique? I suspect it's because of the difficulty of landing a perfect perpendicular hit with a swung spike in practice. . . .

That's my current theory.

Conversely, I suspect that there are three main reasons, if you're looking for archaeological evidence of battlefield back-spike strikes to armor:

1. Rarity. Halberds were much less common than dedicated thrusting weapons (spears and pikes) on battlefields. Although there were armies equipped mostly with halberds--famously, the Swiss--the period during which that was true was short. At other times, halberds and similar weapons were a leavening in the mass of pikes.

2. Use. It's hard to imagine that swinging a halberd would have been the preferred way of using it in most situations. It's safer for halberdiers and their cohorts if the halberdiers thrust most of the time. It requires less space and leaves both the individual halberdier and neighboring soldiers less vulnerable to counterattack, as well as being less likely to interfere with nearby soldiers' actions. For similar reasons, any cutting or swinging strokes are more likely to be short chopping blows rather than fully extended overhead swings. Such short blows are much less likely to generate force sufficient to penetrate plate armor.

3. Effects. When it is swung, a halberd is most likely either to glance off plate armor or knock down the wearer, whether the blade or the fluke is brought to bear. Clearly, glancing off will leave little evidence. Being knocked down may well be enough to curtail the victim's ability to fight (remember that adversaries don't have to be killed or even wounded in a battle; they just have to be prevented from fighting or continuing to fight), whether or not the armor (or soldier) has been damaged, which would make further attacks on that victim relatively unlikely. Fabric armors will of course be unlikely to provide clear evidence of the kind you're looking for; as, to a slightly smaller degree, will mail. I don't know about brigandine; I suspect it falls between the two extremes, but I also suspect that its construction may make proof a complex undertaking.

Some caveats: These ideas apply mostly to the press of battle in formation, in which the effectiveness of elaborate technical skill and the ability simply to avoid a blow will both be restricted. By "halberd" I mean the weapon that has a cutting blade on one side; a spike, hook, or fluke opposite it; and a point at the top and all similar weapons, so that, e.g., bills and glaives with flukes fall into the same category. I have not accounted for archaeological degradation of the evidence, so that I do not consider whether damage to armor that would have been clearly understood the day after the battle to be the result of a piercing blow from a halberd's fluke may have been rendered ambiguous by corrosion and deformation of the armor before archaeological recovery and analysis. I also don't consider the possibility that while the technique may have been used, technological considerations may have interfered--so that, for example, the fluke of an unhardened halberd (which we know was not uncommon) may have bent or dulled, preventing it from penetrating armor even under otherwise ideal conditions and contributing to the paucity of evidence.

Two other points: I think that halberdiers are shown in art as swinging their halberds from overhead mostly to make them recognizable as halberdiers and to add dramatic visual elements to the scenes in which they appear. Finally, I think that modern people are much too likely to look primarily at technical and technological explanations of phenomena that are better explained in other ways. Much of my thinking on this point has been strongly influenced by the more thoughtful postings here on myArmoury.

Best,

Mark Millman
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Sun 17 May, 2020 7:40 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Mark Millman wrote:
2. Use. It's hard to imagine that swinging a halberd would have been the preferred way of using it in most situations.


We have a moderate amount of evidence for halberds/bills as frequently swung in battle even beyond the numerous depictions in period art. Sir John Smythe wanted halberdiers to both strike at the head & thrust the face, with no preference given. A account of Flodden Field 1513 notes how well-armored Scottish pikers endured having multiple bills strike them at once but the billmen eventually beat them down & won the battle. Striking with the bill was iconic in England & assumed by 16th-century military writers as the style of rustic folk; the halberds with long top spikes popular in the Continent at that time were only good for thrusting. It's true that some manuals suggest thrusting more than striking for single combat, but those still include powerful strikes.
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Mark Millman





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PostPosted: Sun 17 May, 2020 9:24 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dear Benjamin H. Abbott,

I'm not saying that full swings weren't used, or that experts never recommended them. I'm saying that in many cases they probably didn't see much use, which would tend to reduce the amount of available evidence. My points are meant to address potential reasons for an evident lack of relevant evidence; that's all. If Britons, and particularly Englishmen, liked to swing at their adversaries' heads--which I agree they did; there's lots of supporting evidence--but continental Europeans preferred to thrust, that means that the probable relative frequency of the two actions can be expected to have limited the total number of attacks that could yield useful data for your inquiry. If most halberdiers had gone in for sweeping blows most of the time, then we'd probably have a bigger data pool now. I might quibble with the idea that techniques meant for single combat accurately represent a significant proportion of battlefield actions, but that's a different issue probably best discussed elsewhere.

Best,

Mark Millman
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Henry O.





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PostPosted: Sun 17 May, 2020 9:57 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I'm not so sure the interest in "heavy blows" is that unique to the english. You also have Raimond de Fourquevaux: "The halbards are armes newly inuented as I thinke by the Switzers, which are very good, so that they be strong and sharpe, and not light, as those that the Italians do carry, more to make a faire shewe (as I thinke) then for any goodnesse that is in them, because they are too weake, and so likewise are the Pertisans, which being stronger and better steeled, might do good service against naked men, but against men that are well armed, they can do no great deede.

You also have Giacomo di Grassi, who seems to have had a particular bone to pick with some "new kind of halberd" in particular



"Where I gather, that the Bill is the most perfect weapon of all others, because it strikes and hurts in every of these six motions, and his defenses both cut and prick: which the new kind of Halberd does not perform, because framed after the said fashion, and rather for lightness aptness and bravery, then for that it carries any great profit with it: for the edge is not so apt to strike, and the point thereof is so weak, that hitting any hard thing, either it bows or breaks."

I think i started a thread on a similar topic a while back about there seeming to be different types of bill/halberd in the 16th which were better suited for different situations.
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