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Pieter B.





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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 1:17 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Regarding helmet protection values and head wounds; What's the most current explanation for all those head wounds of bodies recovered from Visby and Towton?

One article I recently came across http://www.eaines.com/archaeology/the-bioarch...l-warfare/

Quote:
Not only were archaeologists at all three sites able to determine which weapons produced which injuries in many cases, they were also able to detect weaknesses in armor and lack of adequate protection on certain parts of the body. For instance in Towton, only 33% of the perimortem trauma occurred below the neck, whereas all the other individuals in the grave had severe head injuries. This may indicate they did not have helmets, or that they had inadequate helmets (Novak, 2007).


Where they executed? Killed while fleeing without helmet? Wearing bad helmets?
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 1:23 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean Henri Chandler wrote:
I think you can get your bell rung while wearing a mask much more easily with a (correctly weighted) padded weapon like Lance's RSW than you would from even a heavy tournament feder like an ensifer or a regenyei. That is really the point I'm trying to make. Blades don't make good cudgels, and if you needed them to be, it would probably have more impact to hit with the flat.


I'd have to either experience this or see a careful study to believe this. Intuitively, I'm far more scared by blunts/feders than RSWs. (Again, I've never sparred with blunts.)

Also, I'm fundamentally skeptical about the notion that blades don't make effective bludgeons because of the historical evidence. In the nineteenth century you even have claims that blunt (or at least not very sharp) British cavalry sabers were better than sharp swords because the blunt force trauma was more likely to immediately incapacitate than a cut. The comparison strikes me dubious, but it's one of the many points of evidence for the effectiveness of mighty sword strokes to the head.

We have countless sources from the age of mail through Gutierre Díez de Games's time - and earlier and later - for hitting helmeted heads with swords and for striking mighty blows as a key martial ability for warrior elites. I'm sure some of this was exaggerated and suspect Fourquevaux and company's approach of only thrusting at unarmored spots worked better in many cases, but there's a wealth of historical evidence that walloping helmets with swords could be effective, especially in conjunction with other techniques.
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 1:43 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Pieter B. wrote:
Regarding helmet protection values and head wounds; What's the most current explanation for all those head wounds of bodies recovered from Visby and Towton?

One article I recently came across http://www.eaines.com/archaeology/the-bioarch...l-warfare/

Quote:
Not only were archaeologists at all three sites able to determine which weapons produced which injuries in many cases, they were also able to detect weaknesses in armor and lack of adequate protection on certain parts of the body. For instance in Towton, only 33% of the perimortem trauma occurred below the neck, whereas all the other individuals in the grave had severe head injuries. This may indicate they did not have helmets, or that they had inadequate helmets (Novak, 2007).


Where they executed? Killed while fleeing without helmet? Wearing bad helmets?


The general consensus seems to be that the skeletons recovered in this grave were not killed, or even injured, during the actual battle. Wisby is a better example to use.

I don't agree with Jean much but in this case I think he is right. The chances of causing serious injury by inflcting "blunt trauma" through armour is seriously overblown. It might occasionally happen with helmets due to the sensitivity of the brain but it isn't an issue with torso armour.

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Pieter B.





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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 2:06 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dan Howard wrote:


The general consensus seems to be that the skeletons recovered in this grave were not killed, or even injured, during the actual battle. Wisby is a better example to use.



Would you care to elaborate a little on that if it doesn't derail this thread to much?

As for Wisby, they didn't bother to reconstruct the skeletons did they?
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Jean Henri Chandler




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 2:23 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Pieter B. wrote:
Dan Howard wrote:


The general consensus seems to be that the skeletons recovered in this grave were not killed, or even injured, during the actual battle. Wisby is a better example to use.



Would you care to elaborate a little on that if it doesn't derail this thread to much?

As for Wisby, they didn't bother to reconstruct the skeletons did they?



At Towton it was a 'no quarter' battle, as agreed in advance by the antagonists, a lot of people got executed, whereas Wisby was just a one-sided battle.

As the wiki notes re: Towton: "Before the battle, both sides had issued the order to give no quarter and the Yorkists were in no mood to spare anyone after the long, gruelling fight. A number of Lancastrians, such as Trollope, also had substantial bounties on their heads.[14] Gregory's chronicle stated 42 knights were killed after they were taken prisoner.[18]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Towton#Aftermath



As for Dan, ok you got me, I make a policy never to agree with you so I now officially take the opposite position - swords can knock out knights every time!


@ Kel, fair enough!


J

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Philip Dyer





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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 2:27 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dan Howard wrote:
Pieter B. wrote:
Regarding helmet protection values and head wounds; What's the most current explanation for all those head wounds of bodies recovered from Visby and Towton?

One article I recently came across http://www.eaines.com/archaeology/the-bioarch...l-warfare/

Quote:
Not only were archaeologists at all three sites able to determine which weapons produced which injuries in many cases, they were also able to detect weaknesses in armor and lack of adequate protection on certain parts of the body. For instance in Towton, only 33% of the perimortem trauma occurred below the neck, whereas all the other individuals in the grave had severe head injuries. This may indicate they did not have helmets, or that they had inadequate helmets (Novak, 2007).


Where they executed? Killed while fleeing without helmet? Wearing bad helmets?


The general consensus seems to be that the skeletons recovered in this grave were not killed, or even injured, during the actual battle. Wisby is a better example to use.

I don't agree with Jean much but in this case I think he is right. The chances of causing serious injury by inflcting "blunt trauma" through armour is seriously overblown. It might occasionally happen with helmets due to the sensitivity of the brain but it isn't an issue with torso armor.

Agree with you, also, the upraised swords thing tales knights swinging at armour mentioned could explained by battle stress, we can look at modern warfare to as a insight. http://jonathanturley.org/2011/01/10/gao-u-s-...nt-killed/ In a field battle, like a modern engagement , you aren't just worried about your technique /markmanship, their is also the issue of unit cohesion, quick response to orders,etc. All of these make keeping proper technique harder to do. Also, people may have been hit multiple times in the same spot, so a striker wouldn't be facing one oponet, a couples of hit, but more like multiple opponents, distractions, bunch of noise, so wailing on a man's skull is better than freezing because your psychologically overwhelmed and may be effective because the person's helmet may be beat up already.http://www.defensereview.com/military-marksmanship-training-versus-competitive-shooting-training-the-matchup/I
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Pieter B.





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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 3:01 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean Henri Chandler wrote:



At Towton it was a 'no quarter' battle, as agreed in advance by the antagonists, a lot of people got executed, whereas Wisby was just a one-sided battle.

As the wiki notes re: Towton: "Before the battle, both sides had issued the order to give no quarter and the Yorkists were in no mood to spare anyone after the long, gruelling fight. A number of Lancastrians, such as Trollope, also had substantial bounties on their heads.[14] Gregory's chronicle stated 42 knights were killed after they were taken prisoner.[18]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Towton#Aftermath



Ah okay I see.

I did find one diagram of cut wound statistics from Wisby, it's amazing how often the head was hit and how often the lower legs were targeted. Is it an indication that the Danish used polearms to target the lower legs? I heard a few Hema people say that the legs are usually poor targets although they were talking about a 1v1 situation with swords and occasionally short spear.
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Dan Howard




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 3:22 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Turn sideways and take a step forwards. The knee is the closest target. Your shield is supposed to cover this vulnerability but I'm not sure how common shields were at Wisy. There seems to have been a lot of two-handed weapons being used.
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T. Kew




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 4:20 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

When you're fighting one on one, and using relatively short weapons (a longsword is short enough for this, but it's even clearer with e.g. a sabre), attempting to cut for the leg is very easy to over-reach by cutting to the head or shoulder

However, in a group context with longer weapons, that's less easy. Two main reasons:

The range difference is less. The longer the reach you have, the shallower the angle at which you need to reach down to hit the leading leg, and so the less range you give up in doing so. This makes trying to over-reach the attack a riskier proposition.

Additionally, attacks come in from unexpected angles. Uberlauffen is a very effective way to defend the legs, but it depends critically on your weapon not being busy doing something else (e.g. parrying, or attacking someone), and on being able to react to the incoming attack. If you don't see it, because you've just been stabbed in the leg by someone two steps down the line on the other side, you're screwed.
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Mon 09 Mar, 2015 5:09 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

By the way, the Chronicon Helvetiae is a solid source for the sort of upraised-swords images I mentioned earlier. The armored infantry using longswords in these pictures could be approximating Sir John Smythe's technique for halberdiers: strike at the head and thrust at the face. Even if the blow to the head only stuns or dazes for a moment, that could be enough to allow a following thrust to the face.

Do any period military manuals address how to use longswords as a piker's or halberdier's sidearm? None that I've seen.
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Jean Henri Chandler




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 8:51 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I believe the thing about not hitting the leg so much in tournaments or sparring is a peculiarity really limited to unarmored longsword fencing specifically. Due to the physics of fighting with a longsword, striking at the lower legs is kind of risky though there are some ways to do it. It's rare enough, and the ways it can happen are predictable enough, that for example when I'm sparring with friends I don't wear any leg protection. In a tournament though where people are more amped up and try more sneaky 'dirty tricks' I do. (it's mandatory anyway)

Upper legs (thighs to knees) get hit much more, it's one of Axel Petterson's go-to moves for example (strike high, then after the parry, drop down to a thigh cut or a middle-body cut and then exit).

I don't know if it works out any differently when fencing in harness, maybe Kel can chime in on that since he actually owns some nice harness and isn't a blossfechten bum like me.


With other weapons I think the lower leg is a major target, certainly with staff, sword and buckler, and even rapier. I haven't done much rotella or targe fencing but I think when your opponent is using a big shield, their lower legs is one of the few available openings, a lot of times you try to attack low and high openings in an alternating fashion, and attack their arm when they try to strike.

So I think the Wisby forensics are partly representative of the losers of the battle being armed largely with shields, though as previously noted only around 25% of the bodies showed marks on the skeletons, many of them may have been killed by spear or arrow wounds to the soft tissue which didn't show on the hard bits.




Now we all know of course that if the Danish soldiers only had << Katanas >>then every corpse would have a shattered skull and / or a caved in helmet, except for the ones who were cut in half including their shields.

Jean

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T. Kew




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 9:42 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean Henri Chandler wrote:
I believe the thing about not hitting the leg so much in tournaments or sparring is a peculiarity really limited to unarmored longsword fencing specifically. Due to the physics of fighting with a longsword, striking at the lower legs is kind of risky though there are some ways to do it. It's rare enough, and the ways it can happen are predictable enough, that for example when I'm sparring with friends I don't wear any leg protection. In a tournament though where people are more amped up and try more sneaky 'dirty tricks' I do. (it's mandatory anyway)

Upper legs (thighs to knees) get hit much more, it's one of Axel Petterson's go-to moves for example (strike high, then after the parry, drop down to a thigh cut or a middle-body cut and then exit).

I don't know if it works out any differently when fencing in harness, maybe Kel can chime in on that since he actually owns some nice harness and isn't a blossfechten bum like me.


With other weapons I think the lower leg is a major target, certainly with staff, sword and buckler, and even rapier. I haven't done much rotella or targe fencing but I think when your opponent is using a big shield, their lower legs is one of the few available openings, a lot of times you try to attack low and high openings in an alternating fashion, and attack their arm when they try to strike.


I think it's a common factor in most systems that use a relatively short weapon and no other means of defence. So longsword, sabre, messer, etc are all very short on leg attacks.

Sword and buckler lets you counteract the over-reaching issue somewhat by defending high while attacking low - ditto for shields and so on. Long weapons such as staff or spear mean you get less of a range decrease, so it's less safe to just slip the leg.

However, slipping the leg as defence only works when you're aware of the incoming attack, and can manage your distance to account for it. In a battle line, you might not see it, or you might not be able to step backwards without exposing the fighters to your sides. So it's a much less effective way to protect yourself.
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Jean Henri Chandler




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 2:16 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Yeah, that is another thing to keep in mind. All this stuff we have learned from 15-20 years (or more for some us folks like Kel) of doing HEMA, based on the 14th-17th century fight-books is almost useless for understanding what large scale battlefield combat in those same eras was like for an individual. It's a whole nother ball of wax.

I've been trying to understand it at the just the basic tactical overview level for more than a decade and I can't claim to have more than a crude,vague notion of even that much, and only for a few specific areas in Europe. All I can say is that the assumptions I started with don't seem to hold up well.

One thing I have learned for example is that a lot of weapons that most people don't care or think about much, like rocks and darts, seem to be quite ubiquitous and sometimes played critical roles in many battles, even well into the gunpowder era.

Jean

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Mike Ruhala




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 2:47 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

People tend to hype up uberlauffen/leg slip way too much. It's just a counter and there are counters for everything. Legs are high value targets... mobility, balance, femoral artery. As with everything else it's about when and how you do it.
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Benjamin H. Abbott




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 4:26 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

The nineteenth-century quotation about the effectiveness of blunt cavalry swords comes from the military doctor John Jones Cole. Assessments in this period varied, but at least a few asserted the power of "cuts" from blunt cavalry swords.
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Jean Henri Chandler




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 4:51 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Mike Ruhala wrote:
People tend to hype up uberlauffen/leg slip way too much. It's just a counter and there are counters for everything. Legs are high value targets... mobility, balance, femoral artery. As with everything else it's about when and how you do it.


I'm not even specifically referring to uberlauffen, I just haven't seen a lot of people getting hit in the lower legs in the last decade and a half of doing this, with longswords. Whether they are using Fiore or Liechtenauer or come from some Japanese or FMA background or the SCA - I think leg strikes are just a little risky due to the physiology of a human and the dynamics of a longsword, basically for the reasons T. Kew cited.

Your mileage may vary of course Mike, I'm sure it does - I damn sure don't try to speak for you. I know you like to do a lot of things differently.

I speak for myself here.

Jean

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Philip Dyer





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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 5:58 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Jean Henri Chandler wrote:
Mike Ruhala wrote:
People tend to hype up uberlauffen/leg slip way too much. It's just a counter and there are counters for everything. Legs are high value targets... mobility, balance, femoral artery. As with everything else it's about when and how you do it.


I'm not even specifically referring to uberlauffen, I just haven't seen a lot of people getting hit in the lower legs in the last decade and a half of doing this, with longswords. Whether they are using Fiore or Liechtenauer or come from some Japanese or FMA background or the SCA - I think leg strikes are just a little risky due to the physiology of a human and the dynamics of a longsword, basically for the reasons T. Kew cited.

Your mileage may vary of course Mike, I'm sure it does - I damn sure don't try to speak for you. I know you like to do a lot of things differently.

I speak for myself here.

Jean

We are trained to not hit the lower leg in the SCA,it is considered unsafe because how easy it is the cause someone fall over would has been struck it the lower leg and the risk of hitting the often unprotected foot. Also, the Human physiology thing isn't nearly as clear cut, squating, ducking can make up for the shortness of rang cause my trying to go low with a sword,or legs aren't one bones which move like legs. I think it more to do with the dynamics to fighting with a single sword, longsword, arming sword,messer, etc without any armour,it just hard to defend yourself while attacking that area at the same time where it is easy (in a duel, for person to backup a hit or hit while being as you try to cut the lower leg.
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Jean Henri Chandler




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 6:03 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Philip Dyer wrote:

We are trained to not hit the lower leg in the SCA,it is considered unsafe because how easy it is the cause someone fall over would has been struck it the lower leg and the risk of hitting the often unprotected foot. Also, the Human physiology thing isn't nearly as clear cut, squating, ducking can make up for the shortness of rang cause my trying to go low with a sword,or legs aren't one bones which move like legs. I think it more to do with the dynamics to fighting with a single sword, longsword, arming sword,messer, etc without any armour,it just hard to defend yourself while attacking that area at the same time where it is easy (in a duel, for person to backup a hit or hit while being as you try to cut the lower leg.


let me re-iterate, I was only talking about longswords (and maybe equivalent sized weapons). I don't think it works the same way for single-handed weapons, and of course it's not an 'absolute' by any means regardless.

Jean

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Mike Ruhala




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 10:03 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

I actually agree with you Jean, it isn't often seen. I've personally had good success with leg cuts and what I've noticed is that few people have a good low line defense whether this is various weapons in HEMA or even electric or classical sabreurs. I see it as a training issue and each community has its own common explanations for why they aren't working as much on this aspect of their defense but the slip/uberlauffen is often mentioned along with the idea that there's no vital organs in the legs. Other than that the challenge is the same as for any deep target... you don't want to get hit if your opponent decides to counter attack into your cut. For that reason I don't often throw a leg cut as a vorschlag unless my opponent has made a distance error.

I've noticed that dedicated footsoldiers rarely wore fully armored legs. I've seen greaves, poleyns and cuisses either by themselves or 2 outta 3 but never all three at the same time. I'm sure they were balancing the protection against the encumbrance, I often wonder if weight carried on the legs ultimately proves more tiring than weight carried on the body since the legs are constantly swinging the weight of any armor around.

Totally agree re: HEMA tournament feders. The rules at every tournament I can think of require stiff, heavy swords that aren't much like the surviving original feders. Personally I would rather be working with historically accurate steel trainers but the fact is we aren't fighting with dainty implements.
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Vincent C




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PostPosted: Tue 10 Mar, 2015 10:37 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

In Godinho the leg is quite often the target for cuts when attacking a shieldman with an arming sword and shield. He also uses it as the default target when fighting montante against shieldsmen, saying that if even one appears when fighting a group that all the cuts should be directed low. The lower leg isn't an uncommon target in Marozzo's spadone and polearm sections either.

I imagine that any polearms that would cut wouldn't be that different against a shield. For a particularly long shield, I imagine that one guy could hook it while another attacked the opening, especially if they were using things like bills or halberds. That's purely theoretical on my part, though.

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