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Craig Peters
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 Posted: Mon 23 May, 2016 1:07 am Post subject: |
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| Dan Howard wrote: |
You can't cut through mail with a sword. You can't cut through plate with a sword. |
Yes Dan, I know. ;-) To my knowledge, the only time when people have been wounded with cutting swords when wearing mail was because there was because the mail splits or otherwise fails- not from being “cut through”-but because of breaking or some similar form of failure. Likewise, I’ve never said anything about cutting plate with a sword. I know it doesn’t work. I’ve explained to many other people, repeatedly, that it doesn’t work.
I have also never said that a sword can “punch through” plate. That would mean that you could take a sword, aim it at a breastplate say, and drive it forward with enough force to go through and kill a person. I already know this doesn’t work. The only thing I have said regarding swords piercing plate was that some swords have “points acute enough to pierce the articulations of full plate”. The key word is “articulations”, which as you know are not completely invulnerable to a sword point, albeit being very difficult targets to effectively exploit.
I would appreciate if you were careful to avoid straw man arguments about my positions.
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Mon 23 May, 2016 2:20 am Post subject: |
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Hi Craig, I'm not explaining myself very clearly. I'm simply trying to work out why sword designs changed. Mail is being worn under these articulations in the 14th C. If the points on XV, XVa, and XVII swords were designed to punch through mail, then why weren't these swords being used when mail was the predominant armour?
Author: Bronze Age Military Equipment, Pen and Sword Books
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Pieter B.
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| Posted: Mon 23 May, 2016 3:00 am Post subject: Re: Intestines are guts |
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| Joe Pittman wrote: | | And any puncture of the intestines goes septic very quickly and the dying is slow and painful |
What kind of time span are you talking about? Minutes? I am talking about injury that is lethal or incapacitating right there and then and not two days later.
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Craig Peters
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| Posted: Mon 23 May, 2016 6:09 am Post subject: |
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| Dan Howard wrote: | | Hi Craig, I'm not explaining myself very clearly. I'm simply trying to work out why sword designs changed. Mail is being worn under these articulations in the 14th C. If the points on XV, XVa, and XVII swords were designed to punch through mail, then why weren't these swords being used when mail was the predominant armour? |
It's a good question, and I do not know for certain. The only thing that I can suggest is that the earlier, cutting-oriented swords (Type Xa, XI, XIa, XII, XIIIb, and the great sword versions of the latter two families) must have functioned well enough that there was no immediate impetus to create more acute diamond or hexagonal points. It could well be that cutting swords remained in use because helmets like the nasal helmet did not completely protect the face, and even great helms could be defeated in rare instances with a thrust that went through an eye hole, or by pulling the helm off of the head. It seems to me, however, that if mail was completely and utterly impervious to sword attacks and that the head was the only viable target there would have been impetus for the sword to evolve to a thrusting weapon much earlier.
It's true that a cutting sword would be of immense value against the many unarmoured men in a conflict during the High Middle Ages, and that lances were one of the main weapons which might bypass mail. Yet I do not think we can simply say that swords were reserved for unarmoured targets and lances for armoured ones. We know that lances broke readily, and that knights and me- at-arms could easily run out of lances during a conflict. Likewise, the numerous instances of knights being described fighting other knights with swords in primary sources makes it difficult to argue that swords were meant exclusively for unarmoured targets, especially in light of the fact that one might still face enemy knights after one's lances had shattered. So swords must have had some value against mail; otherwise, weapons like axes or maces would have been used far more frequently in preference to the sword.
As well, there are many period images depicting knights wounding other knights with swords. We need not interpret these images as the swords “cutting” through mail since that does not seem plausible. However, the images certain suggest that mail could be defeated by swords, perhaps after the mail had sustained enough trauma to cause a failure to the rings, as I have suggested above. I know that some are inclined to dismiss the many images of swords defeating mail as “artistic license” but that seems unlikely to me. Such an interpretation strikes me as a modern effort to explain away images that might challenge or confront a particular view- in other words, one of the many modern ideas about history that sounds plausible but does not square with the evidence (rather like the theory of younger knights and second sons being the ones who went on crusade).
It reminds me also of some of the things modern interpreters used to say about images from the fechtbücher. When a particular technique or action seems difficult or implausible, such as the rotated wrist shown in Ms I.33 or the under-arm long sword position of Codex Wallerstein, one might dismiss these images as mistakes or fanciful thinking by artists who knew little of fighting. The reality, however, is that such techniques are eminently practical and useful, provided one trains enough and knows the contexts in which to use them. Thus, we should be leery in assuming that images of swords bypassing mail are a mere “chivalric fantasy”. Swords may not have “cut through” mail, but if they were completely useless against it, I would think that it would be fairly obvious to create swords with points more similar to lance heads, or to simply not use swords and carry other arms like maces and axes. That swords did persist as secondary weapons to be used against other mail clad knights and men-at-arms suggests that mail, while highly resilient, was probably not completely impervious to a sword attack.
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