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Michael Long
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 Posted: Tue 01 May, 2018 3:34 pm Post subject: An Inventory of Well-beaten Dead Horses |
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First of all, my apologies for bringing up the L word. I don't intend to reignite the arrow vs. armor debate.
What I am looking for is a good repository of tests that have been performed in the past, whether flawed or not.
You can read hundreds of pages of forum debate when it comes to longbows vs armor, but the links to actual test results invariably point to 404 errors. On the Sword Forum, for example, people successfully beat the dead horse to a pulp in 2003 and all the actual evidence has gone missing in the 15 years since. So the layman is left with nothing but vague references to 'Leeds proved this' and 'Wallace/Stratton demonstrated that.'
What communities like this really need is a single location to reliably host test results, whether that's the original PDFs or just written summaries of the data. Ideally, there would be room for 'peer review', explaining the limitations and shortcomings of a particular test.
It's not 2003 anymore. Most online file hosting services are going to stay around for a while. So it's time to build an Arrow vs. Armor site on Google Drive or Dropbox. All we need are the links.
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Glen A Cleeton
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| Posted: Tue 01 May, 2018 4:04 pm Post subject: |
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Have at it! Atta boy! I'll be sure to read it!
Not to wax too sardonic but I have a backlog of my own interests going back about that long.
You are now in charge and responsible for properly indexing all relevant replies in this thread.
Good luck!
Cheers
GC
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Michael Long
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| Posted: Wed 02 May, 2018 5:39 am Post subject: |
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| Glen A Cleeton wrote: |
You are now in charge and responsible for properly indexing all relevant replies in this thread.
GC |
If we get any replies.
I'll prime the pump by pointing out that the link to the study described by Dan is dead here:
http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.p...ublication
And if I do have to provoke a controversy to get people to cough up the evidence, I'll bring up this paper:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096834459800500205
The pro-armor folks (unfortunately this topic warrants the use of pro- and anti- terms) tend to have the upper hand on the internet when quoting primary sources. So I have always wanted to see a response to textual examples used to rebut Kelly DeVries.
Why are the quotes here any less or more credible than the quotes describing armor defeating arrows?
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Dan Howard
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Dan Howard
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| Posted: Wed 02 May, 2018 4:57 pm Post subject: |
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| Michael Long wrote: | | Why are the quotes here any less or more credible than the quotes describing armor defeating arrows? |
We need eye witness accounts of specific injuries rather than vague references to "their arrows could pierce armour". Just because an arrow penetrated a piece of armour doesn't mean that it went in far enough to actually incapacitate the wearer. We have accounts of fighters getting hit by so many spears and arrows that their armour was completely destroyed but they kept fighting. We have other accounts of fighters looking like porcupines because of all the arrows in their armour but remain unhindered.
One commonly cited source is in the Paston Letters where he complains about getting an arrow through the vambrace and injuring his forearm. What is neglected is the context:
1) the vambrace is one of the thinnest pieces of plate in a harness
2) he managed to take off the vambrace so the arrow couldn't have penetrated too far
3) his arm was well enough to let him hold a pen and write home complaining about it that night.
One good example is the passage describing Alexander getting shot through his armour at Mallia and puncturing his lung. Another is the Master of the Temple getting fatally shot through his mail under the armpit at the Battle of Acre.
On the other side we have studies such as that analysing graves from the Battle of Wisby where we know that most of the victims received their injuries during the fighting rather than during the aftermath. This study catalogued dozens and dozens of injuries to heads and limbs but it couldn't find one single wound to a torso or thigh.
Author: Bronze Age Military Equipment, Pen and Sword Books
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Steve Fabert
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| Posted: Wed 02 May, 2018 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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One-sided anecdotes will always be with us, because of the nature of anecdotal evidence. When a weapon lethally injures its target there is usually no report home other than the report of the fellow who launched the weapon - his victim is dead. When a weapon fails to kill, its intended victim has an entertaining tale to tell among his friends about the ineffectiveness of the missile (or his great luck). Each side downplays the effectiveness of the other side's weapons & brags about how effective its own weapon or defense was during combat. Losers rarely broadcast descriptions of the lethal effect of their enemies' weapons. Admitting to the defeat is usually done in the fewest words possible.
Swords, maces, crossbows, pistols, rifles, or grenades, all are described in the same one-sided terms by the participants, with different impressions being reported by each side and no reports made by the deceased. So it should not be hard to find plenty of tales told by armored knights about the ineffectiveness of arrows against armor and plenty of stories told by archers about how effective their arrows were against armored opponents.
If a head count of the stories shows a preponderance of reports by surviving armored combatants it will probably be because the knight's tale was more likely to be recorded than the archer's story, not because the total number of incidents was lopsided.
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This is a standard topic