Plumbata: Roman War Darts

Hi, it's Todd of Todd's Workshop and Todd Cutler here and today we're going to talk about plumbata, these things. What the heck are plumbata? Well, they are war darts basically. I mean look at these little bits of nastiness. So you've got a barbed head there, you've got a shaft, you can see it gets a sense of scale there off my hand and then a lead weight and then ending up with a feather shaft there. These things weigh in at around 210 grams each, so they're fairly chunky. What are they? Well, they go back to Greek times, at least 150 BC. If you look at Wikipedia, I'm not sure on the truth of that, goes back to about 500 BC. But the Romans certainly liked them as well and they were using them sort of 250, 300 and so on. What I will say right at the beginning here is that Roman and Greek history is not my core area, so I know a bit about these but more to the point I've been fascinated by them for about 20 odd years. But I don't know that much. There's a great site called Archoballistics. I'll put a link into the notes and you can go find his stuff there. He's gone back to the original sources translated in the Greek into finding out what these things were and descriptions of them. So a fantastic bit of work he's done there. Plumbata are undoubtedly nasty little things. They were nicknamed by the Roman soldiers little barbs of Mars. Mars being the god of war, barbs being of course those. And one of the things we need to test with these plumbata is what they do against flesh. That's going to be critical because you know, you don't want it in you, I get that, but how much do you not want it in you? There's a big difference between a barbed head and just a simple point like you get on a pilum. Neither is good. One is definitely worse than the other. So to find that out, I've got a couple of pork joints here that I'm going to spend probably quite a long time trying to throw these out until I hit them. But what we can do is just a very simple test. I'm just going to drop the plumbata now from a meter, a meter height. So this is just gravity, 210 grams. Sharp head, not razor sharp, but sharp. Let's see what happens. That's about the right height. Ouch! That is like properly in. We'll have a look at that in a moment. Let's just go for another one. So that's just down. That's just under my eye height. Let's have a look at this. Ouch! And there you can see we're in. I'm going to pull this one out now and show you how nasty these barbs really are. There we are. That is how far it went in, dropped from a mere meter in height. Let's go out in the field now and we'll throw them around a little bit and get some sort of an idea for the range of them and whether you can throw them overhand, whether you throw them underhand, and just get a bit of a feel for what the heck these things are. Down at the range now to start some throwing trials, but before I begin, if you want to support this channel, t-shirts are a great way to go. Night vision is a new one for us, hot off the press. This is the only one in existence. So why don't you make yourself the second one? I'm going to start throwing these now. Now consensus is that they're thrown underhand like that and that's certainly easy. I'm going to try it throwing like a dart. I'm going to throw it overhand as well. Just see what it does and just commentate. Hopefully, you know, all of the cameras are very wide on this really. I don't know how much you can see, but I will commentate and let you know. So the camera is out there now at 27 meters, so around about 30 yards. Let's see how we do with an overhand. Nice. Oh dear me. Pretty ugly really. They spin, they corkscrew in the air. They're not good. I've got there, what's that 25, 26 meters, so the distance is fine. I wouldn't want to be on the other end of it. They're not nice clean arrow straight throws, which is what you would want. I'm going to throw them overhand now like you would with a modern dart, but of course, typically like a pilum or a spear or a javelin. So I'm just going to try them overhand now. Okay. I'm going to go measure the distance and then I'm going to comment. I managed to get myself a very unimpressive 18 meters, but I'm not a spear thrower. I'm not a trained legionary. Okay, they will get a lot better than that. But we can compare that with my untrained, I'm not a legionary, underhand throw and get an idea for the difference, the proportionate difference. Because if the underhand throw goes further than my overhand throw, then we know that the legionaries would have had the same result as well. So that would mean underhand would be the way to go. So let's just have a look at the underhand version. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I'm just going to give this a third. Well, on the basis that I believe I have just hit my other camera straight in the lens, any camera manufacturers out there, sponsorship would be nice. I can tell you now that that has gone 28 meters. Let's go have a look. Here is the culprit. Oh, I can see where it struck it. And there we have it. Oh well. Rather annoyingly, that just took out my field camera. Hopefully the footage is good. Hopefully the footage is good. But the throws I did were sort of quite low like that, that sort of trajectory. I'm now going to go for a really high lob. The distance is going to be shorter, but obviously the height is a lot more. We saw what it did at one meter. So, you know, this really should go pretty nastily into the ground. We'll have a look. Oops. What's really interesting about this is of course it takes practice like anything else, but the first lob I did there was about 20 meters, but it did do a nice high arc, exactly what I wanted it to do. But the second two actually I fluffed up a bit, much lower, but I tested myself the other day. I was getting 24, 25 meters. That's why I put my camera out at 28, thinking it was safe. But these ones, I've just cleared the 30 meter mark with the last two, sort of more or less accidentally. So very, very little practice and I'm already really getting the numbers quite up there. In a very non-scientific way, these are going up to the lead weight in a, you know, a hard mown lawn. So I don't know what that means, but it does mean that they're going in some. So I'm just going to try for another lob. I've moved the camera. Oh dear. Yeah, I mean it's definitely practice. The first two were nice and high, third one, flat one again, but you know, it's learning. One of the things I have been curious about is how fast you can throw them. These are for the last few seconds, last two, three seconds before two lines of soldiers clash. They're just to get everybody to get their heads down, to put their heads behind the shields, to stop watching what's going on. So actually accuracy is not so important, you just want to fill the air with nasty junk. So I'm just going to do a quick speed trial and just see how quickly I can get things out. We'll put a clock on screen. Three, two, one and there we go. All out at about the 25 meter mark, thereabouts. I'm about six or seven meters away from my port joint there and it's backed up by 12 millimeter, half inch OSB. It's like a cheap construction grade plywood. It's not as good as plywood, I'm not saying it is, but we use it for building houses, let's see what it does. It's going to be interesting because I don't think these things are really meant for accuracy and the port joint is about the size of somebody's face, so it's going to be tricky, but you know, a few attempts, let's see what happens. Right, my conclusion to date here is that for accuracy, underhand is not working for me. I'm going to try overhand. Didn't get it, but much better. Ah, at last. Took me a while to get there with my throwing, but this was at six, seven meters range, whatever it was, and it is in right up to the weight. So that is how far it went into somebody's leg. That's nasty. I've got a board out at the 20 meter mark, let's just see if I can get them to stick in. These three have obviously gone into the board, nice grouping, let's not talk about the other two, about a centimeter sticking out the back. What they're not going to do is punch right through shields, like a scooter or something like that, it's not going to happen. So they really are against flesh, they're not against any kind of armor really, they're just not going to do anything. Accuracy, you throw it overhand. Distance, you throw it underhand. If you want to lob it high, again you throw it underhand, but there is skill involved in it, it's not just a case of grabbing it and letting go. There is a smoothness required to get these things to not corpse through the air, because that's what otherwise happens. You want a nice smooth release so that they, you know, the energy goes into making them go forward, not scrubbing off with drag. Overhand, I managed to get 18 meters on day one. Underhand, I got 32 in the end, so I think that with a little bit of practice I could probably get 40, 42 meters out of it. But don't take that as read that that's what warriors, Roman legionaries, Greeks would have done. I am not a trained warrior, I have not been trained in the use of these things and of course they will throw it further, they will throw it with more accuracy and they will make more of a menace with them than I ever can. This is just me messing about, but it's indicative of what was going on. The pork joint up at close distance, that went right all the way up to the lead. Four and a half inches, 11 centimeters, something like that. Straight into a muscle, going into the side of a muscle, that is going to ruin your day and that's what these things are about. They're not about armor. We could see that it didn't penetrate the board, even at sort of 20 meters they weren't penetrating the board. Close up, I wasn't giving it quite so much force with my swing because I was going for accuracy more. Further out at 20 meters, I could give it some real force with the throw and they did go in a bit deeper, but they're not going to be punching through shields, they're not going to be punching through armor, these are against flesh and the whole point of these things is to break up the opposition that you are just about to charge into and to harry them and to annoy them and the thing is if these things are coming to your face, which is unarmored in those days for sure, if these things are coming to your face you are not going to want to expose your face, you're going to cover it. If you cover your face you can't see what's going on, if you can't see what's going on you're already in trouble and that's what these are about, is to annoy the hell out of the opposition. Probably won't kill them but really, really will mess them up and give them the fear of Mars I suppose, it'll put the fear of Mars into them which is what they're all about. So thank you very much. Adventures in Plumbata. Thank you.