A Mystery About Medieval Shields

Shields are part of the medieval warrior's equipment. They obviously defend you from the slings and arrows of the enemy. And there's about 400 years of the evolution of the shield on display behind me. But why did they change? How were they used? And how did their design reflect what the warrior would be doing on the battlefield? Let's try and find out. First shield I'm gonna show you is Viking or Anglo-Saxon. And this is very clearly a foot soldier's shield. It's held with a grip. It has no strapping that we're aware of to take the weight. You have to have big shoulder muscles to handle this. It's flat. It has what's called a boss made of iron or carbonized. It might even be vaguely steel because of the way the Smiths work. They're basically a metal bit in the middle, which actually is the cup that your hand sits in. And this strap extends top and bottom. This one is made of modern plywood for convenience. Typically they'd be made of strips of theoretically Linden wood, although the archeology varies. And this can be used in single combat. It can be used out here, but it also is very wide and it doesn't defend the leg very well. But what it does do is extend sideways and it would work very well in a linked up shield wall with a whole bunch of your other comrades. They would be standing probably as close packed as they could get like this. Somebody slammed on this side of you, somebody that side of you, as many men as possible, spears or swords over the top. And this would be interacting with other shields. They also use these in single combat and there are various techniques. You can catch a blade on the side here. And if the blade impacts on the wood, you can rotate away, take their weapon away, stab them. And also various ways of attacking this shield because if this shield is held away from the body as it typically was, if you hit on this side, it can rotate the shield and all you've got is the grip stopping it from rotating or rotate it on this side like this. We know that the much earlier period shields, the hoplite shields and the Greek shields, which are many hundreds of years earlier than this, often have impacts up here and down there, which indicates that people were trying to attack up here and stab the face or trying to rotate the shield out. So if you're in a group of other people and your shields are overlapped, hitting here impacts on this side of the other person's shield. So it's not going to rotate so much, but single combat is different. Single combat, you're trying to open up the shield, stab somebody. This is also incredibly difficult to use from horseback. And the reason is you need to hold the reins in this hand and have a weapon in this. And so whilst you're holding the shield, you can't actually hold the reins very well either. There's no sign of any strapping that allows somebody to use this from horseback. And so we know that the fighting was going to be on foot. Moving through history a little bit to what I think of as a transitional period, the Norman invasion. The Normans were basically mounted Vikings and they made a transition from longship combat and maritime combat to horse combat. And this kite shield, well, it's called a kite shield in modern parlance, but obviously they wouldn't have called it a kite shield. They just would have called it a shield, is derived from the round shield. It still sometimes has a boss on it, but the way it is strapped is very clear from the Bay of Tapestry. There isn't a grip here. So the boss actually doesn't do anything. This is an anachronism from an earlier period. And we see on the Bay of Tapestry, some shields have this boss on them and some don't. So obviously some people felt more comfortable with this piece of shield because it looked more like a shield. It's a traditional shield like that with it. And other people have said, look, just get rid of it. It doesn't do anything. It just costs me money and weighs more. And interestingly, we see different kinds of strapping on the Norman kite shield or just the Norman shield. This one is set up in a particular way. There were lots of different ways of setting up this kite shield, and I'm still experimenting. This setup itself, let me show you how it's used. So guide strap goes around your neck. So the shield itself, it can actually hang off you without using any hands at all. But typically what you do is you put your arm through the strap and you hold on to it. Now you can either hold on or you can put it further through. And this hand is now completely available for using the reins on the horse. And much of the weight is taken by the guide strap when it's properly adjusted and goes over the armour. This is a shield designed for somebody who is fighting from horseback. This is a shield designed for somebody fighting on foot. So these two shields, their shape and design clearly indicate a difference in fighting technique and a difference in battlefield tactics. The other thing about this is the length protects your knee quite a lot as well. So it can still be used in the shield wall and is used in the shield wall because we see it on the bare tapestry. So this is designed by shield makers, by the technologists of the time to be usable from horseback, but also usable on foot. Interestingly, as a cavalry man, I find that I need the strapping to be different than the type of strapping used for people that are typically fighting on foot, reenacting on foot. So I wonder back then, whether depending on what you were expected to do, your speciality, whether your shield would be strapped differently. I think that's quite likely because it's practical. One of the problems with this shield when you're fighting on horse is this tail slams against your knee. And after a few hours in the saddle, which I've ridden at Senlac Hill and the reenactments there for English Heritage, my knee started to swell up, get bruised, and eventually it started to bleed. And the next day I had to actually pack a lot of sheepskin on my knee because it was hurting so much. So we actually see a solution to that in the Bay of Tapestry. There are people who are unarmored who are traveling to tell Duke William about something, and their shields are strapped differently and they're supported like this. That gets the tail of the shield out of the way of your knee when you're galloping fast, gets it away from your horse's legs too. It's obviously less protective because the back of the shield is really not protecting anything. I guess it could protect the back of the horse a little bit. But the men on the Bay of Tapestry aren't in armor. They're still carrying the shield. They're not in armor. They're obviously going very fast because their hair's streaming out behind them as well, which is a wonderful little nugget of information on the Bay of Tapestry. But the shield is held differently and controlled differently. I find that fascinating. So it's not just a shield. This shield looks similar to the earlier shield, but it has a curve. And that curve serves the purpose of wrapping around the body. And I think indicates that the shield was used more close to the body itself. And attacking the shield in a particular direction, hitting it here or hitting it low, isn't actually going to turn it very much because of the curve. It's just basically going to rock the person using it. It's not going to actually open you up. There is a technique of an ax coming over the top and opening the shield up, but you're still going to move the whole arm of the person you're doing it against because it's strapped to the forearm and it's held here. Unlike the earlier period, where you're just having to rotate the shield in the grip of the warrior. So this clearly indicates transition in technology and in battlefield tactics and the way that the shield is used. It's still a piece of wood between you and the enemy, but it's now evolved to a different type of use. The kite shield stays around for another 100 years or so. It modifies itself. The top gets chopped off a little bit. So in the first crusade, we see truncated kite shields, whatever you want to call it. It's starting to get towards what many people think of as the classic knight in armor shield shape. This is basically the same, except it's quite different. The shape is very different. It is still curved. It still curves around the body. We still have strapping. This one is strapped for diagonal hold. Again, this is a very personal thing. Depending on what you want to do with the shield, you would have modified it. Just takes moving some nails and some rivets to move the strap around. It now has a flat top, which means you can hold it up here. It can protect your face. It doesn't protect the lower legs at all, but that's okay because this shield is coupled with an evolution in the quality and the protective value of the personal armor that somebody would be wearing. You're starting to have elbow cops, plates guttering over the forearms, lower cannons and upper cannons, pauldrons, plates to protect the shoulders, big helmets, full face masks. So the shield is still very useful though, but it's dwindling in size because it's much easier to use a small shield than a big shield. I don't think at this period anybody's fighting in a shield wall. There's no easy way of overlapping this shield. There's no easy way of getting support from your fellow warriors at arms. You can obviously stand side by side and you could probably overlap it a little bit, but the design leaves big gaps and it doesn't really lend itself to the shield wall formation, which is a good thing because we have no record of shield walls being used in this period. So chances are they weren't doing them. What they were doing though is riding with this as well. So this is for foot combat and also very much for riding a horse and fighting with a lance and a long spear. This shield can be, you can ride along with it when it's strapped properly, when it's strapped the way you need it to be, you can have your hand here. This shield can be kept at an angle, so a bit like this, and that creates effectively a glassy plate like they have on the front of modern day tanks. Angled armour is better at deflecting things. It's the same for a lance and a spear. So this would sort of, we see it, we see actually, we see elbows holding the shield up like this and you're just popping the knight's eyes over the top, braced against the helmet potentially, and forming kind of a protective plate that the lance would bounce off. You can also use this for fighting. The corners are potentially very dangerous. We see this in modern day club tourney. We see people punching with their shields. And in fact, there's some interesting discussions to be had about the evolution of the modern day medieval combat fighting techniques. The only problem with that is it's quite specialised. They're not allowed to stab. They have light weapons. There are no missile weapons being used. So the equipment is evolving to be best used in a particular set of circumstances that they're finding themselves. And it's not really war. It's very tough and very hard to do, but it's not quite the same as having somebody actually trying to kill you with whatever weapons they can have, crossbows and arrows and all sorts. Shield use for the knightly classes dwindles in the 14th and 15th century because the actual plate armour they're wearing and their fighting techniques have changed so much that actually carrying a shield is a bit pointless. They are still used in the formal tournaments and arguably it's a bit of an anachronism even then, although you could argue that the wood helps grab the lance and protect you in that specific situation. But on the battlefield, knightly class are not really using shields. But there is a category of ordinary soldier that is very much still using shields, and that's the crossbowman. And we know this because we see illustrations of it. This big thing called a pavise, which is a square shield, resembles modern riot shields actually quite dramatically, stuck into the ground. And the chap winding up the crossbow has got to take time. He's got to concentrate on quite a complex technical job, winds up the crossbow, puts a quarrel in there, pops up and looses the bolt at his enemies, pops back down again and hides. Now obviously crossbowmen were aware of longbowmen and longbowmen could loose more arrows per second than a crossbowman, roughly two to one, depending on what the quality of the longbowman is and the quality of the crossbowman. But obviously as a crossbowman, you've got to, you're not looking, you've got to concentrate on your job. So having a shield is essential for them and they were very, very rugged. And also in sieges, people use shields all the time. So the shield never really went away, it just wasn't used by the knightly class. I find it incredibly exciting to think that today, the modern day police force uses two types of shields. So they're still in use, they're still in active use today. They use a long square shield, not dissimilar to the design of the kite shield. And they use them in shield walls as a defensive structure against things being hurled at them. And also there's a type of shield used by anti-riot squads, which is circular and smaller, very similar to the Anglo-Saxon Viking shield and used in a similar way because they're used by fast acting snatch squads to burst out from the shield wall and go and arrest people and take them back and do whatever they need to do with them. And I find it fascinating that the shields we were looking at in history that did a certain job are also kind of re-imagined and reinvented by the modern day police for very similar purposes. Isn't that wonderful circularity of history and continuity of technology and techniques from the past? Thanks for watching. Please like and subscribe and don't forget that notification button. We've got a lot more exciting episodes coming up every Friday and look forward to seeing you then.