An advantage and disadvantage of SWORD AND SHIELD

Hey folks, Matt Easton here, Scholarly Guy tutorial. Let's talk a little bit about sword and shield. So I've mentioned many times in previous videos that sword and shield is a really, really awesome combination. We shouldn't be surprised by this because of course throughout history, going back to the ancient period, shields were predominantly used, obviously with spears primarily, but also with swords. And they were a very, very pop popular weapon combination across the world and across a huge period of time. We're talking thousands of years here. Okay. Right. The way back to the bronze age, really once swords were invented and really a lot of swords when we're talking about them, we often tend to talk about them in isolation or some people do. I try not to, because a lot of swords only make sense when put in the correct context of the fact that they were used with a shield. And I've said this in application to the Roman Gladius, for example, a lot of people want to compare a Gladius with some other type of sword, but you've got to remember the Gladius is part of a weapon set. It's used with a scutum, with a large shield. And really that's where the Gladius makes sense. The Gladius as a weapon used by itself doesn't make a lot of sense. But really to say that, yes, indeed. So the point of this video is because I'm going to talk obviously more about this topic in the future, but really to say that whilst sword and shield is a very awesome weapon combination, it's pretty powerful against most other combinations that you might put with a sword. So we might do, for example, sword and dagger, sword and buckler, paired swords. Generally speaking, most of these combinations, I would say, are inferior to sword and shield. But as I've mentioned, you can't always carry a shield. And that's one of the reasons why, for example, sword and dagger or rapier and dagger was very popular, because you can wear a sword or a rapier anywhere and you can carry a dagger anywhere. You can't carry a shield anywhere. It's a large object. You can't really practically wear it, not in everyday life anyway. So in terms of sidearms, that makes the shield sort of irrelevant. It's really a battlefield weapon. You've got to know that you're going to have a fight in order to have the shield ready. But assuming we do know that we're going to have a fight and you've got your shield or targe ready, you now have an absolutely awesome weapon set. But there's one important thing, and this is what I really want to get around to saying, there's one important thing to recognise about the use of the and that is that whilst the shield gives you a huge benefit in defence and in some ways in offence as well, it is something you have to get around that gets in the way to a certain extent. Now, we do occasionally see in movies and indeed some reenactors just simply hold the shield in front of the body and then fight with the sword. This is an incredibly poor way of using the sword and shield together, because what it means is that your sword arm and sword hand, assuming that they're not armoured, are now completely exposed. And also your shield is very close to your body. The further I take that shield away from my body, and if I bring my left foot forward, it means I'm creating what I term a cone of defence. The further it goes away from my body, just like with a buckler, the greater defence it offers. And it has the great benefit that now when I cut or attack with my sword, my sword arm is covered because you'll notice my arms, because I was born this way, my arms are the same length. So that means that if I extend my shield out, now when I attack with my sword from different angles, my hand and my sword arm are the same range as that shield. So that shield is defending and blocking the line, which is great because with a medieval sword we don't have a lot of hand protection. Assuming I'm not wearing armour, I don't have arm protection. So it means that one of my most vulnerable parts that would otherwise be very vulnerable with the medieval sword, or side sword in fact, is now at least on one side protected by the shield. And indeed, if we were to attack from this side, we can indeed move the shield over to this side to protect it from that way as well. So we can give cuts from that side covering the sword arm here, and from this side covering the sword arm there. So bucklers and shields can protect the line to the sword arm, and that's one of the reasons undoubtedly why we don't see developed hilts being evolved sooner on medieval swords. If you're using a shield or a buckler you don't necessarily need them. But the point I want to finish up mentioning is that in doing this it does block some of your lines of attack. So if I'm just using a sabre or sword by itself, I can attack from any direction very very quickly just by moving the sword arm. Okay, but as soon as I have a shield in the way I now can't necessarily do that so easily, because now my own shield is going to get in my way. So there is a trade-off. You gain a huge amount in defense and certain types of offense as well if I pair the two things together, but you also lose a little bit of the speed and diversity of your attacks. So when you add a second item into your equation it doesn't always only result in benefits, it sometimes results in some detracting factors as well. Cheers folks. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe, follow us on Facebook, you can buy t-shirts through Spreadshirt, support us on Patreon or follow us on Pinterest. Thank you.