How did medieval infantry DEFEND themselves against MASSED ARCHERY?

Ow! Oh! Ow! Oi! Ow! Let's look at what the poor medieval common soldier can actually do against massed archery. Hi folks, Matt Easton here, Scholar Gladiatoria, and hopefully you've just watched Arrows vs Armour 3 with Todd and Toby and Will and all of my friends there. Absolutely fantastic. I was actually behind the scenes for the first day of it. Just brilliant, brilliant project. Anyway, thank you to all of the backers for that, and obviously if you haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure you have, then go and check that out now. I'll stick a link down below. But looking at it and looking at the results, which to be honest were fascinating for me, and I hope they were for you as well, one of the questions that immediately comes up that I think that a lot of people like you watching channels like mine and Todd's will probably want to know is what can you do if you're a late medieval common infantryman, and yes this is the same poleaxe from the video incidentally, which I lent them for that, and it's even got some scars on it from the arrows, but what can they do when you know that you're going to be facing massed archery shooting from longbows, hitting you, wounding you potentially, what can you possibly do? So in this video we're going to look at the context behind the common medieval infantryman and what they can do, somewhat, to mitigate the fact that they might have hundreds of arrows being shot at them. So I think that one of the most important takeaways from watching Arrows vs Armour 3, and in fact Arrows vs Armour 1 and 2 that went before it, was that gaps are more important than armour penetration. So while there's this fixation on what can a longbow arrow, or you know, what can a crossbow bolt, or what can even firearms do to armour, the fact is that armour always has gaps, and that was one of the more obvious themes I think of Arrows vs Armour 3, because we're looking at a common infantryman who in this case had exposed male areas, a skirt, armpits, we'll talk about these a little bit later in this video, and of course he didn't have armour on his legs. So clearly anywhere that the arrows were going to hit where there wasn't plate or brigandine was going to do immediate damage, it's pretty much guaranteed. It's very rare actually to see male stop the arrows, I mean sometimes we see particularly dense weave male or aventails with, you know, denser padding underneath stop arrows, it does happen, but very very often as we see, when a arrow finds a male gap where there isn't plate, and it really highlights the usefulness of plate armour here, or indeed brigandines, when it finds male, or where it finds just, you know, clothing or flesh, clearly the arrow's going to wound. So the gaps are more important than the armour penetration. But that being said, I don't want to ignore the fact that we did get armour penetration. As I've been saying all along, there are you know, a couple of hundred years of royal edicts saying that arrows must have steel heads on them, that they must be well steeled, and this is something that we've had back and forth after Arrows vs Armour 2, and I've done videos with Will Sherman myself, and of course with Todd, talking about this very issue. And the fact is that we know that English kings considered it incredibly important to have steeled hardened arrowheads, so therefore those heads must have been intended to pierce something. Now, on the subject of armour penetration, I want to only really say one thing about piercing of the plate. That is that sometimes it can happen, but statistically it's not actually very important, because what's important is if you're throwing thousands and thousands of arrows at the opposing army, what you're really hoping to do is penetrate male, and penetrate anything less than male. So fabric, you know, padded things like gambesons and akatons and things like this, those are what statistically are going to cause most of the injuries. However, it is fair I think to point out that we, in Arrows vs Armour 3 and the previous test, we did see plate get penetrated by arrowheads, and particularly even more now is the case, now that we've got hardened steel arrowheads, Type 16s and 21Bs, that do bite into plate. Now, the plates that we saw penetrated in Arrows vs Armour 3, I think the minimum was about 1.2 millimetres thick. Now, I went and looked up the measurements, the stats, for the Visby coated plates, and what's interesting is some of those plates are as thin as 0.7 millimetres, and this is true if we look at lots of other armour, not necessarily the front of a brigandine, definitely not a helmet, or at least generally not a helmet, but sometimes arm and leg armour can be quite thin plates, as thin as, you know, 0.6, 0.7 of a millimetre, very commonly 1 millimetre, and it's not always, of course, hardened steel, it's very often in period wrought iron, or the equivalent of what we'd now call mild steel. So when you're dealing with very thin plates in certain areas, yes, sometimes an arrow will go enough through a plate, it might not kill the person, but it might wound or incapacitate them to make them far less effective on the battlefield. But enough of plate penetration, the real purpose of this video is to ask, how could a common soldier, wearing equipment like we saw in Arrows versus Armour 3, how could they mitigate and minimise their risk going onto a battlefield where they knew there were going to be lots of enemy longbows? Well, before we dive into that, a very important context section, so we have to set the context before we try and answer the question, okay? So the first thing to point out is that the figure that we see in Arrows versus Armour has a brigandine over mail, a full mail shirt, as well as plate on the arms, a very good sallet, and a bever. That's actually pretty good armour, that is a well-equipped, professional level, in other words a retinue, private retinue, privately equipped, soldier of the 15th century. In fact, if we look even in England, where the armour levels are fairly high actually, compared to some places in Europe, but if we look across Europe as a whole, we very often see infantry wear significantly less armour than that, okay? So for example, we know in Switzerland at this time it was very common for infantry carrying pikes or halberds to have nothing but a helmet, okay? We suspect strongly that at the Battle of Touton, back in England, at the Battle of Touton, that probably there were massed militia's levies who probably weren't wearing very much armour at all, if any armour in most cases. And we find this all over Europe, so it doesn't matter whether we look in, you know, France or the various German states or Scandinavia or Spain or Italy, we often find that infantry don't have as much armour as is seen in Arrows versus Armour 3. What does that tell us? That they would have been mincemeat against massed archery. But not everywhere had massed archery, we'll come back to that point in a minute. So it's important to note that most infantry at the time were not wearing as much armour, necessarily, as we see in Arrows versus Armour 3, that is a well-equipped common soldier. So in some parts of Europe they didn't have as much armour as in other parts of Europe, for numerous reasons. The weapons and the armour being used in an area are related, so if you have somewhere that has lots of longbows, or recurve bows in the case of further east in Europe, or indeed if you have somewhere that actually has lots of crossbows or guns, that's going to change what you choose to equip your common soldiers with. Now I don't want to make any sweeping statements about saying therefore because there were lots of longbows in the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses, the English and the French armoured up more than in other places. Although I might make that argument in another video, but I'm going to leave that for another time. But what is interesting, and just this final thought on this part of the topic, is that when a combined German force fought at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487, at the sort of end of the Wars of the Roses, look at what happened. The Germans got shot to pieces, they got shot to pieces by English and Welsh archers en masse. They weren't used to facing massed archery. Now it makes a certain degree of sense that English and French and Flemish and to some degree Spanish soldiers were used to facing massed longbows, and in fact that would have been true in Eastern Europe as well. But it wasn't necessarily true in the German states or in Italy, where massed longbows, aside from Sir John Hortgood, weren't really used widely in those areas. Crossbows were predominantly used and firearms were predominantly used, which are very powerful weapons but with a very slow rate of shooting. So in a place where you might be facing thousands and thousands of arrows coming away, it would make sense to wear certain types of armour that protects you, and that's what the French did, that's what the English did. However, certain nations like the Scots and the Irish couldn't necessarily provide a lot of armour for themselves economically, and the Germans who came in, presumably came with their traditional style of German armour, and it seems that this was really poorly suited to face massed English archery, because they got shot to pieces, so much so that one source describes them as looking like porcupines. So now that I've set all of the context there in probably more detail than I originally intended, let's get into actually answering the question. What are the physical or material things that a common, let's say English or French, lowly equipped man-at-arms or common soldier really, we're looking at common soldiers mostly here, what could they do to lessen their risk from massed longbow archery? So the first point is really blooming obvious and it's actually said by Todd himself in Arrows vs Armour 3, wear more armour! If there's one thing that Arrows vs Armour 3 demonstrated, it's that armour usually, pretty much most of the time, nine percent of the time, works and protects you. It doesn't really matter whether, well it does actually matter whether it's plate or mail, obviously plate against arrows is far more effective than mail is, however you usually wear both in conjunction. So if you can cover as many gaps as possible, you'll notice here I am not wearing a beaver down here and this was actually a very common way of wearing the sallet for common soldiers. A lot of common soldiers didn't wear the beaver because it's inconvenient and a nuisance to wear, impedes your breathing, speaking, everything else, so a lot of them left it off. So if you weren't wearing a beaver, that whole lower half of the face, and note that the beaver got hit a number of times in Arrows vs Armour 3, this would just be really a magnet for arrows and anybody who could get close and aim at you would be aiming here. Okay, brilliant place to immediately kill or incapacitate someone. So anything on the face that was exposed, we'll talk about the design of helmets and that arrow slit hit in a minute, so anything that's exposed, armpits, legs, anything else, if you can armour it, if you can afford to armour it, or if your lord can afford to provide the equipment for you, then that's a good thing, it's going to massively increase your survival rate. And interestingly that in England and France we even see sometimes archers, who are normally regarded as people who don't necessarily wear a lot of armour, sometimes archers wear leg armour. Now archers can't necessarily wear a lot of armour on their upper body, but legs are actually a big vertical part of your target, they're likely to get hit a lot statistically. So if you can put armour on your legs while you're shooting your bow, that will make you far more invulnerable against the enemy archers. And many times in the Wars of the Roses, where it was English versus English, but also in the Hundred Years War, we also often see arrows versus arrows. If the archers are more protected, if they can soak up a few hits and not get wounded whilst continuing shooting, they're going to overwhelm the enemy archers if they don't have such good armour. No question, the most important lesson to take away from this is wear more armour. If you're expecting to face long bows or recurve bows, wear loads of armour because it will save your life. So the next way that the common soldier can be more protected against archery, against massed arrows flying their direction, I think often gets overlooked in these sort of arrows versus armour tests. Now you will notice in arrows versus armour 3, Todd had one figure that was primarily being shot at, and then some essentially cardboard walk target figures behind, to remind people, very correctly so, to remind people that just because an arrow doesn't hit me, doesn't mean it's gone, it's going to hit someone who's standing over there. So with massed archery, it's going to hit a mass of people. Now the one thing that often gets overlooked is we've got numerous descriptive accounts of medieval soldiers being packed so closely, I believe it's an Italian source that says that if you threw a football onto them, the football would never touch the ground. In other words, they are squished in so tight that the football would just bounce around on their helmets and stay on their shoulders, there is no gap between them. Why is that important for archery? Well, it means that because they're so tightly packed, you're less likely, for example, to be able to see the sides or any kind of openings. If they don't have back armour, you're very unlikely to see that as far as shooting at them is concerned. But also, if they don't have leg armour, only really the people in the front rank are going to have exposed legs because everybody standing behind is behind the person in front and therefore the arrows can't get to their legs because what the arrows face is a whole load of people with helmets and their brigandines or plate armour or whatever else out in front and those arrows will never find their way to the people behind. So, by being tightly packed, not only does it inherently make you safer against archery, but it also makes certain parts of your body basically invisible to archery, particularly the legs. And of course, as a battlefield commander, there is a strategic choice to make here. If you have a thousand infantry and you look at them and you think, well, that hundred have got better armour than the other 900, clearly you put them at the front. So what you do is you take all your guys who have the most complete armour, the biggest pauldrons, the best leg armour, they've remembered to wear their bevers or chosen to wear their bevers, the most heavily armoured people, like the knights or the men-at-arms, you put them at the front rank and therefore all of the lesser equipped people who have got less armour, and some people who might have no armour, those people I spoke about earlier, they are behind. Therefore they are shielded from the arrows by the better armoured people standing in front. So the third way that I'm going to describe whereby people could protect themselves better against arrows is also really blooming obvious, and I'm sure a lot of you were thinking of it already. Use a blooming great shield. I mean, that's obviously what the Romans did, but also this was used in the medieval period. We know that at pretty much the same time as massed archery started to dominate battlefields in the 14th century, a type of shield called a pavis, which really you could say in many ways was based on the Roman scutum, the pavis came along and the pavis was widely used for attacking castles during sieges where the enemy was shooting lots of arrows down. It was also used on the front ranks of infantry forces. In Italy sometimes entire infantry forces had a pavis and a spear, probably an emulation of what they'd read about the Romans. In addition, crossbowmen used them for loading their crossbows behind so they'd be protected while they were reloading. So pavises and any type of large shield is always an option. However, it wasn't widely done in England and France. We've really got very, very little evidence, there's a few isolated ones, of pavises being used in the Wars of the Roses, and in the Wars of the Roses we literally have two archery armies, two English armies, fighting each other at any one time. So why didn't they make wider use of pavises? I think part of it's logistical. Pavises are actually quite laborious to make, very difficult to transport, they're not cheap items, they're very heavy, quite cumbersome. So in some ways they might reduce the offensive capabilities of your force. This being said, there is one standalone source that I'm aware of which mentions potentially using pavises at Agincourt because they knew, remember the Somme plan, the battle plan of Marshal Boussicault at Agincourt was designed around neutralizing the English archers. They knew the problem posed by the English archers and so their entire battle plan was about taking out the English archers which they had suffered from gravely obviously at Crecy and Poitiers in a bunch of other smaller battles. However it seems that the pavises weren't actually used at Agincourt, maybe things would have turned out differently if they were. So shields are always an option, however be aware that they weren't as widely used in the medieval period as you might think they were for a bunch of complicated reasons, and also to be honest depending what type of soldier you are, if you're holding for example a long pike or you're armed with something like a halberd or a poleaxe, you can't really use these things conveniently when also having a pavis. There are some isolated images of people carrying a halberd and a pavis, so they did probably do it sometimes, but by and large if your main weapon is two-handed it's not very conducive to also carrying a big heavy shield. But that being said, would the pavis use and work against mass archery? Yes, and I think it's really a shame that we don't have any examples from history, at least medieval history, of English longbowmen coming up against a pavis equipped force, because I think it really would have changed the nature of the battle. Okay so the last few points about what you can do if you are an infantryman like I am portraying right at this second, and your job is to take out those archers and those archers are going to shoot as many arrows as quickly as they can at you. So the first one, a good bit of life advice, is cover your gaps. Okay now this might sound obvious but we actually have historical sources mentioning this. So say for example you have a helmet here, let's use this example, I have an eye slit here and I have an open mouth I don't have a bever on. Okay so there are a number of things that you can do to make your face and your eyes safer from incoming arrows, and one of those simple things is this. Okay and we absolutely know from written sources that tilting, turning or dipping the head was done and it shouldn't be any surprise because of course these sorts of things were just natural. If someone throws something at your face your natural reaction is to do this usually isn't it, to bring the hard part of your head to protect your eyes and nose and mouth and windpipe and these sorts of things. So absolutely don't necessarily think that you have to walk straight towards incoming arrows like this and we saw in Arrows vs Armour 3 that arrow came in here okay straight through the eye slot and probably through the edge of the person's cranium. If that helmet had been tilted like this there's a good chance that arrow never would have got through because it would have skimmed off here lost some energy hitting this and then would have hit that lip there and not gone straight through the gap. So if arrows are being shot straight at your face even if you have a beaver put the head down and let the strongest most deflective part of your helmet take it okay. If you don't have a beaver you've got to cover that. Now this brings in another interesting aspect many people didn't wear beavers and many people had open-faced helmets. If that's the case you can put stuff in front of your face. If you have arm armour you can do this you can put your arm in front of your face like that. If you don't have armour on your arms and the arrow would potentially go straight through your arm and hit you in the face anyway there are other things you can stick in front of your face. Hello! Now I'm not suggesting that these holes in polar axis are for looking through but you could do that and we again have historical precedent for this there's actually a technique in one of Tauhoff's treatises where he's on a horse someone's behind him shooting a crossbow and he actually puts the sort of lance behind you can hide behind things okay so anything that you can put in front of your face it could be any bit of equipment a halberd head even if it's your gauntlets so this is another good one this is what I always say to people if you're fighting in full armour and you've got gauntlets on well hey presto you can just do this and these gauntlets are really pretty resistive against uh these are hardened steel as well so these are very resistive against arrows you can just stick your hands in front of your face as you go in also think about other bits of your body you know think of the footballers in front of the goal but think about armpits if you've got exposed armpits then keep your elbows down and tucked in if you've got open exposed bits on the inside of your arm armour then make sure you turn your arms to the outside or maybe tuck everything in like this a bit like a boxer in fact there's a lot of parallels to be made with boxing there and hiding behind the boxing gloves so basically cover and close as much as you can as you close on the archers so the final two bits of advice for your common foot soldier against archers this one is really obvious if you think about it but I think it might escape a lot of people move quickly okay so archers have pretty much a fixed rate of shooting there is only a certain speed that most longbowmen will be able to shoot an arrow knock a new arrow draw an arrow release an arrow do the same over and over and over again yes a good archer can have a faster rate of shooting than a poor archer and this is potentially mentioned in historical sources but they can't accelerate themselves beyond what their maximum capacity is your rate of movement however is dictated by how fast you can run forwards and the more time you take to get to the archers the more arrows are going to hit you and every single one of those arrows might find a gap so this has to be married with the idea that you are in a large group of people and clearly you don't want to just trip over and fall over each other because then you'll be a horrendously exposed target so yes you want to bunch in all together or do you we'll come into that when the final point but let's say you're in one big mass and you want to shuffle forwards and gain ground on the archers as quickly as possible what did archers do to counter this well they put their good old friendly wooden stakes it's the wooden stake again i i hoped i would get another chance to feature this in the video and i did it looks like a giant pencil actually doesn't it but um wooden stakes people often think oh it's to stop a cavalry charge it is but don't don't fixate on the idea of men sitting on horses fixate on the fact that it's an enemy who's moving fast okay the danger to the archers is something disrupting their ability to keep shooting arrows at the enemy and that could be fast moving infantry for example fast forward to the victorian period 1879 the battle of rawks drift the british fighting at rawks drift were fighting a highly numerous and very quickly moving enemy the zulus okay and the zulus tactic was to close on the people shooting at them as quickly as possible exactly the same tactic used by the mardis forces in the sudan in the 1880s and 1890s the the problem with shooting weapons is they have a rate of fire or rate of shooting and so what you have to do is you have to close with them it's like the 21 foot rule if you've got a knife and they've got a gun you've got to close on them as quickly as possible so the missile troops at rawks drift they built essentially ramparts at the battle of agincourt they used wooden stakes at the battle of nicopolis the turks the ottomans used stakes as well it's all about holding back those forces so that you can keep shooting your arrows at them so reverse that what does the infantryman want to do close on the archers as quickly as possible so the final thing that i would suggest it's worth the infantryman thinking about doing or rather the infantry force thinking about doing against massed archery and this isn't necessarily a good idea but it's something to think about and i think a final point to launch some discussion down in the comments on and that is split up now i told you if you group together you're better armored and this is true okay the closer you pack in and this is that seems to be from the written sources this is what most medieval soldiers did is they packed themselves in as closely as possible and put their heads down and moved as quickly as they could without falling over each other on those archers in order to reduce the number of arrows hitting them and the amount of time that they were being hit by arrows but potentially if the landscape allows it then splitting up and flanking around the archers has a very important effect and what is it if there is more gaps between each soldier more of the arrows are likely to find gaps and be redundant to be wasted okay when you're packed in you pretty much know that every arrow is going to hit your force it might have less effect because you're packed in close and you don't have very many vulnerable openings but if you split up then those arrows very likely won't hit a lot of you and they'll go between the gaps and you essentially divide the fire you split up the shooting the archery coming from those longbowmen and means that they're now shooting at lots of people all around here and the arrows aren't concentrated on one killing zone and one sort of bottleneck okay so it's another way of doing things and it's very clear that this is exactly what marshal busico had in mind at the battle of agincourt because his original plan was to flank around in two wings of cavalry and hit the archers from either side what did the archers do to counter this well we know they had wooden stakes as mentioned before in front but they also had ground and this was a very common english tactic woods either side of them another ground which meant that the cavalry weren't able to do this and they had to come up the middle so sometimes dividing your forces even if it's just splitting them in two or splitting them into a number of forces to attack the archers in a pincer movement is a good way of dividing up the intensity of the archery of the arrows and meaning that more of the arrows just go into the ground and don't hit anything at all what do you think do you think it's better to group together and advance quickly and smash into the middle of the archers do you think it's better to flank around and why be interested to see down in the comments what your views are it's very clear that both are supported in the historical evidence both were done historically for slightly different reasons and i think whether you have armor on i think if you have armor on it might be better to stay in one group in the middle i think if you're more vulnerable like horses are a lot of horse flesh to hit with arrows it's probably better to spread out to reduce the chances of being hit at all i think this is probably where the division lies anyway thanks a lot for watching and of course if you haven't watched it already make sure to check out arrows versus armor 3 i am intensely happy that it's finally been released it has given me loads of new ideas it's reinvigorated some of my thoughts about archery and armor and lots of other things and indeed it's reminded me of why english and french like to put on the armor that they did because they were the people facing massed longbow arrows and i would not want to be the person like that mannequin standing in front of those arrows it doesn't matter how good your armor is and remember people fixate on the armor penetration but it doesn't matter how good your armor is you know there are some gaps and it only takes one of those arrows to find a gap and you are screwed so um i think it would be terrifying as well as just unpleasant being the hit i think it would be terrifying having arrows of that nature biting into your armor potentially finding gaps glancing off and hitting friends of yours in the face over there absolutely terrifying anyway thanks a lot for watching and thanks to todd and his entire team for putting that together i have been matt easton and i will continue to be and i really trust that i'll see you back on the channel for my next video cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks