10 Medieval Arrow Types What Are They for

Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and I'm down at Will Sherman's forge because he has made me this fantastic sheaf of arrows. I use this for reenacting when I'm showing and demonstrating people what things are and it allows us now the opportunity to talk our way through it. So the first thing is just tell us about the actual all of the arrows basically. So these arrows were made for your bow which is like 80, 80, 90 pounds. So we've got a 10 eight or nine mil nock at the end, a piece of tapered cow horn or buffalo horn on these ones in the nock, swan feathers and the glue is an animal fat beeswax and green verdigris, copper verdigris glue. And the glue itself I find really interesting because we're not quite sure if it's the antibacterial, antimicrobial aspects of copper that it's there, it just preserves the feathers longer or if it's just pretty. Yeah we know they use red, we know they use green, we've got artwork showing that, we've got existent ones showing that, we don't really know why yet. All right first up we have a type 7 needle bodkin. Now first of all I'll say is that we refer to these as a type. Now this is type 7, type 9 is different, type 10 is different and so on. That way when people are talking about arrows you're not just going oh it's a metal pointy thing on the end, it allows you to define one type from another. You know what the sort of the basic parameters are. From my trials on it I know it's really good against fabric, it's really good against shields, mail, obviously it's going to be good against flesh. Armour? Terrible, so plate armour it will bend and we've got a record actually from the medieval period saying they bend like a pig's tail. So up against something flat and hard it's just going to curl up, there's no strength here for it to actually go through. And like a lot of arrowheads these were sometimes made of iron, sometimes made of steel, so there are quite a few in the archaeological record which are steel but still not really going to be strong enough. It just doesn't have the bulk behind it to penetrate without damage. So if you think of a cold chisel for instance where you're hammering through other bits of steel, the cutting edge on it is really quite steep. It's not fine like a wood chisel, this is kind of like the wood chisel, it's not the cold chisel, it will not go through plate armour. Other forms of armour it will. Yeah and if you make them out of steel you can put sharper edges on them and have a harder edge so they can cut through things better. Yeah the steel in there allowing you to get it really sharp and interestingly as well if you keep them clean and polished, and then of course I did those trials where I waxed the heads and if you wax the heads they penetrate much better. How old are they this form? Okay so the type 7 that we know of has got a diamond section, it's actually quite wide and flat, it's not a square. But when you go way back into the Viking period and actually before that it's a square section, so they haven't developed that diamond which is a more efficient cutting tool. In Waterford in Ireland we've got records from around 1170 of a much shorter arrow, it's a military arrow but it's way way shorter and smaller and they've got a type 7 on there with a square or very slightly diamond section head on that. So they're being used way way before the medieval period. Fine so if we say that they go back as far as say the Battle of Hastings as a convenient. Oh way before that yeah. All right fine. Way before that. Great. Now another arrow which is closely related to that is this one, which is called handily the type 9 or a short bodkin. So the type 7 is a long bodkin, bodkin being needle, this is short. Short and fat and strong. Yeah. So again there's so much uncertainty in this. We believe that these are against plate armour and they seem to cut plate armour a bit. So we did lots of trials together on arrows versus armour one and two, all of those films. They can go through seal. Yep. But in essence very few of those shots really penetrated the plate armour. So I think if they are against plate armour they're for very marginal gains. It is not a given that these go through. But they do go through mail. Yep. And gambeson. Yep. So if you're going to be shooting against somebody wearing mail and gambeson and plate, you were just stacking the odds in your favour by making it shorter and harder and more rigid. Yeah. Which is what they may have been used for. So what I would say as well is a modern terminology for this, a modern name is a plate cutter. Yeah. And actually we do not have the definitive proof that that is what this was for. It's a great name and it's caught on but it's not actually necessarily correct. So it could well be that an old medieval name for this was the duckbill head. Yep. Because that's used a lot but we don't actually know what a duckbill head was. So next up we've got these two type 16s. So the one on your right hand side is what's called swept, where the barbs go out. And the other one is what's called closed, although it's not very closed this one, but where the barbs come closer in towards the shank. Military heads. For sure. So military arrowheads developed from the hunting head, in particular that one, the swept out one, was a tightening up of that great big wide swallowtail hunting head. You make them narrower they're going to go through more things, they're more dynamic. So for me the curious difference, I'll show you again actually, between the swept one and the closed one, is that one is going to, the swept one is going to require more force to go through armoured targets. And that's probably why they began to sweep them in. That's my guess. Because obviously the barbs, the bigger the barbs poke out, the better from an anti-flesh point of view. But the harder it is to get it to go through things. So I think that's why they're beginning to close them up. Yeah. Don't really know. But what is really intriguing, if we look back at these two here, the type 7 and the 9, these were against armour. Yep. Both of them in the archaeological record, there is some evidence of them being steel, but not that much. Far more of them are made of soft iron. Yep. However, what we have quite a lot of evidence for, on these ones which are presumably, presumably against soft flesh targets, the barbs are very often of steel. Yeah, iron socket and then steel barb. Some of them are heat treated and hardened, some of them are made of steel but not hardened. But almost all of them have got steel barbs and an iron socket. Which is a really interesting point because if these are against flesh, why need, why use the steel in there? There's no need for it. So there is something that we are definitely missing about these and I for one want to go back and do some trials against armour using these because they're not thought of as armour-piercing heads. Why the steel? Yeah. Hi, I've interrupted the film for another Todd Cutler related interesting fact and today we have the antenna dagger. It goes from the 11th through to the 14th century. The first picture of something very similar to this I know of is 1080 from an Italian church wall, but it's a popular dagger all the way through to the 14th and I love them. Anyway, you'll find this and other similar daggers available at toddcutler.com. But now, back to the film. So next up we have a type 15 hunting head. It's commonly known as a swallowtail these days. Interestingly, it is also the mark of all the British army goods. So anything that belongs to the army is marked with a swallowtail mark because of the old archery days I suppose. Massive. Yeah, they're huge. They're hunting heads. They're not military. They may have taken them to war but they're definitely hunting heads. And big because you want a big wound channel beast to bleed out fast. Now, my understanding of these is that when they're shot in, they go into the chest cavity if you're a good shot. The muscles here on the outside of the wall, you know, their beast will run a little bit. That moves about. But this, they're always blunted on the back aren't they? They're never sharp. They don't want to come back out. No. They want to stay where they are or walk forward. And so my understanding is as the muscle movement goes, it catches and walks its way forward cutting deeper. Hunters out there tell me if I'm talking complete tripe but that's my understanding of it. The other thing that's really interesting is they've got massive cross-sectional area right at the front and it's these, the feathers, that are supposed to be steering it. Not steering from the front because that causes all sorts of problems. It does. So you can't shoot them from a long distance at a small target like a heart. You have to be up very close. They're just not accurate. They steer themselves. Even with really big feathers. And these have got bigger feathers than normal? These have got bigger feathers than the military arrows in an attempt to try and get this to steer properly. But the bigger the feathers, the louder the arrow. Right. So you're making a lot of noise. The animal can hear it from a long way away and it's got time to move around. So you want to be up close as shown in artwork. Yeah. So if you look at the works of Gaston Fabers who was writing, illustrating, end of the 14th century, early 15th century, hunting is done really, really close in this period. And I don't think it's artistic convention where they're trying to squash everything into a small picture. I really believe it was that way because I've shot them off a crossbow bolt, big heads like this, and over like a 10 meter distance, you can see them do this. And I'm not making that up. They really do. And you have to shoot smaller heads off a crossbow bolt because it's inherently less stable than an arrow, but still they steer themselves. So it's got to be done up close. So next up, we've got a type six forked head. I made a film about this a few years ago called Six Medieval Arrowheads and I talked my way through it. The last one I did was this one. I said, actually, I've got no idea really what it's for. Nobody does. All sorts of ideas. So should we start with what it is absolutely not for? It's not for shooting horse tendons. It's not for shooting ropes. It may have been used in a naval context, but it's not designed for that. What we do know is it's one of the oldest heads ever made, ever found. Yeah, this form of head goes back into the Stone Age, through the Roman period, and actually into the modern day now. You can get these in stone, you get them in bronze, you get them all over the world. Every culture in the world seems to have them. So whether it be South America, China, Inuit, I don't know actually about the Aborigines. No, nor do I, but I know the Vikings used them a lot. Yeah. Okay. So maybe almost every culture in the world, but basically you find them all over the planet and all over the timeline as well. So going back thousands upon thousands of years, right to the modern day, and they have a purpose. We know what it is, which is bird hunting. Or small game. Small game too? Yeah. Fur and feathers. It'll grab the feathers and the fur and take the animal out without destroying the meat we're trying to preserve. There's a lovely adaptation of this that I made a film on a few years ago, and it's of an arrow that was from way up in Lapland. But again, I think other cultures use it. Forked head, and then a sort of a swollen, almost cigar-shaped wooden piece behind it. And they bounce. They're bouncing arrows. So you shoot them low over the water, and they skip. And they're great for birds that land on water, ducks and things like that. But the other thing about them is the forked head. It's the same on grass. It doesn't dig in, and it doesn't shoot itself into the reeds at the edge of the water. So you can go and recover your arrows afterwards, even if you miss the birds. We've all lost arrows shooting anything other than a plate test, for example. You're shooting roving, flight shooting, whatever. They just go into the ground and they're gone. These ones go in and they stand up, and you've got your arrow back. Anyway, really interesting head. And one that's sort of underrepresented, really, when you go out with the sort of the show-and-tell thing. So next up, we have this one here with a wooden blunt on it. So the obvious thing, Will, is what? Hunting. Hunting. Yep, I fully agree with that. There's another intriguing possibility. We'll come to that. But this hunting, it shares something similar with that last point that we saw, the forked one. And that is that these don't penetrate into the ground. So they lie on the surface. The it's a very low-cost head. So, you know, in comparison, because that's a bodger in the woods, isn't it? Less skilled, less material cost than an iron or a steel head. And they shoot really well. So in your trials, how have you done with them? We shot one of these. In fact, it may have been an identical head to that made by Phil Gregson. Comparing it to a type 16 head of the same weight, they go the same distance, more or less. So it does mean that, especially at sort of close hunting ranges, it'll make no difference at all. Now, the thing is, it's cheaper if you lose it. Doesn't matter so much. Bird hunting and things in the woodlands and stuff like that, you're going to lose a lot of arrows. So you're already saving your money by not using metal heads. The other thing is, they don't stick in the branches. So you don't have to climb trees to recover your arrows. They fall out. So there's lots of reasons you would want them. Small bird, you know, that coming in is just going to cave its chest in anyway. So lots of reasons for using those. But the other thing that I find really intriguing about it is there's a guy called Pudd. I know him as Pudd, but Mark Wheatley, real name. And he came up with a theory, hypothesis, I suppose it is, that this was what was used for training at the butts. Because under British law, English law, you had to shoot every Sunday at the butts. The main reason he says that is that arrowheads are very rarely found at the butts. And they should be everywhere because tens of thousands of people will be practicing across the time period. There should be millions of arrowheads in town, like centres and things. So I mean, my village, I know exactly where the butts is in my village. It should be littered with hundreds of years worth of arrowheads. Because you break them, you lose them. They're not there. And if they're not there, you kind of have to conclude that they weren't using them. If they weren't using them, what were they using? Well, might well have been these. You see it in things like the lateral salter, you know, where they are shooting at a target and they've got these great big bulbous heads on the end. Other artwork too. But you don't seem to find metal heads on the butts. Whereas these, of course, when they're in the ground for more than a few years, they're gone. Yeah. So next up we have an M3, Tudor or Tauton Bodkin. But I'm going to start with Will here because... They're not Tudor. They're way earlier than that. And earlier than Tauton, which was... Yeah, 1461. These go back into the 1300s. They were finds dated to that. So actually they're called Tudor and Tauton arrowheads and that is completely wrong. Yeah. These are a really interesting head because these are a development of the Type 16. Hold on. On the right hand side you have a swept Type 16 and on the left hand side you have an M3. So they don't look very similar but what you've got is essentially the same process to make them. You've got a socket with barbs welded or brazed on. It's the same with this head here. You can make them in one piece. You can make them in two pieces depending on what you want the end result to be. They're too light really to be used against plates but they're very fast. They're great for long distance and if you bring the barbs out slightly they're going to cause the same horrendous wounds as the Type 16. Yeah. I will just caveat what Will said is we think they're too light to be used against plates. We should test it. We need to test that and that will come in due course. But we'll do that. But these intrigue me a little bit because the head is much smaller and lighter which makes for a faster arrow. Faster means it's going to go further. One has to assume that the less weight means that it's going to be less good against armour. So have you got a theory of what's going on here? Why have they developed them like this? I mean really what is the point? I think they're like a multi-purpose head. They're designed for anyone who's coming at you wearing all kinds of different things. We know that the Type 9 doesn't go through plate all the time but it'll go through male, it'll go through gambeson, that kind of thing. These are very similar. These are essentially a four-sided cutting head but you can control the tip angle, you can control the barb width, that kind of thing and they're quite easy to make. So maybe they're just a fast multi-purpose military head. They've sort of been optimised for kind of good of everything. Yeah. But not great at anything. They're the jack-of-all-trades arrowhead aren't they? And a really skilled arrowsmith can fireweld the barbs on and make them have an iron socket and steel barbs. You can get a less skilled person to braze the barbs on. There's loads of those found at Tarleton or you can make them in one piece. Easy enough to make? Very easy to make, yeah. So last up we have some incendiary heads. These ones here. Now I'm going to put the basket down, we'll talk about that in a minute because that's quite different. So we've got these two here. One's got a flattened shank, one's got twisted shank. Small barbs on the end, nothing really big. The idea with these is that they go in, they're hard to draw out, that's what the barbs are about. They're not against flesh, they're not about armour penetration, they're not about hunting. These are not circular, the shanks are not circular. The idea is that you compact your compound around it, you wrap it, you do all sorts of other bits. We are going to do a film on this, it's just too good to leave alone. We're coming back for a big one. Not yet. We have existing ones where the compound is wrapped around it, it's lit, it's shot. You've got some with the compound still on haven't we? Yes, yes we do. So we know exactly what these are and what they were. They go back into at least the 14th century, possibly before, and they're still getting shot from muskets. Certainly by the time of the English Civil War, so 1650s, they're still getting shot arrows just like this out of muskets. So those we know what they are. So now we're going to come back to this fire basket as it's called. Now this is really where I want you to educate me because, and will actually, because I don't know of any of these in the artwork. I know of a very few in the archaeological record. I can only actually put my finger on a picture of one. Which is European, not English. European, not English. There you go. Now the idea behind them apparently is that you put hot coals in them, you wrap them with a bit of burny stuff, whatever. But my problem with this, and again we're going to come back to test this, is that if that hits on something like a wooden structure, the whole thing is going to collapse. Any embers that you've got in there are just going to fall on the ground or wherever it is. It is a really inefficient way of delivering fire. Might kind of work against that, but not massively exciting. It's a lot of work to go through for something that may not work particularly well. They're very hard to make those things. Are they? Yeah. Okay. So I have one other theory, which again I will test, is they certainly weren't shy of chemical warfare in the medieval period. It's not something we think about very much but they did do it. So they certainly had clay pots where they put lime powder in and throw them on ships in the sieges and things like that. I wonder if you could put lime powder in this and the cloth around it and then actually its collapsing nature is perfect for the delivery of that, that it hits on some walls or whatever. Big puff of lime. Lime, basically it's a caustic agent that will burn any wet membranes, eyes, throats, nose. Was it a liming arrow, he says in inverted commas, or was it a fire arrow? I don't know. Opinions please because that's one that I'd really like to know about. So that's our walk through of most of the standard medieval arrowheads. There are lots of other ones out there, lots of different varieties and variations and forms and changes of form depending on who's making them when they're being made. There are other military heads that aren't in here but these are the basic developments of each type. Okay, well Will, thank you very much for that walk through. No worries. Thank you very much for watching if you made it to the end and well we'll see you again. Cheers. Cheers.