Could This Device Have Changed Medieval European History?

It's not often in one's life that an engineering wizard from what used to be the Holy Roman Empire sends you gifts. What's in these boxes potentially could have changed the outcome of personal longbows. I sent this over to a chap called Jörg Sprave, who runs the Slingshot channel on YouTube. Now he specializes in all sorts of elastic powered weapons and he is a complete genius when it comes to making new forms of, well, weaponry really I suppose is the best way to look at it. I contacted him and challenged him could he do something that would work with an English longbow and so this is mine that I sent him. This is not a warbow, this is about a 30 to 35 pound hunting bow. It is still obviously a longbow in form and function but it's not as powerful as a medieval warbow would be and quite frankly I can't actually draw a medieval warbow yet. I'm working on it but I challenged him to see whether he could do something miraculous with this. So that's the that's the longbow and then we'll open the next package which is where the magic is and Jörg thank you very much if you're watching this. I'm very excited to see what this actually does and how it functions. What Jörg has done is create a device that could have been made by medieval people and it attaches to the longbow and it gives the longbow an incredible function. It actually allows you to loose many many arrows very very quickly. Let me show you it. I haven't actually seen what survived the transportation from mainland Europe yet. It's across the sea to get here and this is what Jörg called the instant robin hood. This device, Sir Robin of Loxley on the side of it in pyrograph writing which is lovely, beautifully made of very high quality plywood. I don't know whether this is birch plywood but it's very very smooth and of course they did have plywood in medieval times as we know a lot of viking shields for example were made not from plywood but they were made into plywood by having small strips of lindenwood ideally but often ash or whatever wood they had because if you cross the grain of wood it gives it more dimensional strength. It means it's strong in equal amounts in equal directions so that's what Jörg has done here. There is literally nothing in this with the exception of the Merlin's Eye, the laser sight, which couldn't have actually been made by somebody in medieval times. Yes they wouldn't have had power tools, they wouldn't have had this specific type of plywood but they could have made it all. This bit is very much not medieval. Jörg has put this on here. It's a red dot aiming device which should make this more accurate. You wouldn't need it though for its basic function but that's a lovely little touch, the magic of Merlin applied to a laser. Let me explain how this actually works. What you do is you attach the bow here like this and then it creates a magazine for the arrows. This is in effect a magazine for a longbow. So the longbow itself attaches here and you bind it into place which I'll do in a moment sort of somewhere in the middle so your longbow is completely natural there's nothing drilled into it there's nothing like that it literally just goes on there and then the arrows and this is the really interesting bit the arrows go in this magazine now this magazine is fairly easy to load and unload these are the arrows or arguably these are bolts that can be shot from the longbow now these are much shorter than a traditional arrow and let me explain some of the features of how it differs from an ordinary arrow this is an ordinary longbow arrow this one is fletched with goose feathers but you'll notice it's fletched with three of them now three fletchings make it very stable but it also means that because the nock is a vertical slice in the end of the arrow it means that the arrow has a handedness so the arrow should go on the bow a particular way around this has the cock feather sticking out at right angles to the nock and the other two feathers offset somewhat so this has a particular way around depending on which side of the shaft of the longbow this arrow goes you always want the cock feather to the outside because if the cock feather was on the inside it would deflect the arrow more than than it does if it's the other way around now this kind of arrow was very very traditional and this is the sort of thing that would have been used in the so-called hundred years war that incredible historical period which actually lasted about 116 years in the middle ages war between the Plantagenet house and the house of Valois which is the French and the English thrones effectively so this arrow would be very familiar to people in the medieval period interestingly the arrows or bolts that are used for Jurg's device are a bit more like those used in crossbows so you could argue this is a bolt because on a crossbow you don't have the feathers or the veins sticking out in the quite the same way that you do with a longbow arrow you'll notice this has just got two and that means they stack in the actual magazine here rather nicely and similarly on crossbows they they go out sideways so they're just two of them and they're in a horizontal plane so the arrow can go either way around in this device and this means they'll stack inside this but these are so short they can't be shot back at you because traditionally archers in medieval warfare certainly where the longbow was concerned ran out of arrows and then went forward to get more arrows to replace the ones they'd actually shot but if you can't shoot these back at the enemy these are useless you can go and pick them up because you've got this device but the enemy can't unless they have this secret weapon and that's what this could have been this could have been a secret weapon which could have changed war it wasn't far away a draw for a long time between the house of valois and the house of plantagenet and at one stage the house of plantagenet the english side kind of almost won but then suffered a whole series of setbacks with a different king a whole different structure some bad decisions and some great generalship from the valois side and from the french what i'm going to do now is assemble the magic bow and the instant robin hood bear with me this may take some time i've not done it before so what i'm going to do is tie this on to the end here what i'm doing is a style of whipping that was medieval but whether it will work or not i don't know you can see how that's now attached to this t-piece fairly firmly held and in operation i will be simply holding it like this what i've got to do now is get the string through this slot pull that through and then i have to actually cock the bow attach the bow string and then we're ready to shoot this device can hold six shots at the same time obviously you could make this bigger if you wanted to but it might become more cumbersome so be an optimum there so let's just span the bow it's a very light one right this is starting to look a bit like a crossbow but it's absolutely not a crossbow because you pull this out you get to this position and then you release and then the arrow comes out i'm going to load this for the first time and try taking a few shots my target is only about 10-12 meters away but is man-sized i am not a particularly good archer i'm certainly not qualified to actually instruct you in any way shape or form about how to use a bow or anything like that this is all personal experimentation and enjoyment i'm going to load this now and it's as simple as for me anyway i sort of slot the arrows in and they of course they stack rather nicely five six that's six arrows in there that just holds them in place it's got a little bit of tension on it i'm not going to use merlin's eye just yet although i am tempted i'm just going to actually release this and show you how it works so you don't actually use this you use your arms as usual you can use whatever number of fingers you want because there's no the arrows up here that's really awkward but it might work i'm going to use my three fingers underneath the bow string goes around the tip of the arrow here and slides in here and there's a double click so i'm led to believe so let's uh let's have a go with the instant robin hood the sir robin of loxley created by jurgs brava of the slingshot channel let's actually shoot my first bolt from an english longbow good grief that's very easy let me try a few more that's it six shots slightly out of control by me there i'm not used to it of course um but it worked incredibly well and did you notice the speed with which i shot six arrows at the target the first time i tried it let's reload and have another go well that's not too bad i've got all of the shots easily within a human torso size target um they've gone well one of them has gone all the way through the target one's stuck in the vertical post so i've got to get those out and reload it but that's not bad shooting for a device that i'm completely unfamiliar with um and that has its own inherent instabilities you know the binding on the longbow and all these kind of things and of course none of these arrows could be shot back at me unless they had this secret device so let's take the arrows out reload and have another go and maybe i'll use merlin's eye this time i've now for fun i've just switched on merlin's eye and if you can see i now have a medieval longbow with a red dot sight obviously they would not have had laser technology in the hundred years war they had guns and stuff but lasers were quite a few hundred years away yet maybe merlin would have come up with something like a laser in the legends i'm reloaded now i'm going to turn on the magic there he goes now let's see if the red dot makes any difference to my target shooting and then i've got something to discuss with you oops it really is incredibly good fun you get through those six shots very quickly i thought i had an extra one there but i don't uh it's definitely empty now uh i'm not sure my red dot sight was properly calibrated so merlin i don't think you improved my aim that time actually merlin i apologize it has improved my shot quite dramatically i have one two three four five and one went through i managed to shoot within a center five six inch spread around the shoulder i was aiming here so obviously merlin's eye is slightly off i'd need to adjust it and it would go where the red dot said but that's interesting so it does actually improve my grouping if not my targeting because it's not actually properly calibrated so let's reload and then i want to talk to you about something that's really intrigued me what i really want to talk to you about is how this might have changed the course of history it's a period of warfare called 100 years war uh which was actually about 116 years between the house of valois which was more or less the french king and the house of plantagenet which was more or less the english king with quite a large amount of what is now france as part of its empire they fought a war they also used a technique called chevalier i've probably slightly mispronounced that word but it means raiding effectively a there's a form of riding around on horseback smashing up your enemy's landscape it's a political terror it sends your ordinary people into hiding in behind fortresses it's generally a form of psychological warfare on the population but it needs a very mobile force now the english were famous for their longbows the question is can you or did you use a longbow from horseback and what are the complications of using that particular weapon while mounted did they ever do that i think they probably would have done maybe they chose to get off first and then shoot their longbows then get on their horses and ride away who knows do you think this might have changed the face of chevalier warfare because i'll explain to you the difficulties of horse archery separate from foot archery by getting on this medieval saddle and showing you what i mean i want to talk about medieval mounted soldiers because we know the hundred years war was famous for very mobile force and the longbowmen were very likely mounted on horses in fact we know they were because otherwise we wouldn't be able to get away it was one of the problems that led to agincourt which is a lot of the foot soldiers weren't mounted and they got encircled by the largely mounted french cavalry i have here my trusty wooden steed this is just four legs and a reproduction medieval saddle with its high front and back this is the kind of saddle that mounted archers would have likely encountered when they were riding to war during the hundred years war so i'm going to get on this and show you the difficulties of using a longbow from this kind of saddle so here i am on my 15th century saddle obviously there would normally be a horse's head here but imagine that so i can't go into this area at all otherwise i hit my horse's head so here's the longbow you can immediately see the issue with such a long weapon which is obviously i can shoot in that angle i can shoot all the way around here but getting over the horse's head and shooting this way is going to be really really difficult but that's the same with quite a lot of mounted archery theoretically you could just turn the bow sideways and do stuff with it but there isn't a very strong tradition of using longbows from horseback there might be a reason for that the simple reason might be that the terrain wasn't suitable it might be that people who could use longbows weren't particularly trained in horseback riding um could be a whole bunch of different things potentially just tradition but here's one of the other issues so if you don't have something like this device that makes me an instant success at mounted archery you've got your arrows here sometimes in mounted archery they actually have four fletchings but this one is a three fletched uh standard one you have to take the arrow out of wherever you're storing it you have to put it onto the bow you have to get it the right way round all the time while you're moving along you have to knock it and you have to draw and loose all in time with the horse's movement now this arrow has one way round it needs to actually fall on the string to shoot and you notice that on mounted archery we tend to have the arrow on this side with warbows we do see arrows used on foot with the arrow shaft on this side of the bow but typically most people tend to use the arrow on the opposite side um you'll have to ask an expert why but typically that's what people talk about today having it on this side it's actually arguably faster on horseback to use the arrow on this side use your other hand knock while you're riding your horse as well of course don't forget draw and loose that takes a lot of training to do efficiently and you've got to store the arrows somewhere as well there are people that can get off multiple shots in a few seconds on horseback and they are highly trained highly skilled there's some fantastic videos of it particularly in Hungary there's a lot of mounted archery of great quality in Hungary they shoot about five or six arrows in 20 or 30 seconds let's see if this instant robin hood can help me match the best trained mounted archers in the world let me see whether this can convert me into an instant champion mounted archer obviously i'm not a real horse but i am kind of sitting on a saddle like you would be on a horse i can brace myself in lots of different ways i don't have those skills yet it's something i want to learn one day but let's see how i can shoot and let's see what this would enable me to do key thing about this device is i don't have to worry about knocking the arrow and all that complexity before i can actually shoot so one two three four five six empty that is very very fast shooting from somebody who quite frankly doesn't really have mounted archery skills imagine this in the hands of thousands of skillful mounted archers imagine what this could have done for the Angevin dynasty and their chevalier raids i think this could have changed history york thank you very much for creating this i'd encourage my viewers to go and have a look at the slingshot channel it is full of crazy and eccentric ideas and it's definitely good fun it's not medieval but it doesn't matter it's all about engineering and having fun with engineering skills so go and have a look at that and thank you for making me an instant robin hood