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 these 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 pound, so we've got a 10 mm arrow,
ash arrow shaft with a 8 or 9 mm nock at the end, 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 existing ones showing that. We
don't really know why yet. All right first up we have a type seven 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's a different,
type 10's 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. Yeah from my trials on it I know it's really good
against fabric. Yep. It's really good against S shields, maile "yep" obviously it's going to be
good against flesh, "yep". Armour, terrible. So plate armour it will bend and we've got a record
actually from the medieval period say they bend like a pig's tail. Right 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, it 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 yeah 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...... 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 Arrow versus Armour 1 and 2, all of those films they can go through steel,
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 yeah and gambeson yeah, so if you're going to be shooting against
somebody wearing mail and gambeson and plate so you're 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 name, terminology for this 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 duck bill head because that's used a lot, but we don't actually know what a duck bill 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 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 arrow heads developed from the hunting head in particular that one the swept out one was
a a tightening up of that great big wide swallow tail hunting head you make them narrower they're
going to go through more things they are more aerodynamic. 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 at these two here, the type 7 and the 9 these were against
armour, 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. 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 barbs; 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 steel? 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? Hi I've interrupted the film
for another Tod Cutler related interesting fact and today today we have the antenna dagger. 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 Tod Cutler.com
Commonly known as a swallow tail 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 swallow tail
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 a hunting head
yeah and big because you want a big wound channel, beast to 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 the 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 got a 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 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 feather 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 Phaebus 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 and I said actually I 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. 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 that the Vikings use them a lot. 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 you'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 they're great for birds that
land on the 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 like 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, but anyway really interesting head and one that's
sort of underrepresented really when when you go out with the sort of the show and tell things. So
next up we have this one here with a wooden blunt on it. So the obvious thing Will is what? Hunting.
Yep I fully agree with that there's another intriguing possibility we'll come to that,
but it shares something similar with that last point that we saw with the forked one and that is
that these don't penetrate into the ground so they lie on the surface. The other thing is that 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 right 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 wooden, 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 coney,
it's 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 Pud, I know him as Pud,
but Mark Wheatley real name and he came out 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. They should there, should be millions of arrow heads
in town centers and things yeah. So in my Village I know exactly where the butts is in my Village
it should be littered with hundreds 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 Lutterell Psalter 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 in the ground for more than a few years
they're gone. So next up we have an M3 Tudor or Towton bodkin, but I'm going to start with
Will here because they're not Tudor. They're way earlier than that and earlier than Towton which
was yeah 1461 these go back into the 1300s they are F dated to that so actually they're called
Tudor and Towton 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 plate
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 a type 16. I will just caveat what Will said,
is "we think they're too light to be us against plates" but we should test it. We need to test
that and that 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 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 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 mail, it will go through gambeson and
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 sort of been optimised for
kind of good at everything yeah but not great at anything. They're the "Jack of all trades"
arrowhead aren't they. Yeah and you can a really skilled arrow smith can fire world 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 Towton 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 a 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 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 is 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 got
some with the compound still on haven't we? Yes yes we do, so we know exactly what they 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 burning stuff whatever,
but my problem with this and again we're going to come back to test this, is that that is 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 thatch yeah but not massively
exciting. They are a lot of work to go through for something that may not work particularly
well. Yeah 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 and sieges and things like that. I wonder
if you could put lime powder in this and 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 heads. There are lots of other ones out there, lots of different varieties
and variations and forms and changes of forms 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