hi its Tod of Tod's workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to
talk a little bit about longbow arrows of English longbow arrows now the first
thing I'll say is that the myth and legend that surround the English longbow
it just makes it obscures so much hard information because there's so many
people out there who just absolutely say this is it this is fact I'll tried quite
I'll try not to be one of those people and that's not what my channel is about
so I will say it the way I believe it to be and explain why I think that and then
we'll take it from there I have six different arrow forms here
and they're all during various points fairly normal kind of arrows so we will
start with the armor piercing bodkin this is fitted to war bow shaft let's say
between 30 and 32 inches long depending I think Mary Rose is about thirty and a
half inches I think and traditionally the cloth yard shaft was supposed to be
32 inches I believe so in a way 30 and a half to 32 inches for an a shaft iron or
steel head upon it which has four faces now the four faces are quite important
because if you imagine taking a round arrow and trying to shoot that through
steel what then has to happen to the steel is you you deform it you have to
break through you have to deform it and stretch it until it's wide enough to
allow the arrow to pass. Now that takes a great deal of energy, it takes less
energy if you cut four cuts in it and then those steel panels get bent back in
a very characteristic shape. The sort of four triangles get bent back leaving
enough room for the arrowhead to pass. But... and here's the but... to try and pass
arrows through armor I have yet to encounter anybody who's really
successfully done it through what I would consider to be a decent piece of
armor so if you take something like a Agincourt they would make armour
out of iron largely at the time perhaps is a bit of Steel there but upon
the breastplate for instance in the front of the helmet the thickness can
really get quite high so sort of maybe three millimeters or up to eighth of an
inch kind of in that direction and I see people on YouTube or wherever it might
be and they're putting arrows through one point two millimeter steel they've
even seen cheats where people have pulled out an aluminium plate and go
look it shoots through steel! It's like uh, wrong colour. So again you look at the
historical treatise and you talk about French Knights for instance fearing that
the arrows will go through the breaths of their helmets not through their
breastplates but through the vents of the helmet well that of course might be
a bit of a lot of a weak spot so yes he would consider that but towards the end
of the Hundred Years War what the French were doing to effectively defeat the
English archers was heads down walk slowly
bunch up maybe but basically makes sure all the gaps are covered and they were
pretty impenetrable so the whole thing about English arrows shooting through
armor yeah sure it happened occasionally if the armor was bad or it's a weak spot
or is a lucky shot but essentially essentially it didn't really happen
that's my understanding of it. Now the other thing that's very interesting
about these arrowheads is of course wrought iron is the cheap material to
make them from but wrought iron doesn't keep a good cutting edge here and you do
need a good cutting edge and again most modern reproductions is just done at
mild steel which is a bit harder than the wrought iron but not a great deal
you could fashion them completely out steel but that becomes an expensive
process so what you see in records is you see arrowheads where it says
arrowheads at X price or if they are 'steeled' they are a higher price now we
don't really know the definition of the word steeled, what they mean by that, my
guess because it would be appropriate to the arrowhead and they certainly could
do, is that it's case hardening so you can take five hundred arrowheads pack
them in a box full of charcoal clay pot bake that in a fire or eight hours ten
hours and a very thin film of carbon impregnates itself into the surface of
the iron or the other low-grade steel and you end up with a
absolutely super hard steel jacket around the arrowhead.
Now, metallurgical analysis hasn't shown that in any arrowheads that I know of but there
is the argument that the layer is so very thin of high carbon steel on the
outside that actually it just be rusted away in all cases so I think
it's never been proved definitively but if you ask my opinion these things only
ever stand a chance of working if they are made from a super super hard steel
or in that case case hardened a super hard steel jacket on fundamentally a
wrought iron core so that would be my take on the armor piercing arrow this is
a Needle Bodkin, now as plate armour came in so this is very much a
13th 14th century item now as plate armor came in this long needle upon the
end it's just going to bend so that's going to be no good at all for plate
armor which is why it got shorter and stubbier for the plate cutting arrow
heads now this long one is to defeat maille (mail) so actually it is less important it
doesn't cut so much as poke its way through the rings but essentially that's
just got one ring that it needs to defeat before it can pass deeper yes
it's got the padded jack beneath it and so on but this makes it an easier
Arrowhead to make the technology of it the steel that's required is
fundamentally a low-grade wrought iron would basically do it so there's no need
to steal these ones or to case-hardened them but this of course fell out of use
as mail fell out of use so by the time you get to about 1400 these things are
not you're not facing mail on a battlefield anymore or not so much and
not against knights anyway and so these sort of arrowheads have fallen out of
use then we get the last of the military head so have here which this is quite an
aggressively barbed one but nonetheless it's it's true for sort of type 16 as
the classic ones where the barbed sort of comes in I suppose you'd call this an
open type 16 I guess you've got to cutting faces here now
that of course will not defeat Armour it will not go through mail and it will not
go through plate just simply it's just the wrong shape but it is of course very
very good at going into flesh that's the whole point of it you've got these
barbs here now as you can tell from my dress up here I'm on a reenactment at
the moment and one of the questions that often comes is well how do you get the
arrowhead out and people go "oh do you push it through?" it's like well, that's
what it's an inch wide 25 mil wide that cutting edge if it's in your leg let's
say it's not that deep in but it fits in your leg if you've got to push that
through yeah it's gonna hurt it's going to do all those things but the other
thing you've now absolutely committed yourself to perhaps a devastating
arterial injury that you simply didn't have before and you're making a much
bigger wound you know so basically you're not going to do that. Can you cut
it out? Well yes you can cut it out because you can't really pull it but you
could put a slit there and sort of like probe into the slit but yet again you're
just increasing the wound size that you've got and if there's one thing
about medieval people we know they didn't necessarily have the technology
we had but they had the same brains we've got they feel the same pain and
they weren't stupid so they find a way and one of the ways which i think is
just beautifully simple is that the arrow goes in and and as you can see now
it's catching on my flesh I can't pull the arrow out without it ripping my hand
apart now if it goes in well, you need to find a way out to get it out so you can
take a pair of feathers these it's just a goose quill and if you poked within
the wound you can just poke it on going deep into the wound and you see there it
now lodges on the end of the barb and the barb now can come clean off my hand
without any danger of it hurting me. Now what I will say about this feather
technique is, and it's one of the dangers actually in truth of not being an
academic and not following my sources up, is I've known this "fact" for 20 years
that this is how people would remove an arrowhead
where I came across that I actually simply cannot remember I have no idea
how I know this or why I know this and as a consequence I can't actually
tell you that it's true, however when people are getting shot continuously
with arrows, as happens in warfare, you find ways, you find solutions to problems
and I would put quite a lot of money on it that this was would be, one of, the
methods for withdrawing an arrow particularly if you can't find a barber
surgeon who's got all the specialist tools and so forth
because of course they existed but if you can't afford them you can't find one
where you make do don't you and some clever guy in your band is going to work
out that that's all you need to do and you can pull your arrow. And the next
we'll talk about is a very simple leaf shape, now this sort of form was
certainly used by the Saxons presumably the Vikings also and to be honest
probably went back way before that and it just carries on and carries on
through the medieval period and it's just a simple leaf shaped Arrowhead it's
wide it's got a cutting surface so it's going to be good for sort of good levels
of penetration but also is going to be good about against moderate sized game
so something like Boar perhaps, certainly in Saxon and Viking times and I'm
guessing in medieval, I don't know, but it would also be a sort of a war head as
well so both hunting and war I'd put that type down as. Now this is an
interesting one. I know it's a Swallowtail head and it is a very broad
cutting head. Swallowtail because it's like the shape
of a swallows tail and it is typically a hunting head. Now this is fitted to a
hunting shaft. Now what I will say actually about all of these arrows is
that they are the most disgusting condition possible and they're just part
of a reenactment kit that's just been left in a garage for 20 years or
something and it is embarrassing but it's also there. Now the thing about
hunting and we're going to come to Gaston Phoebus we're going to talk about
him in a minute, he was an author around about just before the Year 1400 who
wrote some fantastic books, Illustrated, all about medieval hunting, extraordinary
things if you can find them and what you see there again and again is that
men are not shooting from 100 meters away or 50 meters away
they're doing it from really close. They're stalking, they're getting right
in there and the reason for that is, and I can tell you because I've done it, is
at 25 meters (25 yards), if you're watching the man who's shooting the bow you can
step aside from the arrow (I did it with blunts by the way I'm not that brave or stupid)
but you can step aside from the arrow and if I can step aside from the
arrow at 25 yards sure as hell a deer is going to hear it and start and run and
you'll miss so you've got to get very close now the other reason that you get
very close is that these big veins on the front they steer the arrow itself so
the long shaft length allows some stability and it's good stability
because of the long shaft but still you've got these big vanes on the front
and that wants to steer it in other directions and so it is never going to
be a very accurate arrow, now what is particularly the case, and I discovered
this myself, is I wanted to put them on to crossbow bolts. Big swallowtails like
this and you see it throughout things like manuscripts like yes of phoebus you
see these big arrowheads on these crossbows I shot that at five six meters
yards and I shot the Swallowtail straight at the centre just testing it
out and no kidding aside it literally it went down and it rose again and it's
what swept in and so this whole bolt this crossbow bolt over such a short
distance went like that Italy unusable and very annoying because that's what I
wanted to fit now I can only come to the conclusion that the illustrations that
you see in works there guess the fever's what they're doing it's a very medieval
thing but they're highlighting the fact that these crossbows had hunting heads
on them and so they're drawn bigger than they would otherwise be
that's my premise on it because I've tried it and I just cannot see it I had
to cut mine right down to about 28 millimeters (inch and a bit) something
like that in width before it would start behaving yourself this has large cutting
faces that would be sort of chopping up razor sharp really and so when that goes
in the chest of a beast a deer or something
what you really trying to do is to make the thing bleed out as fast as possible
so like an armor-piercing head although that stuck through the heart of a deer
or something it's not going to do it any favors it's still gonna run and it in
dense woodland it can run far enough that you can't find it and it's not
leaving a massive blood trail because the arrow shaft is plugged in the hole
that it's made one like this you're cutting 50 mil 2 inches wide or maybe
more with a small hole plugging it so you get a good blood trail that you can
follow but the other thing that's interesting about these is that when
they go in if you imagine that this is the chest of the beast and this is the
muscles on the side as they move as the thing runs it stirs the arrow shaft
around and so if it is sharpened up razor-sharp it does move around and and
you can kind of see that it can actually walk itself deeper so the actual action
of the beast running causes it more damage so this will allow the beast to
drop as swift as possible and then the last of the arrows were going to come to
is a mystery or at least I believe it to be a mystery now talking of Gaston
phoebus again you see this crescent-shaped head again on hunting
crossbows you see that quite a lot why it's this shape I have no idea I can't
imagine but they're not necessarily as people say for hunting birds because
they're not shown in that context they're shown in the context of beasts
boar and deer in such things I haven't seen a manuscript with this on a longbow
so I don't know for certain that they are longbow arrows maybe somebody out
there does but you do see them on crossbows I've heard so many different
versions of it I've heard that there for birding I've heard for goodness sake
that they're for cutting rigging on ships I've heard many different things
but there are two things about them that I know one you see them Gaston Pheobas
in hunting scenes where they're hunting beasts not Birds the other thing I know
about them is if you do shoot them onto the ground if your roving in a field or
something like that and your arrow if it hits the grass will
just otherwise bury itself these do stop catch and fall over they act like in the
modern archery sense, a judo point, they keep the arrow on the surface
and that is also correct saying that a wooden blunt upon the end and I think
they would probably used a lot actually a wooden blunt upon the end does exactly
the same thing it doesn't bury itself in the ground so there we have it really we
have six different arrowheads longbow heads six different varieties all fitted
to very poor condition arrows, I'm sorry about that, and that is my take on what
they are, what they're for and and how they did it, thank you very much.