Hmm I wasn't expecting that. Should we go measure it?
[Music]
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop here and I'm back with Arrows versus Armour 2 again. Toby Capwell,
Augusto Boer Bront. So a historian and an armourer. Now the purpose of this film is
to look at the different materials that armour could have been made from because there were
quite a lot of choices that they could have had in the medieval period. We do know that there
was a lot of wrought iron used, so basically zero percent carbon material, and there was even going
all the way up to medium carbon steel for higher status individuals and everything in between. So
last time around we used a medium carbon steel and we have to admit that perhaps it was of too
high a quality for the ordinary person we are chasing in these films. We are looking for the
information for normal people, using normal equipment and yeah perhaps it was a bit too
high. You commented, we listened. And so we're looking at what options they had available to them
and we're going to compare one with another. So we've got flat plates like this one here mounted
in the frame and we're going to put that against our archery foam targets and these are all our
samples, all 1.5 millimeters thick. So they may resist the arrows or they may not, we're actually,
not sure. This one here we're going to start with is a charcoal iron, a bloomery iron, so this is
a zero percent carbon, so it is not steel. But then also we have cross laminated wrought iron,
we have normal wrought iron, mild steel, high carbon steel and we're just going to have a look
at how these different materials compare one against the other just like we do with all our
tests. It's a comparison it it's not a piece of armour, we know that, because it's flat, but it
does allow us to see the difference between one arrow impact and another arrow impact. So Toby,
I'd like to hand over to you for some historical context. Yeah okay. So by the time we get to 1415
at the Battle of Agincourt, wrought iron had been used for plate armour for a while but increasingly
we're seeing medium and higher quality armour being made out of low carbon steel or even
medium carbon steel and there's a whole range of different attempts to to harden and temper those
materials, although you know there's still a lot of technological advancement to come later in that
respect. So there's a number of historical materials in play, the behaviour of which,
the protective quality of which we need to better understand. But then there's the other question of
how do modern materials fit into all of this as well, because for a lot of what we're doing we
gotta make, we got to use modern materials. The test armour is modern mild steel, if we're going
to do that legitimately, we need to have a good sense of how the protection afforded by mild steel
compares to the historical materials. It may not be that different, it might be somewhat different,
we don't know. This is now the time we can start to better understand the performance of all these
different materials that are all in play and that all will feed into our analysis of the final
results. But our armorer Augusto can probably tell us more about working with mild steel and why we
can actually have a decent amount of confidence in its performance. Sure so the main difference
between modern steels and medieval steels is like inclusions, slag is just impurities that act like
weak points in the integrity of materials. Modern mild steel doesn't have any slag, but you can
calculate the fracture point of modern steels and medieval steels and long story short, a modern
mild steel does act roughly like a pretty decent quality wrought iron of old. So for our tests it's
good enough of an approximation to use mild steel as an analog for 'brother average'; a commonly
available material to make armour for a medium wealth knight or man at arms. These tests have
been performed by Alan Williams and they described in his book 'The Knight and the Blast Furnace' so
he had a whole list of different materials, modern and historical and he did calculate the fracture
points and throughout these comparisons we can be pretty sure that for our intents and purposes the
materials behave somewhat similarly. So we know from the work of Alan Williams that the samples
should be relatively similar between mild steel and a good quality wrought iron,
but we like to find things out ourselves and we also have other materials as well that we're
going to look at, so we're going to take our arrows here and we're going to shoot them at
our samples. Now the first thing you need to know is that our sample size is small because
it's very difficult to get these materials these days so we've actually taken the choice that we
are going to shoot one arrow at each sample. Now that clearly doesn't give a scientific spread
of data that you would need for any kind of a good study, but what it should do is give us an
indicator. It's like all of these things that we do, is it gives us a point to talk about,
a point of interest, a point of understanding when we look at the other films. The other aspect of
this is that these samples are small and I want to get it fairly central and it's a difficult
target for Joe so we have made a decision to use a longbow simulator which is this. It is
as you can tell also a crossbow, however we've made another film here and go and check it out,
it's another Arrows versus Armour film where I've shot this alongside Joe. Same arrows. They deliver
pretty much the same speed and they behave in the same way; we're all happy that this is a
good analog for Joe in this instance, but it has the advantage of being more accurate. We're going
to start with a control shooting into the foam and no steel at all just to see how deep it goes.
Right so no metal plates and our control distance is 43. All right there we go, so let's put
the plate on and start shooting. This plate is charcoal iron and that is iron that is from the
smelt that doesn't include carbon in it and it's been sourced from Topp and Co which provide the
materials for the restoration of the Royal palaces here in Britain. It's a good quality relatively
pure iron, it will include slag inclusions and possibly a little bit of flaking, exactly as
Augusto was talking about, but it is, well was an absolute standard for armour for a long time.
Nice pretty little wood shaving there, so it's not as central as I'd like but
the thing is this sample is deliberately made so it's completely supported behind all of it,
so it shouldn't really make any difference and our distance is.....
14 centimeters. Yeah that's interesting. Next, next, next Wrought.
Now it comes in lots of different qualities from very poor to very good quality, but one
really good source for good quality wrought iron are medieval bell clappers. So when bells are
renovated the bell clappers can be hundreds of years old, you can never know exactly how old it
is, but you do know that it's good quality and you do know that it's old. Wrought iron and bloomery
iron are very similar and it's often difficult to tell the difference between the two, but what
they both have is a grain structure and that means that it's weaker in one way than another,
but that's the nature of wrought iron. Again it was used for armour for centuries.
Okay so
well 14. 14 again, which that that's good because it should be the same kind of material as the
charcoal iron, we can never quite be sure with old wrought iron like this how old,
but it's performing in the same way. So I think the arrow is a bit bent itself but it's come in at
a bit of a slope, might have skewed the results a bit but it's about there I would say. So yes
this sample is cross-laminated bloomery steel. So you can make your smelt in the first place
to deliver iron or steel. In this case steel, so it's got carbon in it, much tougher, still has
striations of slag just like the other materials so there is a weakness in one orientation and
just like plywood you can cross your laminates and you can weld two pieces together that go in
opposite directions you end up with a much tougher material. So it's steel and it's cross-laminated.
Well it's interesting, so the first thing we can do is measure it.
and we have 14. But the other thing that is very notable about that is there's been a material
failure here, there's been a tear in from the edge where there is a flaw, so I think this
one we just go for a second one and try and get a cleaner shot in this area here. Okay.
Right, so a good clean shot that time, there's no breakage, no fracturing around it, so I'm happy
and our distance is well 13. So in fact it's the failure helped. Yeah so 13 centimeters,
so it is a bit more resistant than the wrought iron. Yes so not a great difference,
but it has not been heat treated in any way. Yep all right, all right. Next one up. Next.
Just like you can do with the bloomery steel you can do the same with the wrought iron,
so you now laminate two pieces together, you forge weld them together and you end up with
the iron equivalent of plywood. It's a much tougher material.
So laminated wrought iron.
Well ten and a half actually.
Shouldn't be better than the laminated steel, but it is, but it is today, so in a way this
result highlights the problem with the sample size of one shot, and that is that we can't
trust everything about that number, because the material has been processed by hand. It could be
a bit thinner there, there might be a pretty nasty slag inclusion at that point, there could be a bit
of delaminating of the materials; we just don't know really. But it is what it is. But overall
the behaviour of these historical materials is basically comparable to the mild steel and that's
a key point. I agree with that because it's similar, it's within the spread of the armour
that people would have had. The protectiveness is comparable. Yeah and I think, I think so far we're
doing that, but the next test is carbon steel, so it would be the higher end of what they could do
and I think we'll probably end up seeing something quite different on the next shot. This one is a
modern medium carbon steel, just like we used on our breastplate last time and this would equate to
really quite high-end armour we think it's going to be tough, we know that but how tough? [Music]
I wasn't expecting that, should we go measure it.
Well that's well obviously different now because there's some of the head is showing there yeah.
So if we measure up five and a half centimeters. That's a big difference. It is a big difference,
but equally it has penetrated. Yeah like kind of wasn't expecting it to really. Yeah but of course
this is not heat treated, this is still it's annealed it's, it's as soft as this material
goes and it's not cheap. It is a huge difference, I would say it's almost half less penetration than
all the other materials. Yeah. Mild steel let's see how it compares. Oh and this sample is mild
steel and this is here really for two reasons. One, this is the material that we're using for
our armour this time around, so we want to see how it behaves in comparison to other things,
but the other side of it is that it's the most popular material that's used for armour these
days and so it allows anybody who's doing any tests to take a benchmark from what we've done
and to understand your tests better and how that would fit in with the historical record.
Good well it went in. Oh no denying that, let's go have a look.
Oh so, mild steel, so it's a good clean hit.
Now our distance is ten and a half. Well it's interesting. So
let's go and conclude. All right
Well again, fantastically interesting set of results and well I'm going to start with you Toby,
so what are you making of what we have here. Well I'm feeling a lot better about a lot of things.
Now, until now we haven't had much of a sense of how the protectiveness of mild steel compares to
historical materials that were actually at the Battle of Agincourt and what we can see now is
that basically all of these materials with the exception of the medium carbon steel,
they're all kind of behaving more or less in the same way. The modern mild steel is pretty
much behaving exactly the same as the wrought iron laminated; that's a really important point
that the mild steel is a good analog for historical materials of a kind of medium level
of quality it's better than the cheapest low-grade materials and it's not as good as the high end,
but it's it's pretty average in a historical context and that's that's for us really important.
Yeah I mean I'd agree with that, so I'm in. Augusto have you got something you'd like to
say? Well again I am really glad that basically we have the same penetration between the mild
steel and the cross laminated wrought iron which is the most common type of metal you would have
on a battlefield at the time. Iron armour was present in sales records and the inventories in
the late 14 and early 15th century, but it is by far not the most common armour present. It
is the cheapest but the most common one is like steel not tempered and that's what you would see
on the battlefield of Agincourt, so I would say we are right there. So my takeaway from this is
unfortunately it is a small sample size, you know there's no getting away from that,. but it gives
us some confidence that we're looking in the right direction We're looking for the normal equipment,
the normal things that people had. Not the best, not the worst, somewhere in the middle and this
mild steel is behaving somewhere in the middle, and so that's good enough for our tests. You know
that makes me feel good about it all, but the other thing actually of course is that this is
only possible these films, only possible because of the Arrows versus Armour 2 fundraiser that we
did on Kickstarter and all you wonderful people out there who donated to it. Thank you so much,
because this information feeds back and it just educates us all and that's all we can ask for.
We'll never solve everything, we'll never know everything, but we can understand more and this
brings it, so thank you. There are other films to watch, go watch them. Arrows vs Armour 2.
[Music]