I love this. I love it! I was not expecting that at al!l
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today i'm back with a brigandine,
a real proper section of brigandine and a fistful of arrows, and a lockdown longbow behind me,
and we're going to shoot the hell out of this with everything I've got and we're going to
see the different arrow types and what they do, or what they don't do to the brigandine.
First of all of course, what is a brigandine?Well I'll talk you through it; basically this has been
the back panel of one here. It's an armoured jacket much like a bulletproof jacket is now
that you're all sort of fairly familiar with. It's flexible, it's articulated so it's actually
relatively comfortable to wear, they were relatively cheap because the size of the plates
was quite small and you could make them and often were made from recycled armour, so from armour
from previous centuries. Very, very popular, very popular, in Spain and Portugal and Italy.
A little less so, but still popular in France and England and outside of those areas, not so much.
But they're made from small plates; now that does two things, one is it allows the whole thing to
articulate and to move so it's actually relatively flexible, relatively comfortable armour to wear,
very often worn as standalone armour, just on its own, with like an arming doublet underneath,
just a very thin padded garment possibly and you often see it with archers and crossbowmen
with maybe a maille shirt or some sort of thicker fabric armour and again you'll sometimes see it
with spaders. You'll sometimes see it with proper armoured arms or splints, you know,
they're just worn in a variety of ways. They're essentially a fairly, but not necessarily low
grade and that's what we're here to find out, but essentially a fairly low cost armour. Ran from
about 1450 through to about 1500, great variety of of looks and appearances and this one here is sort
of a very much ammunition grade, soldiers kind of a piece. Now what is also worth mentioning about
these when we come to the penetration of it, is this here is made of 1.2 millimeter mild steel.
Now they could be made of wrought they could be made of proper steel
but the plate thickness is a very interesting one. My friend Ash, who is a fantastic brigandine maker
has discussed this with me at length, we're going to come back and look at his work in more detail
I'll show you a little bit now as well, but we're going to come back and do another film
with him where we talk all things and everything's brigandine. Now in discussion with my friend Ash
he was saying that he's examined brigandines where you have adjoining plates where one was 0.8mm
and the other was 2mm, basically they're just recycling the armour with not a lot of care or
or thought about what they're doing, they're just putting the things together to make brigandine
panels. So that means that you can't just sit here and go "oh well it didn't go through here,
so it won't go through there" because actually it may well have done, because the things were
so varied. Now part of the story with brigandines is who made them and that is a great clue to the
quality and the skill of the manufacturer behind them because it's probably different in different
countries, but looking at England as far as we know, they didn't seem to be controlled by a
guild, they didn't seem to be controlled by the armourers guild, which perhaps you would expect
and there does seem to be significant evidence that tailors were very often
responsible for their manufacture, but presumably again not under the taylor's guild work, so
they seem to fall outside of guild work, which means they fall outside of quality standards.
Now I'm sure there are going to be better quality and lower quality, but your average munition
grade brigandine could be anywhere between 'really quite good' and 'really not at all',
but what we're going to do now is take this brigandine, mount it on our boss
and shoot the hell out of it with a fistful of arrows. So what I've got here is my standards,
so I'll just show you those now. What we've got here are the arrows i've been using throughout,
but you'll also see that I've greased them really heavily, I'm going to give them
every chance we can to get them through, so we've got a type 7 needle bodkin,
a type 9 plate cutter as it's often called, but short bodkin. A type 16. Now I've got soft ones,
mild steel ones, and I've also got some harder steel ones at about 0.6% percent carbon
and right at the bottom we've got an M2, often known as a Tudor or a Towton bodkin.
I'm back at the range with the Lockdown Longbow and excitingly for me, a new camera after the
plumbata fiasco last week when I managed to kill one of mine, We've got all four arrow types
and hopefully again we're not going to kill too many of them but that is a hard target down there
with the brigandine, so I am expecting some to get 'muellered' by this. Now what have we got going on
down there? We have got my brigandine sample with a big orange triangle on the back, that's roughly
where the leg of lamb is that is my target zone, now I've shortened this because I want to get as
many arrows as I can on target, so we're down at about 15 meters something like that, 15 yards.
Now for those of you who've seen previous Lockdown Longbow films, you know that even out at 75 meters
we've only lost about 10 or 12 percent of the speed of the arrow, yeah this is a short range,
but it's going to help me a lot with the test. So we have our brigandine, under that we've got
an arming doublet, then we've got the leg of lamb then we got a bag of sand to simulate torso weight
and it's all on a stand which is just a little bit wibbly wobbly, so it's got a little bit
of give in it. First up type seven needle bodkin let's see what we can do to it......
Oh my goodness me! Well I don't think there's any argument about that one is there?
Right uh needle bodkins. Brigandine not looking so happy.
Yeah I'm not going to do the third one I'm really not, I think because I don't want to
fill the whole place up too much. So next up and this I'm really interested about,
type 16, so the barbed arrow head. Now why this is really interesting is because these are the only
ones that I've really been able to find which have a reference for having steel in, for a hunting
head that makes no sense, maybe they've got a different role, let's find out? Now one of these,
this one, I've marked up with an H because it is hard, the other two are in mild. Let's find out
I love this. I love it! I was not expecting that at all.
Well I think if the hard one does it, well let's find out if a soft one doesn't. Let's do it.
It's getting a bit predictable isn't it? Right we're going to go on to
the M2, the Towton or the Tudor head that it is often known as, because that is absolutely
contemporary with brigandines, so these two will have faced each other off. Let's find out.
Now I think from memory this was the fastest of the arrow types in my earlier tests it's a
few months ago now, but it'll be interesting to see what this one does, it's also the lightest.
They're all at it! Right let's go again with an M2, lovely stuff!
Right now the last of them is the type 9, the short bodkin, this is often known as
the plate cutter, now the supreme irony here would be if this didn't go in, let's find out.
It went in.
So we're going to do one more and then we're going to go and have a look and see how deep that type
9 went in, because it's not enough just to go through, it's got to go through deeply.
And that one didn't. Interesting,
let's go see what we got. Now this has got really interesting, here are our M2s, they penetrated,
they stuck in, we saw that, we absolutely saw that, but they've fallen out, so they were in,
not that deeply. We have got a needle bodkin, one of them fell out, this one is still there, well
it's actually got blood from the lamb on it, but that is how deep, so in context of my
finger it's about 50 mm something like that, 50 mm/2 inches, that through the brigandine,
into the body underneath. Probably not a killing shot, but it could have been. This one here is the
type 9 and this is the type 16 the bladed one, the armour-piercing one. So let's just pop that off.
Oh goodness, this this is messy, this is really messy.
Oh fantastic, but this is where it gets really interesting, the type 9 which is what we know as
of as a plate cutter very often; short bodkin. Presumably, we think against armour, that one
has gone through the furthest against this plate here and that's gone through about 70,75 mm, so
heading for three inches, two and three quarter inches, something like that,
but for me what's been very interesting has been this type 16. This is the hard one here, not the
soft one that is the hard one and it has gone through and into some poor fellow's body cavity,
I was not expecting that, but it does perhaps explain the presence of steel on type 16 heads,
so that you they're very effective basically, against at least thin low-grade armour like this
and against flesh. Right back to base to conclude. Oh fabulous. Now the first thing to say is do you
remember right at the beginning, I said these were a fairly low-grade armour very often made
of scrap, this plate might be 0.8 mm, this one might be 2 mm, one over there looks brilliant,
this guy's here looks just as brilliant but actually is rubbish, it's covered in fabric
and tin and you can't know, because you don't know what's underneath, not until you're shot at.
So just because the arrows went through this one brigandine, doesn't mean that all brigandines
are useless against arrows and equally it doesn't mean that just because somebody goes 'oh his is a
high end brigandine that it is going to be proof against arrows' we simply don't know,
we simply don't know, but we know that this one behaved like this. 1.2 mm mild steel plates,
covered in tin, five layers of linen inside with the arming doublet, linen/wool with the arming
doublet, and that is what happened. Now if we go through our arrowheads, interestingly, Will
Sherman myself and the other guys actually from the original "Myth Busting Arrows Vs Armour" film
were wondering about the presence of steel on type 16 arrowheads,
it doesn't really make sense on a head that is against flesh, it's not required,
but here it showed without the steel present, the arrow did not pass through the brigandine,
with the steel present it did pass through the brigandine and it passed through enough to get
into somebody's body cavity and with barbs on it, that is a messy day. The type 9 the short bodkin;
that is the first time that I've really seen it against metal and really work, and it really did,
it penetrated more than the others round about 70-75 mm, so nudging on three inches of depth.
That is significant, that is something that you do not want. The needle bodkin, well that went in
maybe about 40 mm, small hole. You know if you're lucky it's not going to do you too much damage.
That was one of them, the other one in less don't forget, but interestingly one of them, definitely
you can see from the hole size, this definitely crossed two plates, so it's penetrating through
two plates and it did do it, but only a little bit. Making a hole is not enough, it's how deeply
it goes through, so you can't look at a plate and 'oh it's made a hole, it's gone through',
it means nothing unless it goes through like that. And then the last one and this surprised
me as well actually, was the M2, the Towton and the Tudor bodkin, it didn't fare very well and
the two are absolutely contemporary, brigandines and M2s were absolutely the arrowheads and the
sort of low-grade bulletproof jacket-style armour that was present at the same time
and yet one didn't work that well against the other, that interested me. The other thing that
really must be noted is I was expecting to walk up there and just find a pile of bits dust and
splinters and arrowheads, that's why I put all that netting around it to try and catch it. Not
one arrow broke, not one, that's probably partly due to the way the brigandine functions as armour,
which protects the arrows, but it also protects the person inside because it progressively gives
you, you do a strike in this place and it puts the load going progressively out from there across the
armour, moving all of the plates and distributing them a little bit, so yes it might make a bigger
bruise here but by the time the energy gets here it's really largely dissipated and that is a very
good factor that is not true of things the fabric, I mean like gambeson so much, but that's a very
good factor that protects probably both the wearer and ironically the arrows with the brigandine. But
it's also when we come back full full circle, I believe, I'm on very sketchy ground here, but I
believe there's a modern ballistic armour called dragon scale, that works exactly in the same way
that it has smaller multiple plates rather than singular big ones, but again write in and tell me,
I'm sure you'll let me know if I'm wrong, but it's just another interesting point for discussion,
where brigandines fit into the world of armour. But anyway thank you very much, it's been for
me again, another absolutely fascinating test, because it just didn't do what I was expecting
it to do, I thought it would turn the arrows pretty much and it really didn't. So brigandines,
Lockdown Longbow and four different arrow types. Thank you very much.