Hi I'm will Sherman from medieval arrows and I'm a full time Fletcher and
Arrowsmith. The arrow that I've brought for the arrow vs. Armour penetration test
is an exact copy of one found on the wreck of the Mary Rose which dates to around
1545 we're using these arrows because that's pretty much all we've got there
aren't many others that we can use as extant examples to copy they're made
of a mix of black poplar which is this one and ash we're fletched with Swan
feathers and the swan feathers are bound with silk into a beeswax kidney fat and
copper verdigris compound. The compound is then heated up and that seals in the
bindings and the fletchings and forms a good hard seal. In the nock here we've
got a cow horn strip which is glued in place with hidh glue. The arrowhead that
we're using today is a wrought iron type 9 arrowhead copied from Museum of London
arrowhead 7568 the arrowhead is commonly called a plate
cutter and that's really why we're here today to see if they do penetrate plate
considering the weight that people put on these heads and the plate cutter name
and the never ending idea that these arrows are going to be going through
plate or oak doors or whatever is gonna be really interesting to see up against
true armor using materials of the time using bows of the time what these
arrowheads are really capable of doing there's a an awful lot of work and time
and effort potentially from a couple of different specialists yeah and a lot of
swans and geese yep that have gone into supplying henry v with hundreds of
thousands of arrows yeah yeah I mean these are this is a valuable thing each
one of these if you're gonna shoot one of these you want to make sure it counts
right yeah and that's something that a lot of people don't realize is they think of
Hollywood volleys you know just wasting arrows
yeah you probably want to make sure that you're using them properly yeah you
might be able to lob this a great distance but you also want to be sure it
does something when it gets there right yeah but it's it's heavy in the hand it
feels like it's gonna do something yeah well these are environment yeah I mean
that the 80 grams pretty much that on one of these the heads are 25 grams and
so it it needs to be heavy like this to stand in
a heavy bow absolutely yeah but it's also got to be able to travel the
distance and you know hit hard when it gets there yeah there's a Holy Grail of
everything coming together just right yeah and then you've got a good
ammunition it's very important if the arrow's too heavy you won't shoot well
it's too light you're risking it breaking on release if it bends too much
it can shatter if it's too stiff it won't shoot properly yeah so there's a
there's a fine line between getting it right and getting it wrong and you've
got to have the right ammunition for the weapon I mean you can't just stick any
arrow into any bow nope you've got to have the right weight of
arrow for the right draw way yeah if the arrow shoots we'll have 160 pound bow it
won't shoot we'll have a 100 pound bow so we can then look at the arrows
that we've got and we can work out what kind of bows they were shooting from
that so the arrow can't be too heavy and it can't be too light it's got to be the
precisely the right weight for the job and the weight of the arrow and the
weight draw away to the bow have got a match up yeah and if your mass producing
the arrows which you have to do if you need hundreds of thousands of them then
that means you need all your archers shooting basically the same kind of bow
yeah they can't just shoot whatever weight they want to because 100
pounds lighter it's not going to fly well I'm really struck by what a
complex object this is actually incredible amount of effort and care has
gone into this you know that's that the the forming of the shaft the forging of
the head the cutting of the fletchings all those thousands of geese and swans
have given up their feathers and then binding them on it's putting the horn
knock in and and then laying the wax in I mean each one of these is valuable
yeah right this is I mean there's a lot of work in one of these right yeah we're
talking about an hour maybe a bit over per arrow so you're talking maybe five to
seven minutes for the head and then the rest of the time we spent on working the
shaft down and all of this end here so if we're talking hundreds of thousands
of arrows talking hundreds of thousands of man-hours yeah you want to make sure
they're hitting what you're aiming at and and having an effect at the end of
that when they get there they make a difference...
you