Oh interesting, I thought it was implausible. Total junk.
Hi it's Tod and Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with a three inch thick, 75 mm
piece of oak. I've just done a film about three longbow myths and unfortunately I got caught up
in the moment and I didn't do the one thing I was really supposed to do, which was shoot my arrows
at three inch thick oak, 75 mm. So here we are, we're back with my oak, my trusty Lockdown Longbow
which simulates a long bow of 160 pounds in draw weight and my true weight medieval arrows shooting
needle bodkins. What is brilliant about the comments on my channel is I learn a lot and
I put the shout out asking for information where did this myth come from? EriK Fossheim thank you
very much, you came up with the answer, which was Gerald of Wales. Gerald of Wales toured
around and in 1188 he came to Abergavenny Castle. There'd been a battle there in 1182 and arrows
were shot at a three inch thick oak door and the arrows penetrated the oak door to the depth of a
hand. Possibly a mistranslation, possibly the oak door was three inches thick and they penetrated
the door as in they stuck in. Don't really know. Maybe Gerald made the whole thing up, maybe he
just told lies. The door is probably old, old like this is. This is 10 year seasoned English oak,
it's made of two planks, unfortunately I didn't have any three inch thick but the thickness is
true to form and what we're going to do is we're going to screw this onto the target, we're going
to shoot it with the arrows and we're going to see what happens because it'll be interesting to see
whether there's any truth in this at all, whether these will penetrate out the back
or whether they will just stop within the board. Let's go shoot some stuff! And over
there is three inches/75 mm of seasoned 10 year old English oak let's see what happens.
Well certainly in
Splitting; now that is interesting.
Here we are with my simulated oak door three inches thick/75
mm and my three arrows which have not broken and that is a good thing because
I have got brigandine testing coming up for my next film, so I need my arrows;
it'll be coming soon. So let's get this back to base and we'll see what we've got.
Oh interesting! I'm back at base now with my seasoned oak plank and my two arrows stuck in
it. I've removed one of them because I didn't mark out the heads beforehand which I should have done,
so I could do depth, so I had to remove one, measure this one because they're about the same,
and then get the result. On these; look at this one that I have just removed,
I mean absolutely mutilated and that's the grain of the wood that causes it to bend
around like that, because don't forget this period of course 1188/1182 there's absolutely
no evidence of steel in arrowheads at all, so this probably would have been wrought iron,
even softer than this mild that I've used. But now back to the really interesting stuff
and this is not what I expected at all, so we have it. Right, 75 mm/three inches of oak;
this one here has penetrated 64mm/two and a half inches, so not quite through and this
one a little bit less of 56mm/inch and a quarter. Now what is really interesting there, is that is
that much, that much, from what Gerald of Wales, who I thought was frankly full of it,
said that they did. So there's a few things now to talk about. Here
first of all, the test that I've done, it's not perfect because I've got two planks back to back,
so that's not going to be as good as one single one, but we don't know how they made the door,
they could have done it just like that. We don't know how old their wood was, was it green? Was
it seasoned? Is it 100 year old? Though we don't know any of these questions, so in many respects
the test I've done is completely meaningless because we simply don't know, but it is like
all of these tests, an indicator and the indicator to me says that at 64 mm, 12mm/ half an inch short
of going through this board which I am stunned by. I thought it was implausible, total junk.
It's not; it's close. This test is close so Gerald of Wales, I take my hat off to
you because genuinely I thought you were lying or you'd been misled and that was not the case. What
should also be noted here is I didn't frame this board and I actually didn't frame it on purpose,
because I have assumed here and this is all assumptions, that a door would usually be made
out of green oak it's easier to work and after a year it's seasoned then away, but when it seasons,
it shrinks a little bit so there will be gaps between the boards. Now you can caulk them with
all sorts of stuff, but really it's going to be a little bit gappy, so I've allowed this
to move a bit and the result here is it is that far from going through. Thank you very much.