Hi, it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to
talk about Jorg's Instant Legolas device and how that would have fitted into
medieval history, but before we do that, I just want to show
off my lovely t-shirt designed by Emily my editor's six-year-old daughter
and available on the merch shelf.
Today i'm back to talk about the instant legolas and where i would feel
that would fit into the medieval world; a really accurate discussion of my ideas
behind it really. This was originally going to be a film
with myself and Joe talking about the medieval instant legolas
that i had made, but unfortunately the discussion stream that came off my
second film about this went in a completely different direction
to what Joe and i talked about so it becomes almost pointless to to
show that film. I'm sorry about that if it disappoints any of you lot.
The first thing to say obviously is this is Jorg's instant legolas that he
originally sent me. My one has already gone on the way to
Shad. It's somewhere between here in Australia.
Shad's going to come back with him testing it with a hundred pound bow I
think; let's see what comes out of that. But i'm now going to talk in great
detail really about who I feel would have used this device
and why they would have used it and in what situations they would have used it.
Now here's the spoiler. My views are different to Jorg's and
probably different to Shads as well. It doesn't mean we're enemies, it doesn't
mean we're gonna have a big argument about it,
it means we've got different opinions and that's what's wonderful about this
sort of thing. I have found this whole process
absolutely fascinating because it's just a complete learning exercise,
I am fully aware that this device did not exist in the medieval world;
but what if it had? It's become almost like a
a weird sort of philosophy exercise, a thinking exercise in my head, of where it
would have fitted in. Because don't forget, actually my channel
is not listed as as entertainment it's listed as education. Ii do think that
history is so rammed full of fascinating, exciting,
interesting stuff, that it should never be boring and yet
when i was at school history was taught in a boring way and
it just shouldn't be there's no need to do it.
And Jorg's device has allowed me to think about history in a different way.
Now what did I make of Jorg's instant legless device?
Well I mean the first thing which is just like so apparent with everybody who
shoots it, is it is such good fun. Right we're going to put that
aside. we've got that, so what else does it give you?
Well it gives you a really high rate of fire,
that's without a shadow of a doubt, true. It was accurate,
it was easy to use, I found it very intuitive, it was
simple and in a device which can shoot accurately over
decent distances and with such rapidity and ease of use, that is just a fantastic
package. it's a fantastic package and I can absolutely see why you would want to pursue that in the medieval context and to scale it
up and to go "does this work with the warbow archer|" and
that for me is where it begins to become a little more difficult.
Now people latch on to two things about the Instant Legolas straightaway,
they see the bow and they go "it's like a modified longbow."
No it's not; there is a bow at its power source. And then they see this part here
and they go "well well that's a crossbow isn't it? It's
just a crossbow" It's not a crossbow it just happens to be crossbow shaped.
They are three different things. Instant Legolas, longbow,
crossbow are different things and different things are used for different
purposes. So if you think about it in a modern
context of firearms, there is a massive family resemblance between a pistol, an
assault rifle and a sniper rifle. They all shoot bullets, they all have
that same chemical reaction within the shell, they all drive a bullet down a
barrel. There is a great family resemblance there, but they are entirely
different weapons, used for entirely different purposes.
This is like that. The longbow is an open field weapon and I don't really believe
that the Instant Legolas is that and I'm now going to go in
and explain my thinking. I'm not denigrating it I'm just saying it is
different, it is other. People are the same now as they were
then and and some highlights some traits were
more apparent in the medieval world, so you know, people did want to be seen to
be rich and ram it down other people's throats.
I've got this, you haven't. But we still love
the new, the novel, the gadget, and the thing is,
yes it would be expensive and people go "they haven't got the money for it" well
things are no different now to they were then
and here's a clip of a pellet bow. So I don't know if any of you know pellet
bows, this is one that I made. These came into high fashion in England
around 1500. Every nobleman had one, you know it was
the thing to have, but what they're really for
is shooting birds out of trees and rabbits in fields. They're nothing to do
with the noble hunting of boar or whatever, that's
not what they're about and yet they became such an item of fashion that
there's a fantastic woodcut of Elizabeth shooting one of these hunting a stag of
all things, which is like massively inappropriate. Whether it's a fantasized
portrait or not, who knows? but the bottom line is, it's shown in that context.
Then we look at this balestrino here which in Victorian times was known as an
assassin's bow. They weren't for assassinating people,
it's got an impact energy of two foot pounds or three Joules or something, I've
shown that. They don't deliver energy enough to kill,
they're toys. People had them because they were fun
and because they were new and other people didn't have them.
And this fits that bill perfectly so civilian life absolutely
this would have existed. Military life, now there's a question.
Militarily there is an awful lot to talk about here,
so we're going to make some assumptions straight off the bat, that there's a lot
of comments about Joe's position was incorrect, there was friction in the
system, the trigger was the wrong way round, whatever it was
forget about all that stuff all right, that would have been ironed
out in the manufacture. I've made one, the next one, the next one, the 50th one,
they'd be very different objects to they are now.
So just assume that all of that gets sorted, assume that the bowmen are going
to be trained to use them, so that they get used to position
changes, whatever it may be. There are two very boring everyday
reasons that I struggle with the Instant Legolas
as a broadly deployed military device. The first one is complexity. So it was
the first device I'd ever made like this but nonetheless it's using the same
techniques I'm used to doing, it took me at least three times as long
as it would take me to make a a regular 350/ 400 pound crossbow.
That was interesting so it would be an expensive device you know even if i
managed to smooth that out it's going to be twice the time at least.
And the second one is logistics. How do you supply
a device like this that shoots so fast, so continually,
with arrows in a battlefield context. I'm going to use
the battle of Agincourt as an example for what I mean by logistics. They took
with them around about, we don't know any of the
exact numbers, around about a million arrows.
We have to assume that that was as many arrows as they could take or transport
or could manufacture. They had about four thousand archers. The battle
lasted about four hours. Now of course a battle
doesn't mean that you are constantly shooting all the time,
but if you average a million arrows, over 4 000 archers,
over a four hour period, that is about one arrow a minute an archer.
This thing can shoot 25 arrows in a minute;
how do you service that? Now let's even assume that they could bring more arrows
the wagon trains with the arrow supplies are some hundreds of meters
behind the shooting lines, so you've got some little boy servicing me with
arrows here coming backwards and forwards.
So he's got to run 400 meters, 400 meters sheaf of arrows, 400 meters, so you need
multiple arrow boys per archer to keep that up or you bring the wagon trains
forward. Imagine the tooing and froing of
people, imagine the carnage behind the shooting lines
of people just trying to bring arrows backwards and forwards and running. It
would be a nightmare. Now Jorg has made the very good argument
that when a more powerful weapon comes along,
logistics be damned, it will get sorted well maybe it will but
part of my premise with this whole Instant Legolas thing has been
to try and slip it into medieval life, not to recreate,
rebuild medieval life all around it and i cannot see logistically how this thing
could get serviced with hundred years war type situations.
The next problem i have with the Instant Legolas device as an open battlefield
weapon is the repetition. We saw Joe
shooting a 120 pound bow but he was shooting it rapidly.
His comment was that was hard work that possibly because
his position was wrong the friction was in the in the system
whatever it might have been, but we'll assume that that can get
ironed out, and i believe it probably could. But
doesn't get away from the unavoidable fact that Joe is having to
do this action again and again at great rapidity
and that's tiring. So both Joe and I felt for a device like the Instant Legolas,
a much more usable and constantly usable
poundage would be in the 90 or 100 pound mark for a man like Joe.
Now when we come back again, there's discussion about "oh this is the perfect
peasant weapon", well is it? Because would that mean the
average peasant who's not a bowman, like let us just say me, i'm you know i'm
reasonably fit, i'm reasonably strong and i shoot like most peasants would,
I reckon I could handle a 50 or a 60 pound bow at that kind of repetitive
speed. So it is not the game-changing
powerhouse on the battlefield for peasants, it just
couldn't be. Now don't forget shooting a bow is not just about
training your arm to pull it back, you are part of a military machine.
You are not just a random geezer who's turned up to do a job you
are a soldier and with a soldier, just like then,
just like now, training happens. You are prepared for what you are facing.
You put this into the hands of a peasant and a few things are going to happen.
He's never seen a magazine loading device, he's never seen a self-loading
system before. I get a jam on this, and any magazine
feeding system will jam from time to time,
Now James the peasant has got no idea what to do and you were expecting him to
be in a shooting line while you've got cavalry charging at you
or whatever it is. He's not wearing armour because he's peasanty, he probably
hasn't got any kind of a decent side weapon because he's peasanty,
he's now got a weapon he can't shoot, he wasn't very happy in the first place
standing there, but now he's got a weapon that he can't
shoot he's nervous as hell, he's trying to unjam it, that's not really working,
he's dropped his bolts, his mate next door has poked him in the arm while he's
trying to do it, somebody else has been shot. It's all
gone to hell and your peasant chap is just gonna go
"you know what? i've had enough of this!" and he's going to run. And the first
thing that happens when somebody starts running, everybody else wants to know why
they're running and they're going to start getting twitchy, they're not
focusing on that, and they're off as well. And then your whole setup of your
peasants with your very expensively produced Instant Legolas'
has fallen apart. Give it to people who will stand (and fight)
they know how to clear the jams because they practiced it,
they know how to reload fast because they practiced it, they know how
distances work and how long it takes cavalry or foot soldiers to come to them
so they will be calm, they will know that Jeremy
and Francis will look after them while they're clearing a jam because they are
trained. That is why i think it's trained
soldiers. Because of the lower power the untrained people would require and the
fact that you've got the whole repetition thing built in, that they will
tire very quickly, you need a relatively light bow for an
untrained person that means your range is going to be
short maybe, 120-130 meters so that means you are going to be well
within the missile range of your enemies and if there is anything guaranteed to
make a peasant army rout that is getting shot
while they cannot shoot back effectively. Knowing that what they are doing is not
affecting the other side. Give it to people who are trained and
know how to use it; but in an open battlefield situation
they're in exactly the same position. That they cannot
shoot as far as their enemy is shooting they can shoot faster but they can't
shoot as far. So they need to use it in different ways
and in clever ways and they leave the open battlefield for the people who can
pretty much shoot like for like in distance, which means pretty much
crossbows and longbows or longbows and longbows.
Much has been made about the speed of shooting of this and for the first five
shots oh it's amazing it's absolutely extraordinary.
But then you've got to reload. if you look at this clip here the advantage is
not quite as great it's there's still an advantage over
regular shooting but it's not so marked. However I do believe the speed
clip for these devices would be easy to do now and it would have been
easy to do then, so I think we can assume that sooner or later they would have
worked that one out and there'd be a speed clip in there.
So that is great, but it doesn't remove the repetition aspect and once you've done
15 or 20 of these shots you can't do it on a heavy bow. You need
something that is maybe 50 percent of the power that you can regularly
draw. This is not about ripping this device apart I think there are distinct
military applications for it, I really do, but open field war is not what it's
about. Just like a pistol does not fulfill the role of a sniper
rifle and vice versa, the things are different.
But I will tell you where I think that this would shine. When myself and
my friends made the arrows versus armor video last year
we saw that actually however powerful a longbow is it still
really struggles getting through plate armor so we can assume that the Instant
Legolas will never do that either however powerful you make the thing, so
that one's out. So that leaves you the lower grade armours the maille and the
gambeson or the no armour. Where i think the
Instant Legolas will absolutely shine and come into its own
are these particular situations, be it street
fighting, naval warfare, salle gates, fords,
battlements. You may think my ideas for using this
for very specific situations are a little bit fanciful.
These are the moments, those critical moments, where something
really tactically decisive has to happen and you put this into the hands of
people who really know what they're doing
and you know what? they can also in order when their time is done,
fall back and let the regular bowman take over. The medieval world is full
of weapons that were used for very specific circumstances and if you go to the
museums they always have some, so a really good example of this are the
gun shields off the Mary Rose. So this is a shield about that kind of
diameter with a gun and a little sighting grating in the
middle for repelling borders. Single shot device.
But they were there and they were there in quantity and then you have other
things. I saw a fantastic gun in I think I'm pretty sure it's a Polish
museum where it was all superimposed load it was a
I think a 70 shot gun in seven different barrels
and you ignited it once and it just carried on going until the 70 shots were
done. Right did it see widespread use? No, but
there were many of them made. So you see these devices again and again
these sort of like specials. So is it fanciful to think that this
would have been used in the way that I'm proposing?
I don't think so. Would it have had a military application?
I think absolutely it would but I think it'd be in the hands of the trained,
proper, professional archers, not the peasant army.
I think if you gave 500 of these to a peasant army, what you'd get
is a very expensively equipped bunch of people that would be quite easy to rout;
that would be my gut feeling. So it comes down to that big question.
"Would this have been a game changer in medieval warfare?"
I don't think so, it's just my opinion but just like the gun shields which were
on the Mary Rose, they were fantastically useful, every
foot soldier could have been equipped with them,
but they weren't. This device, every soldier could have been equipped with it
but I think by doing that you are taking away other aspects of regular bows.
They would have been used in conjunction, they would not have replaced.
And they'd be used in conjunction under very specific circumstances,
for short-term important tactical goals. I know there's a lot of delicate
arguments on either side about this and there are people so for it and so
against it, but please don't throw insults at me,
throw information at me. It's much better and it makes you look
better as well. And Jorg it's been an absolute pleasure being
able to work on this with you and thank you so much for giving the
opportunity, and now it's over to Shad. So Shad
time for you to do your thing.