Late 15th century solid mace shaft here. Hold on.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to talk about maces,
now most particularly this one, which is a 15th century, late 15th century flanged Gothic mace.
But also a lot of what we're talking about here is relevant to earlier ones like the the bronze
or the brass and the steel ones that were around really from uh well 9th/10th Century,
they were quite common. So we're going to touch on those as well. So this particular example
here is based on one of the Met Museum from New York and it's an absolutely lovely piece,
late 15th century, so let's just say it's about 1480 something like
that. The handle is quite plain, quite ordinary, you have a steel shaft here,
a solid steel shaft and then coming through to a flanged head. It's not that big right,
it's really not that big and overall this thing weighs in at about 860 grams, so it's a little bit
under two pounds in weight. Now what that means is that you can move it very quickly, very easily,
so when you look at something like Sauron's mace in Lord of the Rings, it's just so massive. The
guy might have had the All-Seeing Eye, he might have been able to see everything in the world,
but what he couldn't do is design weapons, because if he had made that thing lighter and faster and
more manoeuverable he would have done better. So sorry Sauron; rubbish. But coming back to this
thing, late 15th century solid mace shaft here, now this one is steel. You can never quite tell
with original weaponry if it's steel or if it's iron, because they don't always use steel in
places where we would expect them to, so you could have a shaft out of iron and maybe it would bend a
little bit occasionally, mostly it wouldn't. If it does you've got somebody else to straighten it up,
it's not a big problem. This one though was in steel and then we come to the head itself, which
again is, well as big as my hand really but it's a really intriguing thing because we look here, you
can see we've got a hexagonal shaft and then we've got a hexagonal collar that is, if you can see it,
brazed onto the shaft. So it is socketed down there hexagonal as well and then brazed in place,
then these flanges slip down as again a hexagonal piece, slipping down into that collar,
capped at the top here and then actually that there on the original I could see no evidence
of peening, so I've assumed that it was screwed, so I've screwed that down as well. Now it's a
lovely thing, it's not that big you can see it's not that heavy, but these have intrigued me for
well 20 years really and it took a commission for me to really put my mind to how they were
constructed and to pay attention to it because I'd always wondered and I got bits of information,
but I never really knew and in my world when you make something you learn so much more.
And so these flanges are brazed into position right. Anybody who knows anything about metal
work will go "surely they'll just snap off?". Well it was good enough for them,
so it's good enough for me, but let's just have a look again.
Okay this one I must say I have actually cast from the original that I did so excuse that, but these
go on to a round tube and they have little fillets just here and the whole lot is brazed in. So what
you've got is a core, a round core, these are brazed to it and those fillets are put in there.
Now this has a whole story behind it because then how do you actually make sure that stays in place,
because you're brazing it in a fire and so on, it's really a difficult thing, really
difficult thing for them to to make and it was a difficult thing for me, so what I actually did
was I tack welded the ends of these to the tube before putting the fillets in and before them
wiring everything together and brazing it all as one piece. I suspect they did exactly the same,
so I tack welded it with an electric welder they could weld it in a fire. So the whole assembly is
not fire welded. Now the brazing of this thing is where it begins to get really interesting for me,
but before we do that don't forget. Sign up to the channel, stick your bell notifications on,
buy the t-shirts, support us, help us keep going. If you like the knives and the daggers,
go down for the English Cutler stuff because this is amazing value and this one particularly hot,
new off the press. 14th century rondel, absolutely unique on the reproduction market as far as I know
and they were everywhere in the 14th century, but anyway enough of that. Coming back to this the
brazing. This is where it becomes very important, very interesting, because in modern days when we
talk about brazing we're talking about a silicon bronze, a brass, basically brazing material
melting around about 800 Centigrade maybe a little bit more but lower than the 900 Centigrade or so
required to harden the steel or at least very, very close in temperatures which means what you
couldn't do is make this mace head, heat it up to red hot, quench it in oil and have a hardened mace
head. You couldn't do it and you couldn't do it because it would fall apart at those temperatures.
However they didn't do it with that, they didn't do it with brass, they did it with copper. Much,
much hotter melting temperature, so what that means is if you braze it together with copper
is you can then after the whole thing has been brazed, been cleaned up, everything's lovely,
you can then get it back up red, quench it in oil, temper it and have yourself a hardened mace head.
The question is did they? Well I think probably occasionally they did but these are mass weapons,
literally it is the mass of the object that is doing the damage. So if we look at this
one handily called Mr Ugly here available from Tod Cutler it is around about the year 1300,
Norwegian I think, it's in Bergen Museum. Uh just as a slight aside. If we look at this, this is
very slightly earlier but if we look at this one here you can see there's quite a comparison on the
back of this guy's head to this and then you have the face on the front. Now these are all carved or
moulded, sculpted in beeswax originally and then they were cast. I've just got this story in my
head that what happened......... Friday afternoon, everybody's bored and somebody, Eric, decides that
he's sculpting these things is sitting there in his foundry and he just thinks you know what and
he just does a little bit of that and he goes " Oi, Thorkill, look at.that! Looks just like you!"
That's the only explanation I've got because it's such an oddball. Anyway that's an aside.
These basically impart their energy, their damage, their fighting, their violence, by hitting things,
but not by penetrating. It's just the pure mass and that's essentially what this is, because
the thing is what you need to understand about these is they might be hardened, provide a bit of
purchase, but they're not what they look like they are, which is for armour penetration, they are not
that. They are force concentrators, and just like this one here, it's another version 14th century,
those are not for going through armour and so actually the fact that this particular example is
in brass but they come in bronze, they even come in Iron as well, it doesn't really matter if they
dent or or the points get lost, because that's not really what it's about. It is about getting
all of your energy on a small place and that small place is very important because maces are great
against things like mail and the thing is the mail, and that does hurt, the mail does not resist
the blow, it will stop it puncturing, it'll stop it going through, but it will not stop the weight
of the blow. So these are force concentrators and the same is true of any of these maces here, so
again we look at these two. Very simple one here, I particularly love this lead weighted number here
and then another one, iron. These are not for armour penetration what it does is it lands
and it concentrates all of the energy of your blow into the smallest possible place to do the biggest
damage underneath. Is it going to go through the armour? No it's not. So you even look at some
brute of a thing like this and this was something that I did for a Weird Weapons series with Matt
Easton and again you look at the beak upon that and your first gut reaction "armour penetration",
but I don't think it is, it really isn't. I tried as hard as I could to get this through mail,
it basically didn't do it. So I think the next thing is let's just have a
quick look at these things actually striking mail, striking bit of armour
see what they do. So first of all we've got a guy just in a gambeson let's see what it does.
Well kind of made a bit of a hole let's just go again because
and that time not actually the hole I was looking at was in fact an arrow hole from previous,
so that doesn't go through the gamberson. Let's put some mail on him, so now we've
got our poor chap here in still the gambeson and some riveted mail, let's see what we do.
I think I lost a link actually and it sounded like one went... hold on
and there we have our missing Link. Great joke. That's the important thing is it didn't really
penetrate the mail, it whacked out one link but it didn't go through, it didn't create a
gaping hole, it didn't of course go through the gambeson underneath. Force concentrator,
and it certainly did the job at concentrating the force on that mail. I wouldn't have wanted
to take that. So we're getting to the point that we all want to see, which is this 15th century
mace against this 15th century variable thickness breastplate made by my friend Ash, so this one is
in mild steel, let's see what happens, nice and thick at about two and a half mm in the middle.
Made a big dent. Well......
still straight, still hard, still what it's meant to be. So that held up, that held up.
Well what does that tell us? Well it tells us that armour works, it tells us that you can
take a pretty big impact, I don't know how many joules that is, on a relatively sharp point,
nothing much is going to happen, but you do that and you hit in that section right there
into the arm here, if he's not wearing besagews up here, if he hasn't got that or even a skirt,
because the skirt is going to be relatively thin, suddenly things are going to, oh look at that,
going to get a bit nasty. So that is the late 15th century Gothic mace with a solid shaft, but
around about 1500 they started to change and this the shaft became bigger and visually you think
"goodness that's going to be heavy", but they're hollow, they're actually made of sheet and then
to give it the strength, the integrity, they're filled with a wooden core and that's what keeps
the two sides apart, that's what stops them being ridiculous. If that was a bit of 16 gauge/one and
a half millimeter tube at about let's say 22/25 mm diameter, about an inch, it would of course just
buckle it really would, but they're not made like that because they have that core and it's that
kind of attention to detail that I absolutely love when you're recreating this kind of thing
and it's absolutely the kind of detail that I love when I'm recreating items like this.
So as an example this knight's Rondel, about the same period as this actually, if you listen to it
it doesn't have a solid top, it has a hollow one, that whole thing that looks
like a solid casting, it's not because that would be wrong. So Tod Cutler,
go buy it, it's great stuff, amazing value for money highly, highly accurate and if you
want the real custom stuff come to Tod's Workshop, find things like this mace.
But in the meantime I'll see you again sometime
bye-bye