Yes, good, good, good, so we've got three good ones.
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I am back at very long last with
maille and type 16 heads. Maille very generously well made and donated by Isak Krogh, handmade,
hand riveted, beautiful, beautiful stuff. 1.75 mm wire. Now then, highly authentic, highly accurate,
medieval armour, both gambeson and the maille and we're going to be shooting these from our
lockdown longbow. Now 160 pound longbow is great and I think that's probably the height
of the power and that's the one that I want to use today, but I realistically cannot hit this target
at 50 or 75 meters at a realistic range, so if I do it close, it's not a realistic result but
here's the thing. If you look at this chrono test I did with my 120 pound simulator here,
it shoots the heavyweight arrows out from a 10 meter distance with a 9% speed loss, that is the
same as I'm getting at 75 meters off the lockdown longbow, so if I use the lighter one here it is
basically like for like of me shooting the arrows at a 75 meter distance, so it might look close
but we're going to call it the 160 pound longbow at 75 meter range. It's not; it's a cheat, but
like all these cheats it works for this. Isak very generously sent me four samples to have a look and
indeed a shoot at, in fact I've decided just to do one in the end, but the heaviest one here is
two mm, two mm wire and you know that really is quite heavy, but I decided not to do that because
I just want to do something representative. So then we've got 1.4 mm, seven mm links
and then the one that we're using 1.75 with nine mm links, so it's still fairly heavy maille and
then the last one that again I haven't used is a 1.4 by nine mm link so a little bit lighter there,
but these are all wedge riveted handmade by Isak Krogh. Amazing stuff, but anyway
enough of all that chitchat, we all want to go see what happens when you shoot this stuff
so let's go down to the range. Down on the range now with my maille and gabeson sample
with the maille away from me so the arrow is going to strike the gambeson first.
Basically I'm just hoping to make the arrows survive for the next part of the test really.
That's all mounted onto some roofing insulation foam and here we go let's see what happens.
Straight in! Lovely. So that has gone well through the fabric, through the maille, but more to the
point it's in the center of the piece so it's a good, a good telling example. Let's go again.
Good! Another one just in; it just in.
Just above, just above.
You know what? I'm going to leave that in place because we're going to go have a look at that.
Well here we are with my first shots this was the first one and it has gone in, I can tell you now,
11 centimeters. So it's gone clean through the gambeson and the maille behind and
to a depth of 11 centimeters, marked off there, but that is definitely a good shot.
Second shot right on the edge and that has gone in 23 centimeters
and again this one 23 centimeters, so that one may or may not have clipped the maille.
That one definitely has missed it but that does mean it shows you exactly what the difference
is between hitting the gambeson without the maille and with the maille, so it does offer you, well it
more than halves, more than halves the penetration of the arrow into the roofing
foam. It's obviously not a flesh proxy, but let's just pull that and we'll see what we've got.
Okay ah there we have it. Here's our answer, this one completely missed the maille
and this one hit one ring of the maille and just sprung it so it popped that ring,
but right on the edge so that's not really going to be a very representative shot so I think we've
got to shoot again. I'm going to replace those roofing foam blocks so we have virgin blocks
again and we'll go again. I've sharpened them up polished them up; see if I can hit it this time.
Yes, good, good, good, nice good solid one and for whatever it means, going clean through.
Yes good good good, so we've got three good ones.
Well here we are, our three good shots. They're all far enough away that they shouldn't have
interfered with each other. The material they've all hit is clean and virgin so it is a
real, unaffected by previous shots, test, but it's also an interesting spread of numbers here. So
this one is 11 cm on the first as we said this one here, it's just the head gone in, so five.
You know, that's probably in that far, through the whole material so that's certainly not, not
a mortal wound and then this one here has gone in 25, 20, 17 cm. Well here it is from the nasty side
and you can quite clearly see the difference in the depth of penetration there, but to be honest
they all look pretty much like they have split one ring. They haven't gone through two, I pulled the
first two arrows and they did just split one link, but this last one here that hardly went in at all,
what it's actually done is it split one link, but then just by chance the way the arrowhead
happened to fall within the maille, it's then tried to spread two more links, it's trying to
shift them out the way and they won't go out the way because they're connected to the others,
so basically yes it split one link, but just by chance there are two more links now completely
blocking its way and that's why it came to a dead halt. Next up the maille is on the outside of the
gambeson, freshly sharpened heads let's shoot it see what happens. The orange spots are the
previous strikes, so we get some idea of how close these are to a bad one. Yes! Hey well that's in.
Yes good another clean one, but they both look like they're very in.
Yes good. Okay three good strikes. Let's see what we got here. We are with our three, I thought I'd
show you this before I disturb things because this top one has just clipped it again, it's just gone
in, but it's not really representative, so I'm gonna pull that in a minute,
but to make sure I haven't disturbed anything, I'm going to show you now.
Okay so that did split a link and it's that deep, so three cm, so barely, barely
touching the body underneath. I would think
this one here is five cm, six cm deep, so again you know, not so much, you can see it wobbling
and this one here is is 11 again, 10 or 11, but it's you know, right in the edge, so I'm
going to pull that, we're going to go again. Here we go again, freshly sharpened let's see.
Yeah good good good. Right let's have a look. This was the last shot here, so away,
enough away from the compromised areas and again the head hasn't even gone beneath the maille, so
slightly more than the other but maybe four cm. Let's see, it might be a bit of a,
yeah okay the barbs are caught, it's not gonna, it's not gonna come, but let's have a look.
Well here it is one inch, 25 mm for the worst of those two and of course the one I pulled out
already when in the least of all three, does it make a difference? Yes it does! Well back
at base now to conclude and I think the first part of the conclusion is really very simple.
Wear your mail on the outside. I think it did exactly what David Jones has said it would,
which is that it blunts the faces of the arrowheads it stops them going through the
fabric effectively. So we've got accumulative depth if we shoot this way of all three arrows
of around about 13 cm, but you can see that's 13 cm from the front face, not from the back face.
Probably only 50,60 mm, five,six centimeters on the back face cumulatively. But the other way
around, if you shot it from the fabric side from the gambeson side and into the maille,
then you've got much deeper penetration and that's because the arrowheads maintain their
sharpness through the fabric and then yes, they get blunted by the maille, but they've still got
loads of energy at that point and so they go on to penetrate. So you very, very much want to wear
your maille on the outside. Now that brings me on to the next point of the conclusion. Really is
people from the past aren't stupid, it's absolutely a trope of Hollywood films and a lot of
people seem to consider that people from the past, our ancestors were stupid. Well they weren't.
They were the absolute kings of observing their environment and what worked and what didn't work.
This worked. Now they knew that maille was really good against cutting blades, so that's great.
Tod Cutler piece here. But they're not good against penetration, so what you do is you back up
the the maille which is good against cutting and the fabric, not so good against cutting,
but you back that up with a fabric, so once the arrowhead goes in and gets blunted by the maille,
it doesn't penetrate. So it really is just a very clever thing,
but this brings me on to the third point of this conclusion really is composite armour and nothing
has changed. Do a google, do a wikipedia search on tank armour as an example it is composite armour.
A lot of body armour, composite armour and it was the same back then. So what I mean by that is
different elements to it some which defend against some weapons, some which defend against others,
some which dissipate the forces in particular ways, so that the next part of the armour
picks it up better and so on. Clever stuff. Six, seven, eight hundred years ago composite armour.
They knew what they were doing. Anyway so here we are. So thank you Isak Krogh for letting me
uh destroy your maille. It must be said it has not been returned as I found it. Sorry. And thank you
very much for watching; maille, gambesons and type 16 sharp arrowheads. Thank you.