I can't believe he's doing this.
He's going to go up against an enormous army
of charging knights on his own?
You're gonna die.
Hello, everyone. My name is Roel Konijnendijk.
I teach ancient history at the University of Oxford,
and I'm back now to look at some more scenes
from movies and TV and judge how real they are.
This is 13 years after "Saving Private Ryan,"
and we're still just like,
"No, that's how you do an invasion."
This is a modern landing craft that they've dressed up
to look vaguely medieval-ish.
This actually happened, in the sense that
a French army landed on English soil
during the period of the Barons' revolt.
But it wouldn't have landed in these landing craft,
which are specifically designed
to support a modern amphibious landing.
And, in fact, historically, this landing was unopposed.
If the enemy's landing on a beach like this,
there's only one way up the cliffs.
Why would you go down there and fight them?
You just block off that ramp
and watch them starve to death or go home.
It's your choice, really.
You don't have to fight. You don't run any risks.
It's better for everybody.
These archers have a completely impossible range.
They're firing from the cliff tops,
which are hundreds of meters away,
and they're firing up into the air as well
to get maximum range,
which, yes, it makes your arrows go further,
but it also means that when they land,
they're basically just falling.
They have no force.
So if you hold your shield up,
they're just going to ping off your armor or your shield.
Now, these guys, again,
are doing everything they can to lose this battle.
You see a bunch of horsemen charging down at you,
and instead of bundling together,
you form a sort of loose line
that the horses can actually get in between you,
and you kneel down for no apparent reason.
No. This is where you clump together, right?
You form shields, you get as close together as you can.
You stick your spears out.
The horses can't touch you.
They don't want to get in so close to an object
that they can't get through,
so they're not going to charge in.
And then you have the range advantage,
'cause you have a spear
and the guy on the horse seems to just have a hammer.
So you're just going to poke them.
I would give it a 3 out of 10.
The landing craft are obviously wildly unhistorical.
I mean, movies always love to use fire, right?
It's going to be very spectacular.
But obviously this would've been very rarely used,
especially when you're defending your own village.
You're not going to set it on fire.
Defenses are often built to try
and pin the enemy in place.
You surround them from the walls,
you can fire down at them.
Now, this town obviously has no defenses at all,
which makes it more difficult.
Blockading the enemy, pinning them in place,
that's when they're at your mercy.
They did sort of portray that pretty well.
Ambushing with archers is usually quite effective.
You try to hide these people, and then they pop out
when the enemy's most blocked and confused
and doesn't know where they're going.
But we shouldn't overestimate how lethal that would be.
Unless you have a lot of archers,
the enemy's soon going to be able to regain
enough organization to throw their shields up,
and then your arrows are not going to be very effective.
Unless you have overwhelming numbers.
You wouldn't necessarily try to defend a village
that had no fortifications, but if you had to,
yeah, you would get up on the roof.
The idea that the orcs can actually fire back at them
and kill some of them, that's very unrealistic,
because the villagers are going to be
completely in the dark.
The light is down there, where the fire is.
As far as the orcs can tell,
the arrows are coming from the night.
You'd do some of these things, like funneling the enemy,
trying to block their way,
trying to hit them when they're confused
or when they're distracted.
We'd give this maybe a 4 out of 10.
The really cool thing about this scene
is they have a ditch. And you can see how it works,
'cause they have to go into the ditch to approach the wall,
and it means that the wall is very high all of a sudden.
You can see this ditch forming a part
of an integrated defensive system.
The fighting for the ladders
and trying to make your way onto the walls
and all of that, broadly speaking, is accurate.
There would be a lot of engineering.
There would be a lot of times in history
when siege warfare is a place where a lot of
technological innovation happens in a very short time.
And you have famous instances,
like when the Romans attacked
this Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily.
Archimedes is one of the defenders,
and he supposedly came up with all these different devices.
They were so new and innovative and strange
that the Romans supposedly towards the end of this siege
became so afraid of these devices
that if they just saw a bit of rope dangling over the wall,
they would run away because they were terrified
that Archimedes had some new devilry to throw at them.
So this idea of using strange machines
in the defense of a city is historical.
It's just that these particular things
that they've come up with here,
they literally don't do anything
that a thrown rock couldn't do.
These balls just make no sense.
Well, the marble chutes, and when you know
where the balls come out, you just step aside, right?
If you get hit by these balls,
you have no one to blame but yourself.
It has some things right.
You gotta give points for a good ditch.
I give it a 5 out of 10.
Soldier: We were ordered by Pierre to hold this bridge.
There is a siege of Limoges,
which they've turned into the battle of Limoges
for some inexplicable reason.
You can see the city burning in the background.
This was a complete English victory.
They just overcame a small garrison in this city
and then murdered everyone.
But there was no battle outside the walls
or anything like that.
So, they're trying to tempt the French into attacking
by killing hostages in France with them.
Now in the Hundred Years' War, it was a fairly common thing
for the English to provoke the French knights
as a way to win.
So several of their most famous victories,
at Crécy, Poitiers, and arguably Agincourt,
the French knights charged when they shouldn't have,
and this caused chaos.
They charged into prepared positions,
they charged into disadvantageous terrain,
all these kinds of things.
So the English clearly thought of this
as a great way to win,
and I think they were just trying to transpose this
into the story of the siege of Limoges,
but it doesn't belong there.
That one guy who just runs out,
like, what are you going to do?
Like, my guy, don't.
He's going to go up against an enormous army
of charging knights on his own?
You're gonna die.
They're saying at the beginning,
"We have orders to defend this bridge."
Strategically senseless,
because you can just ford the river.
So if they're trying to stop the English advancing
across the river, which is what I guess you're doing
when you're defending a bridge,
the English can just walk across.
They don't form a formation.
They don't have archer support.
They don't seem to have any cavalry nearby.
They're all going to die, I'm afraid.
Shall we give it a 2 out of 10,
because they've got the date right?
These are supposed to be these wolfskin warriors,
these Úlfhéðnar. Sometimes they're also called Berserkers.
The idea that there are these wild warriors
who work themselves up into a frenzy
and then go into battle basically naked
with a complete disregard for their own safety.
But actually, when you read the sources
about these warriors, they're just ordinary soldiers
in the sense of their equipment.
They wear shields, clothes, armor,
and they go into battle fighting as a unit
that behaves, as far as we can tell, normally.
It's just very much later sources,
centuries after these guys were around,
start embellishing this story.
As far as we know, that never happened.
The spear throwing is actually something
that's very realistic.
They would throw their spears in battle,
but then, of course, they would fight in close combat,
wearing armor, helmets and swords and shields,
for the most part.
You can climb a basic fortification.
If it's a simple fort made of wood, in particular,
you can either throw a ladder up against it
or climb it even by hand,
and this does sometimes happen.
If the enemy's not very prepared for you,
you might be able to sneak in that way.
But if it's defended at all, this is going to go very badly.
If these defenders had any sense at all,
they would be forming a formation
in the streets of this little town,
and these invaders would have to
try and break that formation,
which they don't seem very well equipped to do.
They don't have any armor. They don't have shields left.
They just have their little axes.
Well, in close combat against the spear,
you're going to be at a massive reach disadvantage.
Viking raids were obviously endemic
in Europe in this period. Most of the time,
Vikings would target obviously more vulnerable places.
It's just not a very profitable arrangement, or undertaking,
to try and attack a town that's defended.
So you'd go after isolated farmsteads, monasteries,
perhaps settlements that didn't have
any kind of wall or palisade even,
so that you could actually just walk in
and take what you wanted.
In terms of the actual fighting that we're seeing,
this is 3 out of 10.
Actually, that marching scene has a very nice depiction
of the fact that marching order would be relatively loose.
You wouldn't march in very tight order,
because you'd just get in each other's way.
When they would be marching,
there might be as much as 2 meters between each man.
So they're showing that really well.
Soldier: And this
is the Roman army amid our forests and swamps.
It's always very tempting, I think,
for movie makers to have these battle planners
either sketch it out in the sand
or to have them pore over a battle map and plan.
Maps and the kind of top-down visualization of the world
that we are used to just wasn't common back then.
You would try and find a high point
to overlook the battlefield, maybe,
so that you would have the overview.
But generally speaking,
you wouldn't rely on this kind of abstract visualization
to understand the space.
Soldier: When we cut off the head,
the tail won't notice,
and we hack it to bits.
Fundamentally, you don't need to split up
this army even further.
And because they're strung out along a narrow road,
they can't support each other anyway.
The front of this column is going to be
miles away from the back of it.
You're already in a position where you can
essentially attack them with impunity.
You don't have to do anything to these poor trees.
This is the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
So, this is a real event in which three Roman legions
were destroyed by an alliance of Germanic tribes.
They were essentially drawn into a forest
where they did not know the paths
and they did not know the way,
and then they were attacked from all sides.
And so fighting them when they don't expect you,
great tactic.
In the accounts of battle that we have,
it was raining, so good luck with making a big fire
in the middle of this field.
There was a huge downpour, which distressed the Romans
because it made the ground all slick and slippery.
It ruined their visibility. It soaked their equipment.
They weren't able to operate well
because it was raining all the time.
They're using it to try and split up this formation.
But, again, there's no point.
If you're coming at them from all sides,
you're pushing them back into their own formation,
and the closer they get together,
the harder it'll be for them to maneuver,
to fight, to get organized.
That's how you beat them.
So making big lines of fire in between
to separate them actually works against you,
because then they have nowhere to go
but directly into you,
and they're going to fight all the harder.
So this is actually a terrible idea,
but obviously it looks really good on-screen,
so that's what we're going with.
I think it deserves an 8 out of 10.
Why not either let the archers handle it
or send out a formation of guys?
Let him try and break a shield wall on his own
with only a little sword.
Like, he's not gonna have a good time.
Obviously, every time he has to fight someone, he stops.
That's when he would get shot,
and he has to do that several times and then find cover,
which just happens to be there.
He's immensely lucky.
He's basically wearing sort of premium-grade plot armor.
Also, I'm begging movie makers to please stop it
with the orders to the archers.
This never happened.
The "nock, draw, loose," thing, it's not real.
Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
The Crabfeeder's men, the men in yellow,
they actually have these swords and bucklers,
which is a very particular style of combat
where they have these curved swords
and these very small shields.
Usually they would've been made of metal,
and you can actually use them
both to guard yourself and to attack.
So they have a very particular style of armor
that you don't see in movies or TV series a lot.
In terms of the fighting, it's just chaos.
Everybody's just running around engaging the enemy
one at a time, hacking at anything they can see.
It's very exciting to watch,
but this is not a battle, this is just a big mess.
2 out of 10.
Soldier: Tighten the circle!
These kind of protective circular formations are attested,
though you do get Romans sometimes forming a circle.
But having them be in a single line
makes it much too vulnerable.
If even one of these men dies, the entire circle collapses.
The enemy will be inside, and no one will have any defense.
You have to make that into a multi-rank formation.
Otherwise, it's completely useless.
They just throw themselves at these Romans
like a zombie horde or something.
It's kind of sad to see this kind of portrayal
of northwest European peoples, essentially.
There's this tendency to turn actual well-equipped fighters
into these wild shirtless barbarians,
because all the way back
to essentially Greek and Roman times,
we have this stereotype that the people from the north,
people from the forests of Europe
are these sort of barely civilized wild men.
They knew how to equip themselves,
and wealthy warriors in all of these societies
would've been just as well equipped
as the Romans in this scene.
So, they are confusing two things.
They're confusing chariots and scythed chariots,
which are different kinds of weapons essentially.
Chariots were still in use among the most wealthy
sort of warlords in Britannia at this point.
But these would be missile platforms.
So on those chariots, you would be firing arrows
or throwing javelins, for instance.
You wouldn't be engaging them in close combat,
because that would be a terrible waste of your poor ponies.
These men would be heavily armored,
not like you're seeing in this fragment.
They would be carrying mail shirts themselves.
They would be carrying helmets.
Some centuries before this,
there had been an attempt to create
this kind of armored battering ram
in the form of the scythed chariot.
So you attach scythe blades to the wheels of these chariots
in order to try and send them
at enemy formations to break them up.
This is something that we first see in the Persian empire.
But it never works very well.
It's very easy to either get out of the way
or dispatch the riders
and then essentially nullify this entire device.
4 out of 10.
Fire on my command.
Ready.
Arrow loops are a way to make sure
that you can project missiles
from the wall while you are under cover.
So enemies will find it very difficult to fire
into those loops.
That's why they always have this sort of wedge shape.
They will let you cover a wide range of territory.
These guys have been here, according to the story,
for 10,000 years, defending this gap.
I don't know what they did.
Like, they built the most simple wall they could
for about a week, and then they,
I guess, did crossword puzzles.
This is incredibly primitive,
in terms of what it's trying to achieve
as a defensive fortification.
It's just a single wall.
There's nothing you can do about them climbing up,
breaking in, and getting to where you are.
Make sure the walls have bastions
so that you can cover the foot of the wall,
so that you can defend yourself against an enemy
that actually reaches you.
The actual scene they show us is a 1 out of 10.
Absolutely worthless.
Always looking for the crossbowmen, and they're never there.
There's, like, one guy, I think, among the French
outside the walls who has a crossbow.
But these should be quite prestigious warriors.
The French's answer to the longbow
is to have these armored crossbowmen show up in battle.
They treasure them a lot,
and they spend a lot of time training as crossbowmen,
and some of the wealthiest city dwellers
would equip themselves as crossbowmen for these fights.
You also have pavises,
which are basically great standing shields
that are used as cover mostly for crossbowmen or archers.
It's basically just a door that you're carrying around
and you set down in front of you
so that arrows will get stuck in the board, basically.
So they're using those to try and defend themselves,
but then they stand way behind it, which is great, I guess.
Like, why did you bother then?
No one's wearing helmets, which is also great.
You can always say, like,
"Oh, we want to see the actors' faces."
There are arrows flying everywhere.
You want to protect your head.
Soldier: Light!
Recede!
The gunpowder use is so strange.
It was known in Europe at this time,
and, again, we're talking about a siege,
so maybe they were incentivized to try and use tricks.
Guns aren't known yet in this period.
The earliest gunpowder weapons,
these cannon that shoot, again,
like, big arrow-shaped projectiles,
occur several decades later.
So I have no idea what they're trying to do here,
but I guess it's because, "Well, they had gunpowder,
so let's use gunpowder
because then we can show big explosions and fire,
and we always want that."
It has nothing to do with history.
This kind of weapon isn't real,
and in fact this fight didn't happen.
2 out of 10.
My favorite depiction of ancient warfare in movies
is the scene of the battle of Gaugamela in "Alexander,"
which is not a very good movie, but the battle at least
is depicted in a way that makes sense,
where you can see the formations behaving as they should.
You can see each unit equipped as it should be.
So that, I feel, is a really faithful adaptation,
a way that you can actually see
what this might have looked like.
Thanks very much for watching.
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