Making Historical Weapons For The Witcher & Wolf Hall | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘So in one of your videos on your YouTube channel, you say that when you're making historical replicas, you don't always want it to look exactly like the thing that you're replicating. Why is that?’
‘Now talking about handwork, becomes a very interesting side of things. Because you can see you, the human eye is fantastic at seeing slight deviations from normal. And the subconscious is fantastic at filling in gaps. And when we were at school, I don't know, I'm sure we all did that thing where you can draw three quarters of a circle, but not the last quarter. And you say to somebody what shape is that, the, oh, it's a circle, you know, it doesn't need, your brain fills it in. It just does it. And it's the same with the subconscious and if something is too perfect, it doesn't look right, it doesn't look handmade, it looks machine made.
And, but there's a real problem with making modern items now or making reproduction items now. Is that if you just spent 2000 pounds on a sword, you want your sword to be perfect, of course you do. But if I make your perfect sword, it won't look perfect because it won't look like the ones in the museums, that's what I want it to be. But the ones in the museums actually can be really really badly made. And, and the thing is, we all have this concept that craftsmen in the medieval world were just fantastically skilled and they were brilliant at what they did. And in many respects they were. But they too had mortgages to pay or whatever their equivalent was. And they too had to eat. And they need to get it out that day. And it means that for you and I, what would be grossly badly finished was just normal then.
And and you can see if you look for it because we have it in our mind that the stuff in museums is perfect but if you go to the museums and you look for it, you know you can see it's not. I mean, there's a fantastic example is the tournament armor from Henry VIII’s tournament armor from the Field of Cloth of Gold. If you look down the front of it, you know, this is one of the richest men in Europe. One of the most powerful, fantastic people in Europe who's trying to make the best impression you possibly can. The front of his armor has got a whole load of holes which have been filled in where hinges were put in in, the wrong place...
There's a lovely sword from somebody, I forget who it was. It was a French Archbishop, I think, I think. But anyway, he had a beautifully enameled pommel on his sword, fantastic piece of work. And it's been put on completely at an angle, not just a little bit, but maybe five degrees off. And presumably, he went, he looked at the sword, and he just went, yeah, nice work, because, you know, he had enough money that he could have asked for it to be done again, but he didn't. And so the whole concept of sort of medieval aesthetics, not just styles, but what's acceptable is very different back then to how we would view it...
Agincourt… somewhere along the lines of a British force of, let's say, 6000, and a French force of 30,000. And we absolutely trounced them. And that was in very large part, definitely not completely, but in large part to the use of the English longbow. And that carried on and had proceeded it through the 100 Years War period, really, until the French began to understand how to defeat the bow as a weapon. But it was just enormously effective. But what has happened, because of these staggering victories that occurred, a whole mythology has grown up around the longbow, that is some sort of super weapon and so on. But part of the irony is that basically all other nations had bows of the same kind of strength, maybe the same kind of materials, the same, you know, the same performance. But we had adopted a set of laws and interest, pride in the longbow. That meant that we could present an awful lot of strong shooters that could shoot powerful bows a long way. So it became an enormous important part of the British, of the English army. And we won the victories.
But the question is, how do we win the victories, and that's what I've been trying to look at. Because you read accounts, and they talk about people being shot through the chests, or the devastating power of the bow and how it defeated armor and so on. And there's even paintings of people with arrows sticking out of their chest plates. But thing is, if you haven't been there as an example, and somebody goes, oh, he was shot in the chest. Well, if you're an artist, you'll go away and you'll go, well, how was he shot in the chest? Well, it's a visual thing, isn't it? It looks best if it sticks out the middle of your chest because that looks great. So he paints a breastplate with an arrow sticking out the middle of the chest. Maybe that happened. Maybe that was his interpretation of what happened after the tales. It could be just as true that the arrow went under the armpit and into his chest, where the armor is significantly weaker, where it's not covered by breastplate. We don't know this stuff.
So we know that the longbow was fantastically effective. We know it was pivotal in winning victories, but we don't actually quite know how, how did it perform against the armor. For years now, I've been watching tests on YouTube or reenactment shows and things where people are putting arrows through breastplates. But a lot of the problem is the breastplates are not real breastplates. They've just very cheap, very thin, breastplate shaped objects, but that doesn't make it make it a breastplate. And I do an awful lot of materials work. You know, in my day to day work. I use steels, I use irons. And I spent a long time thinking, I can't see how an arrow can go through a full thickness breastplate, I can't see it. So myself and a bunch of friends got together. And we. Kevin made a fantastic breastplate. Will made fantastic arrows. Joe is a fantastic shooter. Toby Capwell is a fantastic jouster, fighter, historian. And I did the talking, I suppose. And, yeah, we just got together and tested it.
And arrows bounce off breastplates. Although I will say that that arrow bounced off that breastplate, because of course, this is not definitive, none of it. But it allows you to start looking at the direction of what things are going, how things are working. It can't ever be, what I'm doing can't ever be a scientific test, you know, rigorously done with lots of sample sizes. I'm just not in a position to do that. But for me, it indicates the direction of thinking. And if the arrows go through breastplates every time we know it's done. If they bounce off every time well, makes you think again’"
