GRUESOME result of medieval SWORD strike on HEAD. 

Bastard sword: This is grandpa's sword. He was a fine gentleman and slew many enemies in battle. Cleaver: This is grandpa's sword. He hacked people to bits with it.

One of my all time favorite things about you is your respect for the devastation these weapons bring. You just don't shrug it off as history, you grasp the weight of the terror and horror they caused way back when. I've never been able to see a skeleton not think about their family, friends, loved ones, the laughs and jokes they had, all to be stopped by whatever thing bludgeoned them on the head... Terrible....

You should try it on horse back against chain mail and see if it can cut through on a ballistic torso.

"It was too big to be called a sword. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too rough. Indeed, it was a heap of raw iron."

I came here expecting a show of two blades choping things but instead I found a great speach about the fact that we need to rethink the way we are studying history in our museums. And it was totally worth it. My congratulations to you Jason, you are not only teaching us stuff, you are also making us think to learn better.

The mixture of sadness, anger, horror and excitement in Jason's voice when describing the choppy boi is the part that needed the content warning.

Could just listen to this guy all day, never gets boring

When we look at the bodies found in battlefield burial sites, they have injuries that make the worst GoT and other movies/series can throw at us seem tame in comparison. We have evidence that wounded men would use their arms and hands in an attempt to ward off blows and cuts, before they had their heads hit repeatedly to kill them.

"A brutal majesty". Very well put and I agree. Sometimes when a thing is made, not to be pretty, but to be very good at a particular task it's sheer ruthless practicality gives it a kind of beauty.

That head-chop gives the term "defaced" a whole new interpretation.

The Japanese have a weapon called a nagimaki which is the same as "choppy boy" for all intents and purposes. I think it's mostly an infantry weapon though. It's always amazing to me how two cultures, separated by thousands of miles, come up with similar tools.

“It hasn’t told me what it’s called yet.” I really like that and it makes sense.

Honestly, there's nothing about these weapons that makes me think they wouldn't have been used. Even in a battlefield saturated with mail, I can see something like this being a viable weapon. Even if you're not capable of cutting through mail in most circumstances, the amount of force transferred on a fine edge by a top heavy 2kg bar of steel of that length is absolutely going to break bones, even through mail and gambeson. If you want a sword-like weapon to be a viable primary weapon on a battlefield full of mail, one way of going about that could be to make it big and top heavy

Reminds me of Chinese swords. I honestly expected weighted rings to be installed where the X's are. In fact the legendary (and historical!) warrior Guan Yu used something similar only the handle was elongated into a polearm but he was also reported to be nearly seven foot tall so it fit him quite well.

"People call them 'ork swords'..." 'UMIEZ CALL 'EM WOTEVA BUT ORKZ CALL 'EM CHOPPAZ!

I agree. The sword you carried every day and probably used only once or twice was made to show your status and it got passed on. The same can't be said about your poleaxe, which probably got used until it was too chipped... This oversized falchion looks like something men at arms and lower nobility may use. Cheap, but devastating against lightly armored troops. Something you wouldn't be too sad, if it gets chipped...

Fascinating, engaging and horrific. Just thinking of some real person being wiped out of existence like that is genuinely awful.

I love your theory about museums. It makes perfect sense: the items in our lives that are used, often get used until they break! I love weapons like these - the falchion type weapons. Practical items that people actually used. As an aside, it dimensionally almost reminds me of a Japanese Nagamaki, which is essentially a katana, but with a grip of about the same length as your choppy boy. I’d have to assume that they were used similarly.

I love the way you stood there for a few seconds, then "Yuck!" Sometimes you make my day, you really do!

One swing, clean in half, crown to jaw. Brutal.

I used something very similar to this on a daily basis as a brush cutting tool in the woods! It definitely has a farm-implement feeling about it

The 'Choppy Boy' was a tool, a workaday weapon of battle, the Sword was as symbol of Chivalry, If the 'Choppy Boy' was damaged or lost it was no big loss and after battle would as you say been collected up and repurposed into any number of things, the Sword had a higher investment in it and looks nice, it would be better looked after

On the subject of conjecture, I would think a weapon like that would also find a lot of use as a tool. As you said it's basically a two handed machete. Would have made a great medieval bush hog. Probably used until it was chipped to pieces and then the steel repurposed.

Ive heard so many times accounts of heads being split in battle, that really brought it home!

hmmm.was the long “choppy boy” perhaps an anti-horse sword?

I had never considered why a bastard sword was actually called that. I learned something in the first minute and then much more. Thanks for all you do and you're love of history. As long as you keep making videos I and I'm sure many others will keep watching them.

You make a compelling point about how the most used implements may have been so mundane at the time that they weren't preserved. I never looked at it that way!

looks incredibly like a chinese 'horse chopping sword' (zhanmadao).

When I saw 'choppy boy' I immediately thought 'hog splitter': not a sword but a tool that used to be used in abattoires for e.g. quartering a carcass.

This is what you get when butcher gets conscripted. Poor mr. Jelly had no chance.

Is it just me or does the big chopper, look like an amazing anti-cavalry weapon. Especially if you're going after the horse, which I imagine was not the most chivalrous way to go about it.

There is a horrid beauty in the slow motion replay. Given that our ancestors (minstrels and “historians” in particular) were demonstrably given to romanticizing wars and their implements, I think you may have something there in your hypothesis. Makes you realize just how many little mysteries of our own history there are yet to solve.

The contrast between this gentleman’s chivalrous demeanor and soft, lilting accent at the beginning, as opposed to finishing with the demonstrably medieval butchery and surprising smattering of scrumptious jam- it’s truly, remarkably striking. Indeed, ol’ Choppy Boy ended the video rightly. I shall now go spend fifteen minutes online … and save hundreds on insurance.

Oh, the preservation bias issue is a known thing in the historical fashion side of things as well. People think that oh, everyone back then was absolutely tiny and wore these gorgeous outfits all the time! Nah. You're basically seeing some combination of best clothes worn by the 5% and absolute tiniest clothing worn by the smallest people. 1) Everyday clothing was used and reused to shreds, as anyone who's ever worn out a favourite T-shirt can tell you, but your fancy, formal clothes are preserved incredibly well (wedding dresses, formal dresses, extreme high heels, etc) - the corsets that are too small/curvy unless you lose weight or just want to look fancy for a night, or the panniers or hoop skirts that are too wide to be practical 2) Fabric was expensive and clothes were liable to be cut and tailored down to fit the next person, until there was no one around who could wear it. So Mary, the 5'8 linebacker of a Regency woman, passes her clothes down to her average height sister, and then from her average height sister to her absolute *waif* of a cousin, etc until oh well, there's not enough fabric to make a new gown out of that. 3) The luxury to not use and reuse every available scrap of fabric to shreds was VERY much a 5% thing. Mary and her family would be well-off to be able to just go "eh fuck it, just throw it in a chest and we'll deal with it another day" rather than "well, I can still use that cloth for a new apron and the scraps for a patchwork blanket, get the scissors"

Very good point about museum collections! When I worked on digs, I usually wound up in middens because that was where we could find the detritus of life. Usually not fancy, like much of what ended up in museums. An area of controversy as to what really worked and, not surprisingly, how much was repurposed over and over again. Metals, textiles, stone, are time, resources, and labour intensive so you make an excellent argument. Kind of wondering what damage Choppy Boy would do to a pig carcass; the skull and brain matter head was shocking.

Arya: "Lots of people name their swords" Hound: "Lots of c*nts" Great video as usual!

Very much like your reminder regarding potential "selection" forces at play regarding which items may or may not have survived into museums.

The "choppy boy" really just looks like the "big bad brute guy"'s blade. The rugged, no non-sense look really has its charm, ngl.

I think your suspicion of essentially survival bias of museum items makes sense. 👍🏻

My new favourite quote "it will chop, it will kill, it will end him rightly".

I can see the choppy-boy being terrifyingly-effective by a mounted-knight against lightly-armoured foot-soldiers. But I wonder if it would be a preferred choice against another similarly-skilled/armed/armoured opponent. The wind-up is pretty big and if somebody else had something smaller and lighter then they could be sticking the pointy-end into you while you were still winding-up to cut them into two large pieces. It reminds me of one of the rules of a gunfight; Fast is fine, but accuracy is final. So maybe you'd be riding across the battle field mowing-down poor infantrymen like grass and when you fetch up against another knight you toss-away your choppy-boy and pull out something smaller-and-handier.

Ngl watching the face roll back along the blade was the ultimate expression of choppy boys wrecking ability

Hey Jason, I saw you the other day jousting in the 2009 David Starkey series “Henry VIII - Mind Of A Tyrant. Didn’t recognise you at first as your hair was shorter. Do you remember doing it?

I think you are completely on point with weapons that found their way into collection's. It makes sense.

Would be cool to see a video of your entire sword collection.

I've watched a good number of your videos and I'm not sure if I've ever heard you cover this so forgive me if you have, but have you ever discussed what happened after a battle was over? Did soldiers rummage through the dead bodies strewn on the field? Was it kind of 'finders-keepers' for any weapons they found laying on the ground, which had belonged to slain men? Or was there a system in place in which knights divided up materials among their men? I can't imagine they let much go to waste.

Wouldn't it be great if somewhere, centuries ago, in their language at the time, soldiers also referred to the long single-edged blades as "choppy boys?" haha

Are you familiar with a computer game called Mount and Blade? When I played it I found that a bardiche from horse back was brutally effective against all but light horse archers and lancers. If I was able to catch a enemy, exactly as in the illustration, I would bring the blade down with maximum force onto the spine of the rider. I don't doubt at all that breaking a man's back with such a stroke would be possible. To prevent such attacks against myself I would wear my shield on my back where it also saved me from arrows fired by horse archers trying to flank me.

"turn your swords to ploughshares"... I reckon Choppy Boy makes a better plough than The Sword With No Name.

Yeah, war isn't all it's cracked up to be. Messy, disturbing, the manifestation of death.

That cleaver reminds me of a number of weapons from China and SE Asia. A lot of weapons from those regions feature a single edged blade and a long handle in a similar way. It's almost a borderline between a polearm and a big sword.

I thought of a farming impliment at first too. Mater if fact we have something very similar to it in our barn. Ours has two handles on the side sticking out like on a Sythe, is lightly curved like a Katana and has round bellys on the blade that make it look like an angels wing. It apparently was used for cuting into stacks of hay.

"Choppy boy does exactly what the name implies" lmao

Hmm, That's kind of what I was thinking about what happened to them and so many other weapons of war. The "commoners" wouldn't be allowed to keep them most of the time and the nobles who stored them would eventually repurpose them. Who knows how many of these would be used then melted down like you said. Then if more ever needed to be made, simple. Also maybe they were used as plow blades or for chopping wood etc. Think about how many spears must have existed and yet. So few in comparison do. You'd store them. The wood would rot. You have them remove the heads etc. And create new ones if the need arose or melt them down. GREAT video Thank you...

The second sword reminds me of a number of Japanese weapons that were well suited for their style of fighting. Of course, Europe didn't make its way to Japan until mid 16th Century, so I'm not suggesting a direct link, but it certainly reminds me of the kind of weapon more popular in that culture.

There are dead knights embroidered along the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, and some of them look as if a blade like the falchion might have been used.

That was awesome! From my mind, I think your conjecture is spot on about how and why some things survived and others didn't.

Similar, but smaller sword is kept in Poznań Archdiocesan Museum as "Saint Peter's sword", the ear-cutting one.

I was literally typing I bet a lot of those cheap two handers were converted to farming tools after battle as you said “it’s likely a lot were repurposed” it just makes sense that an expensive knight’s sword would be kept but a cheap rudimentary blade would be scrapped into something more useful once the fighting was done (especially when you consider a knights sword is a week of work and these are half a day for a blacksmith to make a new one, I just don’t see people valuing them beyond their material after battle)

I want to call it a war cleaver just looking at it.

Now that's a savage piece of kit! I couldn't help but think of Anne Boleyn at the end there, could this type of weapon, I wonder, be an ancestor of the kind of executioner's sword likely used on that day, albeit possibly a little less sophisticated.

That choppy boy is the sort of thing that would, proverbially, get beaten into multiple plow shears

Great to see you back again. Interesting as always

Wow you just solved some of the mysteries archeologist have for years now. There are documentaries showing some archeologist being unable to figure out how and which weapon caused the gruesome damage to some remains, as the popular weapons of time couldn't do so. Introduce them to Choppy Boy here and they might get enlightened.

I wonder also if it is less about the aesthetics of to choppy sword but more the class of the man who used it. Fancy swords are a way of identifying rank, class, and wealth. The more brutal but effective laymen weapons would not necessarily boast the same. Then, once the campaigns were over, what would lower classed men to do with this violent and obviously lower class weapon? At that point farm, trade, and home necessities would be more needed. I feel like, much like the wardrobes of the lower classes, the tools and weaponry would also be less known. I mean, outside background characters on a tapestry or manuscript, who really cared enough to record much about the lessers much less keep the implements of wars they were forced to fight? I do think this is a case of survival bias meeting the basic reality of being poor in history. Why don't we have many extant examples of servant clothing? the wore them til they were rags, then used them for cleaning until they were tinder or fodder.

7:12 Ye gods, that combat scene looks like it was drawn by Maurits C. Escher! The dude is chopping the other one to his left while holding the sword to the right of his horse's neck. Something non-euclidean is going on there!

That...was both brutal and horrific. I want one

I see Jason has his best Ash Williams face going on in the thumbnail, Groovy!

The second sword looks a bit like a mixture of a sword and a pole-arm. A bastard pole-sword maybe?

Perhaps the reason why we dont have suviving examples of this 2 handed falsion, is because the blade is the same as the 1 handed counterpart and handle is made of organic material that deconposes. Similar to how the katanas blades can be tunerd to pole weapons by adding a bigger handle.

Obviously, we need to name the bastard "Stabby Boi" now.

"Steal the face right off your head."

Choppy Boy looks like a "coulter" (colter, knife) from a plow. I can certainly imagine that once peace came, those got strapped right back behind the ox. Even during war, "I am just a peaceful farmer sir, I have no weapons...just this old plow". In Japan (which I've studied far more), there is lots of documentation of simillar things.

In the old Mount and Blade: Warband game, they have something that seems like it'd be very similar to "Choppy Boy". There, they call it a ... 'Shortened Military Scythe', I think, like it was a scythe either made for a peasant levy or converted, perhaps. It's not a one to one comparison, because the scythe as they depict it has a definite stabby point to it, but it has a sword-length blade with a single choppy edge and that sort of lengthened, hilt-like handle, presumably cut down from a longer pole. The graphic they use makes it look like a neat, cheap, but low-rent Messer knockoff, but that's what "Choppy Boy" makes me think of. Fun stuff!

In before YT gets to it. This just shows how important armour really is and why armies turned from mostly levies to fully professional.

There are 2 youtube channels that will always manage to grab and keep my attention, and that is this one and Lindybeige. Another amazing video!

What occurred to me as I watched you chop the skull is how exposed your entire body was to a sword or spear strike and I thought that this would be more of a post battlefield tool for dispatching the wounded enemy. I could easily imagine a team of gleaners walking through the field of dead and dying. Some whacking with the old choppy boi and the rest collecting the goodies. So this thing would have been a sort of low status harvesting tool.

The slow mo on the head makes me think wearing someone's face wouldn't be that hard to pull off.

They carefully kept pollaxes, a mix of hammer, axe and spear. They weren't afraid of showing off their brutal weapons.

My swordhandling group collects post-Halloween pumpkins from local farmers and hosts a giant party where we hack, slice and chop them to bits with any and all weapons deemed safe enough to the handler and audience. I'm the weirdo who brings my farm implements out. Scythe works less well on pumpkins than you'd think because the thick vertical spine that strengthens the horizontal blade gets caught... baseball bat, crowbar and sledgehammer are quite therapeutic, shovels work surprisingly well as a stabby slicey implement, I do not want to face a peasant with a pitchfork even in my plate mail, and my long-handled bush hook is just terrifying. Similar to your Choppy Boy in effect, it's a piece of 6 mm (1/4") steel about30 cm (12") long, 10 cm ( 4") wide with a hook at the end and I use it to take down small trees.

Had no idea swords even had percussion points, or any idea about percussion points as a concept in general. Love to watch your informative videos!!!

I have the same thought about plate and mail armour. Plate looks beautifull and expensive so we keep that. Mail even though used much it wasnt as aesthetically pleasing as plate so it got repurpossed. As with many arms and armour that were practical designed.

Well, now I’m upset that I’ve already named all my children. *puts Choppy Boy on the list for grandkids.

OUCH! It chops like a guillotine.

And just like that, we all get a split second glimpse of how absolutely brutal, gruesome, disgusting, visceral, and raw living in the Medieval period was. For all the equally pure and natural aspects of that era off the battlefield, there is this sort of warfare.

In modern forces service pistols are barely fired, while your rifle gets bashed all the time. In the end of fighting, your pistol will come home with you. Rifles are just junk.

Choppy Boy looks like the sort of implement that could be used for chopping up animal carcasses. I've seen similar.

I think you are right about what is on display at the museums -- mostly things they didn't like for one reason or another so the item was preserved. Choppy-boy is a rather scary looking weapon - I would not want to see that coming at me on a battle field.

Wouldn't a simple weapon like that have been repurposed into something else? Maybe that is why there are no existing examples.

I cannot express how much I love these videos.

The kind of damage I can do with a simple and common billhook is jarring so it gets used a lot around the cottage and gets regular maintenance. The wall hanger decorative sword is still pristine

11:24 - Strong objection. Without a doubt, the choppy-boy sword could end someone, but without a pommel to throw, there's no way it could end them rightly.

"Your friend's dead and Meryn Trant's not, because Trant had armor and a big fucking sword." Sandor Clegane.

looking at weapons like this, it is easy to see, and important to remember that the history of man has always been a race between the ability to make armor that could defend against weapons, and the ability to make weapons that defeat the armor of our enemies. this "falchion" for lack of a better description, would be a formidable tool for exactly this purpose.

Great content as usual 👏👌👍🤌

choppy boy definitely gave a splitting headache to that head.....

that's certainly one way to face off with an opponent

I can remember when Altana cutlery was selling this swords back in the 1990s.

This reminds me of the Buster Sword in Adventure Town. Took me a long time to save up for that thing, and it was worth it. My adorable little characters look absolutely menacing with it.

"I don't know if there's goo in it or not" Me, who can commonly be found on the firearm side of youtube: Oh yeah, there's goo in that. You are in the middle of the splash zone.