Medieval Crossbow vs Flexible Armours 

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A bunch of Norwegian longbowmen do a similar test almost each summer at Tønsberg medieval festival. We use a gambeson/gambeson and mail over a target of some kind, bows from 40# to 130#, and the same kind of heads (both sharpened and dull) as you. We have the same results as you, every time.

Todd time and time again delivers content the history channel would have been proud to have years ago before it became about aliens. Doing Medieval history proud Todd, keep up the amazing work!

What it really underlines again is how effective all types of period armors are in reality, a far cry from Hollywood where they stand up to impacts like wet tissue paper.

Hi, an actual tailor w. Renaissance hobby here. The results are absolutely logical to every tailor who has made eyelets by a sewing bodkin. Linen and cotton are very resistant and need a lot of force to penetrate without cutting. However, introduce a cutting tip even gently (shear tip, knife etc.) and it's like nothing - multiple layers included. Slashing cuts are more averted, but when pushing in, a cutting tip becomes a tremendous killer. Also, a nice fleshwound... Gambeson and aketon "choke" the bodkins and pad against the hit. I shall have to do some experiments but I believe I could probably make one (using Renaissance methods) that is rather resistant to needle point bodkin as well. And needle point, well, it is logically against mail and more loosely stacked underlayer.

I greatly admire how Tod will say there are simply things we don't know. So many people make wild claims to know exactly how things are made of were used and that's just not the case. My hat's off to both Tod's skill as a craftsman AND a historian

Just heads up about your comment on ballistics gel. Ballistics gel is not a simulation of human tissue. It was developed as a rough average of all tissues in the body and provides a consistent test media to compare projectiles, along side real world statistical data. The biggest issue you run into when testing arrows against ballistics gel is that the gel is very tacky. You'll have arrows that have passed straight through boar only penetrate 12cm in gel.

The needle bodkin is called "perce-maille" in french, literrally : mail piercer

"I can conclude" That you want mail over gambeson If you can afford it

Tod, draw a scale on the wooden shaft of your bolts so you can measure the penetration without pulling everything apart!

So, in conclusion, the safest thing is to be behind the crossbow...

The platecutter appears to be a case of "we're not getting through either way, so we might aswell try and break something squishy behind the armor".

In Spanish, cotton is "algodón", even closer to the Arabic pronunciation. Great video, as ususal. I also love that you have the hands of an actual manual laborer, a guy hammering stuff. No manicures at Tod's.

I think the problem is that the fleash cutter is cutting the fibers while the shape of the needle is trying to push them apart and thus creates more resistance.

Todd showing his arrows off like a true beauty youtuber! That little detail made me giggle

This matches very well with what the Scythians used to shoot, against enemies that probably mostly had textile armor: broad-bladed arrow heads with long cutting surfaces.

You would probably get different results if you replace the foam with ballistics gel, I think flexible armour would do much better. Maybe an idea for a future video?

Yes, the words Gambeson and Aketon both come from the words for cotton undarmors/primary armors in use in the 10th-13th centuries in the Byzantine and Arabic sphere. In the case of Gambeson it's a horrendous butchering of the word *Vamvakion* from *Vamvax* (Cotton). The *Vamvakion* was a cotton *Kavadion* (the exact same thing, but in cotton or linen/wool). Doeskin over 30 layers is also relatively similar to what the Romans record, which is Libyan Hide (modern Morroccan Goatskin is the closest) over linen "one or two finger widths in thickness". The difference was the Romans didn't sew the "Libyan Hide" directly onto the garment, but wore it as another layer decorated with *Podones* ("Paws") which is the decorative scallops we see sticking out under metal armor in the art. So taking a 15th century source on how to make a gambeson and interpolating it back to 1250 seems reasonable considering we have evidence for this practice of using an animal hide over linen going as far back as Classical Antiquity. Especially considering availability of material between 1250 and 1400 should be reasonably the same in Western Europe. Great video! I really wanna see someone test Hunnic/Avar/etc. Trilobate heads (three-bladed) against fabric armor. They tear improperly made shields apart as the research in "The North in the Shadow of the Roman Empire" showed.

2:17 al qutn roughly means "the cotton" in spanish the word is related to "algodón" which... as you may have guessed, means cotton

Great video, fun to watch! One thing that you should probably want to try is an Gambeson ON TOP of mail armor. According to Medieval Byzantine manuals such as the Sylologe Tacticorum Roman cataphracts and even lancers were supposed to wear padded armor on top of metal armor.

I don’t even bother with other channels videos regarding arms and armor, anymore. Tod for the definitive win😎

I always love watching Tod's experiments and hearing his reasoning behind things. Historically accurate or not, this is fascinating stuff. I'm sure they tested things like this back then as well; it would be really cool if we could bring back some of the weapon developers from those times and watch them and Tod talk about designs and try things out.

I'd sell organs to be able to afford one of Tods crossbows. Maybe not *my* organs, but organs all the same.

I very much appreciate the "we don't exactly know how it worked, but we make do the best we can" attitude. Very down to earth. Thanks mate!

In central and Eastern Europe as well as in Asia people would use silk for their textile armors. I imagine that would make them even more effective. In the XVI century there are also mentions of "bulletproof" (bullet-resistant) padded zupans made from layers of carded silk.

Man as a fantasy writer that like realistic battle scenes these really help

I had to keep going back to the beginning of the video to when you said, “raw cotton is this stuff, here!”. For whatever reason, I found the way you said that to be hilarious 😆

Glad this channel for saved. I love listening to Tod.

Well if the outer layer is deer hide, the broad head would slice right through it as it enters. Even if it enters at a slight angle...The needle head needs to hit dead on to get the full effect..Slightly off center and you're wasting alot of energy realigning the bolt as it enters and losing some penetration power

Your quick conversion from imperial to metric is impressive.

this reminds me of a video by ola onsrud "knight in the13th century" in which he discribes a thinner aketon under the mail and a thicker gambeson over the mail and also says you could also have an aketon under gambeson without mail

I came upon some research a couple years back that traced a large number of those short bodkin finds to training grounds and shooting ranges, but very few to any inventories of armies in the field, where the cutting points were much more prevalent. This suggested those bodkin point types were more like a target or field point than being some special plate armor piercing chisel as had been speculated prior. I wish I could remember where I saw the article...

Many centuries ago, two Italian crossbowmen were arguing whether to just use hunting broadheads or use the fancy bodkins.

indeed the word "Coton" comes from the arabic word "Kutn" (prefix "Al"=the).

I wasn't surprised by these results, only because a number of years ago I found a link to a site (I might have found that link on the Mount&Blade forum or it may have been a history site such as RomanArmyTalk) where someone had documented, with a few pictures alongside the plentiful text, a similar test to Tod's though with arrows rather than bolts. If I remember rightly they also tested with maille alone, and then with maille atop the padded armour. I think the needle bodkin, being sharp at the tip but not along it's edges, breaks the outer surface of fabric armour comfortably but is then slowed down, it's smooth edges not cutting through the fibres like the edges of a 'flesh cutter' do. So the padded armour is good against the needle point but not the sharp edged heads, and the opposite is true of the maille, so that they complement one another. If I remember rightly, the expectation of the author of that article beforehand had been that the maille would be worn outside the padded armour, but by the end of it he doubted this theory- the maille can stop the flesh cutter dead, no problem, but the needlepoint can get through, and then do some damage to the padded garment underneath, and perhaps reach your skin. With maille underneath instead, both bolt/arrowheads will probably have lost too much energy to breach the maille. However, as I consider it now there are downsides to that way of doing it too; you need a decent extra layer beneath the maille to ensure it is still comfortable to wear. I've never worn it so have no idea whether a simple tunic would be enough or something thicker. But a bigger problem of wearing the padded armour outside the maille is that it becomes damaged over time by all the arrows shot into it, and so it will be rendered useless sooner. There may be times when you don't want to wear the maille and only want the padded armour, and so you want the latter to be in good condition.

The way you put the bolts on your palm at 0:18 suggests you've had a lot of experience with the autofocus not doing what you want...

I cant stop watching all your videos, I went from throwing knives to learning archery and now im here....... Thank you todd for the lessons

thanks tod! this is a really cool vid. kind of reminds of how modern tanks uses different types of rounds for different targets.

People were giving shit to chainmail and Todd just prove that it is more effective than people give it credit for. Now I can respect chainmail more

After watching what jorg and you put together it would be neat to see the two of you collaborate on some more projects

What I really appreciate (aside from the fun of watching bolts thrown at stuff) is the note on how these tests are not definitive proof by any means, while yt is full of "scientific test" videos. Any experimental archaeologist would hug you mr. Tod :)

Hi, love the video. Really appreciate these experiments you're doing. I was just wondering what was the 15th century source you mentioned for the gambeson? I was very intrigued to hear about the use of doeskin.

I like how Tod now has to put a small disclaimer when testing armour against projectile weapons saying it's not conclusive and it's for his own enjoyment and that the picture he's basing it off likely has a better archer using the crossbow XD

2:15 no worries you are using a word which has two letters you don't have in your alphabet

Maybe the notion that needle bodkins are good against fabric armour stems from the fact that they were the "if in doubt" option. It is absolutely not specialised against fabric but it will do damage and it will work good on mail where the specialised fleshcutter will fail. So I can easily picture a quartermaster back in the era giving someone a quick rundown of the boltheads going "this is good against fabric - this is good against fabric and mail - this is good against plate"

So.....let's say that wearing mail over (or under) a heavy fabric armour like a gambeson might be a good combination if you want to protect yoursef against the 2 most effective head-types, according to this specific test.

I've got a theory of why the flesh-cutting bolt is so effective against cloth-armour. It's in the word flesh-"cutting". It cuts through the fabric effective, and penetrates much further. The needle-bodkin punctures the cloth and gets caught -> stops much faster.

I bet whoever sold the enemy those "plate cutters" didn't hang around for long after the battle.

Fascinating stuff. Even with all the caveats it certainly makes you question long held assumptions.

I think gambesons/akhetons were generally minimum 12 layers of linen or cotton up to c24. That is when not just stuffed with wadding or old soft rags, but even then if done well, tightly stuffed to a good thickness, should do far better against arrows & bolts. Worth sharpening the broadhead & trying again. Great video Tod, thanks.

Gambesons prior to the 15th century could also be stuffed instead of layered. One source for this is a regulation from the armourers guild in London, which dates to the early 14th century (I forgot which exact date). There it was said: "That a haketon and a gambeson covered with sendale, or with cloth of silk, shall be stuffed with new cotton cloth, and with cadaz, and with old sendales, and in no other manner. And that white haketons shall be stuffed with old woven cloth, and with cotton, and made of new woven cloth within and without." Layered gambesons would in all likelyhood be more expensive, but I'd also guess they'd be more effective. Sadly the amount of stuffing and the thickness is not specified in the source As for the arabic 'Al-Quton' (or however that is spelled), I have a hypothesis that the arabic variants actually were made with cotton textile, which I presume would fit the arid climate of the middle east. Europe notable lacked cotton textile in the middle ages, and so they probably defaulted to other materials and constructions. Such as loose cotton filling. That being said I do not _know_ whether the arabic ones were made in that manner, so this is just some food for thought.

Robert Hardy's book, 'Longbow' which also compares the crossbow is well worth reading. It is both technical and informative whilst also being entertaining.

So, to see how the arrows would behave, you need a "softer" base for the armor layers, something like ballistic gel. Chainmail and padded were flexible, they needed to spread the kinetic force of the arrow by dragging some surface of the armor toward the center point of impact, to be useful. This force dispersion is caused by the arrow movement in depts thanks to the body of the person being "soft". In this way the kgs of force would be spent mostly by dragging the chainmail and the padded. That's why bodkin arrow were made, no force spent by dragging rings or to try to force open those, all the force, optimally, spent to pierce the padded garments. More the chainmail can "float" (padded keeping cushioning distance from body) and move, more useful it is.

Even with the, what did you call it, goat foot? That Crossbow still looks bonkers to pull! And what I think is the most important thing we all learned here is, don't get shot by a crossbow! Great vid! Really enjoyed it!

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I love these experiments and the insights they give us.

I LOVE these videos. Not only educational but very entertaining. Subscribed

This is great, In my fantasy book the main armor is gambeson to keep the soldiers costs down and the main range weapon is a crossbow. I watch your stuff because it is so helpful for my writing.

I don't have my books with me but I think it was Vincentio Saviolo who said "any penetration over a finger's length is invariably fatal" He was talking about rapier thrusts and I assume to the torso but it gives you the general expectations of the time.

Fascinating stuff. Some of the tests expected, some counter-intuitive. Bloody wonderfull. Keep up the good work, Tod. Flaxen Saxon.

If you combine a gambeston jacket with a ring mail you ll probably survive any bolt shoot maybe. Nice videos!

I think that the needle bodkin has to "pull" the fabric threads while penetrating, at the time the number of threads being pushed may increase in a non linear fashion (i don't know if it is as a square, cubic or exponential function) whereas the flesh cutting arrow head as it is going through the fabirc tears it apart disconnecting the threads from each other, thus the armor offers less resistance.

I believe the reason the barbed fared better than the needle point is simply down to mass. Being a heavier bolt head the barbed head maintains its momentum as it hits the fabric and overcomes its dispersion potential with more force available than the needle. This concept is still in use today in sabot rounds as they are sharp and pointed like the needle but made out of extremely hard and dense materials so that they have the necessary mass to hold speed over distance and penetrate materials designed to dissipate force and do damage beyond the armor.

I love the music at the end !

How terrifying it would have been to prep for a battle and see these arrows sipping by you and hitting your cohorts with that thwack! (Or get hit with an inch of metal and the weight of the bolt bouncing around, causing the bodkin to scrape and scratch in the tissue…and trying to charge on anyway)

I find it interesting to note that you mention the backing isn't ballistics gel. But from what I've found with ballistics gel is that it's not really all that useful for showing anything other than bullets. Even the really tough German recipe for it can be scooped with a spoon using very minimal muscle power. Yet compared to say trying to use that same spoon to penetrate an abdomen (I pressed a spoon into my stomach), I would have had to exert extreme force in order to try to pierce my stomach with it. Something which I was obviously not going to do to myself. So a spoon can be pressed into ballistics gel without much effort at all, while pressing it into a jiggly bit of human body requires significantly more force to even begin to start penetrating. Which is why I don't think ballistics gel is really all that good at testing cutting implements. At least not to see the kind of wound channel it would make like it does for bullets, where both humans and ballistics gel have very similar wound channels.

It's the distal taper of the Needle Bodkin reducing penetration. Yes the Flesh Cutter reduces the amount of resistance due to the edges, it's also the overall reduced friction. Due to the more acute angle the distal taper the Bodkin has. Which allows it to cut the path, allowing the bolt to deliver more energy and follow the arrow head. You have so much more length of relatively untapered steel with that Fleshcutter design. I used to hand sharpen and restore on waterstone Yajiri and Yanone. Japanese arrowheads, the Fleshcutter designs were like fine razorblades. I don't see them as of the past few years. Although I lost a very close client or two due to age, cancer, etc.

Makes a lot of sense for the needle point to be the only one to penetrate mail.

"Barbs are inside your body, really gonna mess your day up" ... Bit of an understatement, Tod.

Excellent once again. I'd really like to see about a hundred shots of each sharp point vs each, though, with a proper chart of penetration depths. And given your results (and the results Skallagrim showed with sharp vs razor-sharp swords against gambeson) I'd be fascinated to see you sharpen those barbed bolts and compare results there. Especially since, even if the arrow/bolt heads get to the supply wagon only middling sharp, an archer or crossbowman has a lot of time just sitting around in camp exaggerating his prowess, and he can do all that while sharpening his weapons if he cares to.

i like how you approached it like a research, without assuming much

Looks like using a goat’s foot loader would give you a hellacious hip bruise. All the archers limping around the fortifications the next day

This tells me that a combination of mail and gambeson would probably have protected the wearer from most damage out of a crossbow like that, as no bolt performed good enough to make me think it could pierce both.

Food for thought, thanks Tod.

Huh. It makes a certain amount of sense that the cutting head would work against fabric armour. At those speeds and forces, parting fibres is probably quite viable; piercing the fabric is good, but if the individual fibres remain intact, i imagine they can still "catch" and dustribute a fair amount of that force. Fascinating.

Tod does the best adverts for his stuff.

I'd really like to see a bunch of different arrow types against modern kevlar.

Yeah like others said, the Needle Bodkin suffers from having only a pointy tip and no sharp edges on the sides. It penetrates the fabric and then has to squeeze itself through the fabric without cutting so the surrounding fabric takes up all the impact and the bolt gets stopped quickly. I imagine if it had maybe only a blade like shape and not the rectangular base, with sharp edges, it would cut through the gambesons like a hot knife through butter. Yet on the mail the small tip is perfect to slide through the first metal ring it hits and I assume the head getting thicker then helps bursting the ring (and maybe a few surrounding ones) open, sort of prying open it like with a crowbar, so it can easily go through the mail.

Piercing heads are not as good against fabric armor as cutting heads for a simple reason: In a case of a piercing head, the weave of the fabric is not cut, but the head slips through the threads. This leads to the fabric compressing against the entering bolt, and halting it's advance. A cutting bolt, on the other hand, like that flesh cutter cuts the threads, and in this way, can enter deeper.

thanks Tod

I saw your latchet crossbow on Jason Kingsley's Modern History TV. I could not be happier with both of your content. Very cool.

Veeery interesting. I wonder if a well-equipped mercenary crossbow trooper carrier around 3-4 different types of bolts to be able to deal with the different types of armors.

Iv used a biw most of my life and 25yrs of watching arrows bounce off of things still looks funny to me.

Are the three types of bolt weighing the same? its widely accepted amongst airgunners that heavier projectiles retain energy better than lighter ones. lighter projectiles have a higher initial speed but slow down quicker and heavy ones start off slower but lose less speed over the length of the flight. This might be why the flesh cutter is performing so well as it appears to have the greatest mass, and it may have more energy than the other two at the moment of impact.

The ranking of effectiveness is roughly what I expected; the surprise was how impotent the plate cutter was against fabric. I can see needle bodkins being adopted and surviving even with the way they performed in this test, on the basis that a minor wound is better than no wound, but what are we missing that would justify plate cutters? Even one that succeeds in punching through plate will still have to then face some degree of fabric armor, however light. Is there something that’s been missed in the mass versus velocity balance of missile and bow/crossbow pairing?

Really makes you consider just how much protection people were getting out of a gambeson with mail, or a brigandine set of armor.

Doing research for D&D crossbows (for my rogue sniper) and found your videos very informative and entertaining. Instant sub.

Has anyone ever done a similar test, but with a bunch of archers/crossbow men doing volley fire at the target? Be interesting to see if the shock of multiple hits at the same or very close by times causes the armour to react differently

Excellent work! Thanks for sharing. Cheers!

Its exactly what I was expecting the needls bodkin got thicker quicker therefore harder to penetrate cloth, I'm guessing that the needle was for plate and/or mail, the flesh for cloth and well, flesh

seems to me like the needle point has to *spread* the fabric around itself and gets pinched, but the flesh cutter, well, *cuts* the armor and manages to get deeper since its not being pinched

I think the total surface area in contact with the armor of the needle bodkin may actually be greater than the fleshcutter

Need to use a pressure and Force Gauge to see what pressures would be experienced by the wearer of each armor when the 'Plate Cutter' *Bodkin Bolt is used.

Very good and interesting test. It might explain a little bit the obviously popular combination of mail and layered or stuffed textile armor we quite often see in late medieval art.

Hmm, perhaps the thing about the Bodkin is that it is forced to stretch the warp and weft threads as it gradually goes through. As such, the amount of energy expended on it would likely be the reason why it does not go very far. In this case, the bodkin act's rather like an awl. On the otherhand, the cutting heads are likely able to cut through the warp and weft threads, and this action likely uses up less energy than stretching the warp and weft threads of the fabric... Hence a better performance? Of course, this is only my thought on it.

From this it is clear that the best protection against crossbow bolts and arrows will be a gambeson+chain mail.

Not what I expected either. I wonder if the choice of impact material, as opposed to ballistic gel, affected more than just penetration depth. If it's more rigid than flesh, maybe that made things more bouncy. Also, glad one of those bolts didn't bounce back at you. Maybe fashion yourself a pavice? That would look cool!

Thanks for an excellent presentation and experiment. Regardless of any historical imperfections, it is valid and interesting information. Watching several of your experiments has really brought home to me the importance that volume of fire must have had in these medieval battles. It's becoming clear the great extent to which archery would have caused cumulative damage or the occasional lucky shot that took a warrior in armor out of the battle.

Sounds like a needle bodkin, is a good all rounder bolt to carry with you as a crossbowman

Another great video! Keep them coming please.