I love how Doc Clough instructs how to take down an armored opponent.... and then demonstrates. Again, critical information we should all have.... along with that spear. And along with that maille!
Great test! I'm happy to see mail armor plus thick padding holding up so well, as lots & lots of historical sources describe. I do wonder how a narrower point would manage, like from some pollaxes. Other tests against mail have had that penetrating easily, like Michael Edelson's 2007 test of mail by Julio Junco Funes (which admittedly used much thinner padding).
I'm curious about how a narrower spear like the one found at the Birka, Sweden excavation might faire against maille in a comparable test. Obviously, a more needle/bodkin like spearhead is sacrificing the structural reinforcement of a more robust construction, but are the results versus armor worth the increased risk of catastrophic failure?
Excellent observation and illustrates the dynamic in weapon vs armor over the ages. Spear form and cross section would come into play as well as the size of wire and ring on the mail. The eternal adjustment of defensive material vs the offensive object is what keep armorers employed :-)
I know it's been a year but some time ago. We got a old pig. A bit of mail and a thick wool blanket foiled it in two. And my wing spear. We found that if the pig was on the ground. A foot on the wing and a push helped the point go in a good way. We pushed the spear in from standing knocked the pig over and then followed up with the stamp on the wing. Of course axes thrown spears and all was tried out on the pig just for fun
That mail is unusually resilient … If it was like that, there’s was no way, even leaning into it, that a sword (even diamond section) or a dagger (even triangle section) would go in :-) And these would go in, quite easily and quickly
Thats what we thought but the mail testing has shown far less penetration than we thought in active testing, ie in motion and combat situations. Its quite different than a set up hard target test.
I've seen it argued that Viking and Norman era knights wrote minimal padding under their maille, or even no padding at all--merely a tunic. It would be interesting to see this test with lighter padding than the 24 layers, or even just a heavy tunic analogue to see how it would have tried if this view were accurate. Great test though!
There's bunch of stuff I like about this. The spear is awesome, and I want one. It looks like you used good quality mail. I liked the point about how the spear sticks into the target, and the ultimate point about how mail is good and it works. I thought of something though...most of the time the spear was used with a shield, meaning most of the time thrusts would be delivered with one hand. It would've been neat to see tests against the mail while using the spear with a shield.
Obviously a professional spearman would possess highly developed muscle groups that are responsible for that motion, and the coordination for tip-shaft alignment kind of like edge alignment for cutting blades; they could not only thrust hard, but also straight and fast, all force multipliers imo.
Decent video. My only complaint is the push thrust type of technique you're using. I'd like to see that spear moving faster from spear range as it should be used. A slow stab from a foot away isn't building up any speed which means low force.
We tried it several different ways and had some folks who felt we didn't hit hard enough try and they all had same result. We may revisit this again for folks.
In the moment, most of these hits would be annoying more than anything considering they only went through a small amount. People today have gotten much worse bullet wounds and not noticed since adrenaline keeps you going fairly well.
In most cultures you will find a variety of spear sizes and shapes. The nordic cultures where no different and they may well have had heads with specific anti-maile shaping. But then one needs to consider how often where these weapons coming up against maile. it can get very circular in the what was done when discussions.
It just struck me. This is not a good replication of the real thing. Not because the chin mail is of poor quality, but because of the set up. The set up is absorbing the impact slowly thereby reducing the force of the spear on the chain mail. If this was a full body chain mail on a human, it would offer much more resistance and the spear would tear through the rings and go well in to the body behind. So just to recap. This set up is acting as a shock absorber and reducing the force of the impact a lot.
