@@elyastoohey6621 he is not ugly lol And im pretty sure soldiers, especialy archers considering how specialised the job was, were well fed, so they must’ve had a good diet
@@jeanmouloude I never said he was ugly, you completely misread what I typed up. I said most commoners back in feudal times were ugly. This guy isn’t. This guy just looks like the actors who were cast in braveheart and kingdom of heaven. Two big budget medieval movies that influenced what we think medieval people looked like. As for diet, if you were accepted into the kings army, or your local lords forces, yes, you’d be fed well. But before that, unless you were from a wealthy farming family, most peasants/farmers are poorly. Very little meat. Lots of grains. Poor mix of vegetables. You ate whatever you could get. Led you sub optimal development.
What people forget during these wonderful demonstrations is that you have to multiply him by 500+ guys all firing at once to get a real feel for how much you do not want to be on the receiving end of this barrage.
Indeed. It is similar to a revolutionary era soldier firing a musket. It seems ineffective until you add 50 more soldiers dressed in close ranks unleashing a volley. Even more so if the first rank kneels to reload while the second rank fires a volley over their heads. By the way, a delightful video and demonstration. This gentleman is keeping history alive and interesting for future generations.
I have read that during the siege of Malta the defenders ran low on ammunition and gunpowder so they brought out the old crossbows! They worked just fine and they often went through the armour or shields of the Turks!
well you see some artwork where some are holding a musket and some a crossbow. stands to reason that they wouldnt be instantly retired, you have a practiced skillset and they are still more accurate in the hands of a skilled user
Having an assistant = Crew served weapon. So many parallels between modern weapon systems and those of antiquity. I wonder if groups of crossbow men ever put their best men in front and had others load and pass the weapons forward, such as was done with muskets. Imagine the volleys of 4-5 crossbow men who would shoot, pass the weapon back, and be handed a fresh weapon continuously. Thanks for all of the delightful content Good Sir.
seeing you in full kit out in the countryside gives us a small glimpse at what it really could have been like. this channel is fascinating, and i want to thank you for sharing your passion and knowledge with all of us
When you think of the Joules of energy behind that Bolt and what it will dump on impact with the target im not suprised that Genoese Crossbowmen were so valued by Kings!
and still the french rode them down a Crecy like mad man. i mean sure.. made it easier for the english but the money lost htat day in genoese crossbowmen alone... no wonder France at this time was broke as hell
@@raikbarczynski6582 i am surprised the mercenaries didn't simply fricked off and left the moment things started to turn badly for them... you know what they say of old and bold mercenaries.
Would love to see Kevin shooting another Matchlock Musket like he did in one of his older videos. The way he demonstrated and talked about the musket was so cool. “It punches a hole in, it docent cut it like a modern bullet”. Glad he is still making great videos!!👉💨
The vulnerability of the bowman while reloading seems akin to that of an artillery crew. Very easy to rush and overwhelm unless behind a fortified position or protected by a squad of infantry.
You can fire artillery very quickly in modern warfare. The main issue is moving it, which is essential. Since you can fully expect the enemy to know the location and return fire. The Caesar howitzer does help since it's attached to a small truck. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-j8AF2s6vQLg.html
In my research I've found that crossbowman aren't as incapable of fending off infantry as archers. Many wore a good chunk of armor and because the ease of training the weapon in question many learned to be capable in a close quarter scrap. ..and there's also the reverse, where some would use the crossbows to wreck damage before going into the fray. Very interesting stuff.
Can we talk about the bolt trajectory? The way that bolt was launched seems like it bounced/pushed rather than traditional archery pull and release. I know it's a crossbow (not that I had one), but when I paused the video, it seems like the bolt bent down a bit after it was fired. Does it affect the accuracy so much? And what is the effective range of that particular heavy crossbow? Thanks!
Hi Nikolai, as for the range of this crossbow, when I first shot it, we couldn't find the bolts, which was still the case when we shot the film, one of the bolts went clear through everything. They have a flat trajectory, but because the actual shaft can't flex like an arrow, they truly do react as if being pushed by a might force. Because of the flat trajectory, their range is less than a longbow, which can arc. We do know from the Battle of Crecy that the Genoese had to advance towards the bowmen to reduce the range for the flat trajectory. I've shot as best I can say around 150 yards with my crossbow, but as I said, I often loose the bolts.
The dude * shoots the crossbow * The crewmen " wtf where did it go " Some dude 200 km away " GARGGGGGHHHHH BLOODY FOOKING HELL MY MOTHA FOOKING FOOT!!!! "
It’s so cool that you look like an actual Medieval Crossbowman! The fact that can break and seriously maim and injure the user at anytime is frightening for sure! It adds to the fear and reputation of this deadly weapon. No wonder it has remained fascinating and legendary to this day! Thankyou!
In all the videos I've seen so far he is always dressed in the outfit of the time. His explanations have helped grow my understanding. He gets to the point and moves on in his next video. There are others I've watch, but what they take 20 minutes to cover he does in 5. I feel my writing has benefited. (I write fantasy, but you need to try to make it seem what you have is possible. Yes, I have a Dwarven crossbow which is cocked, stripping a bolt from the mag, but only a Dwarf can us it, where a normal human don't have the strength. The Elf is a bowman and because of their gracefulness they get off more arrows than a human and cause more damage.
Nicely done. It's very interesting seeing the transition from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, from dealing with mainly mail to men-at-arms in plate armor. Bravo to Kevin for demonstrating the technology.
This is amazing on how difficult it makes the reload process look but on how effective and destructive the shots would be against defensive opponents. Ok, a longbowman might've knocked and fired 15 arrows by the time the heavy crossbowman might've taken to reload but the arrows would not have gone through shields and fortifications like the bolt would.
The downside of the longbowman. True you can get off maybe 6 arrows to one bolt but if your arrow does nothing more than piss off the enemy while the bolt penetrates the armor where does the advantage lye? I would imagine that the crossbow has a greater range since it is higher power. I would think that as long as the crossbow man has his shield man he would have an advantage with the shield to hide behind.If you enemy has mail (I'm trying to break my habit of saying chain mail since I learn that mail is chain. It's like saying mail mail or chain chain) either weapon is going to get the job done. The biggest difference (And I'm just picking numbers and don't know the true range) you are hitting at 100 yards while the crossbowman is hitting at 200 yards. (I hope someone can add the actual range.) Still, think about the fact you have 500, 1000 or more bolts or arrows coming at you. Does it all matter? I'm a bowman, I love the old English longbow and have one.
Long bows did penetrate armour so did crossbow, it go to the point where neither did and now we have armour that stops bullets. We always improve when we need to improve. This is the problem with most tests. 18 gauge steel was near the middle to end of the 100 year war. That whole war was about improvements as well winning. And the crossbow men were heavily out ranged by the bowmen. Even today as impressive as our crossbows are today we still cant break the 500 yard mark. 800 yards was not unheard of for bowmen. Most common was 450-500. Todays bows with the light arrows strings materials the average archer should be able to be accurate to 900-1000 yards 1500 yards being a damn good archer.
@@rickrozen2341 NYS started allowing crossbows for big game hunting a few years ago. Now we have black bears around here but it would be interesting to hear how people are doing against Brown bears and Grizzly.
I thought I recognized that chap. Saw your wonderful matchlock vid years ago. Love your dedication in period accurate kit. Would you ever consider filming a demonstration with a variant of the 15th century Hand-gonne? Keep up the great work!
Thanks! The snow is on the ground here now so that's put an end to outdoor shoots, but I'm hoping to wrap up and get out to do a Towton film ready for March.
The greatest rival was the cannon. The French eventually built a large force of them so they could sit out of bow shot & blast our archers. -One reason we lost the HYW.
@@Ukraineaissance2014 The bolts loosened from these types of crossbows are far more powerful than any bow. You need that amount of power to pierce plate armour, this is why as the quality of the armour worn by the common soldier increased, so too did the need to pierce it with powerful projectile. So even tho it's a hassle to reload and heavy to carry around, it's worth it when you have hundreds of men shooting these in a volley on a battlefield or a siege.
@@Ukraineaissance2014 "The strongest windlass-pulled arbalests could have up to 22 kN (2,200 kilograms-force; 4,900 pounds-force) of force" "The best longbows were made of yew, might have required a force of as much as 150 to 180 pounds" (70 to 80 kg) Citation: Wikipedia The rate of fire is a massive trade off to be sure. But the folks back in the day decided it was worth it for that kind of raw power. It's also a matter of training, to become a good arbalestier doesn't need as much time as being a good bowman. Eventually muskets made them both obsolete, even though it had the lowest rate of fire of any projectile weapon it was far easier to train a lot of men to use in a short amount of time.
@@Ukraineaissance2014 A longbowman however is significantly harder to train. Crossbowmen on the other hand don't require all that much investment. Way easier to recruit and replace.
Man im loving your channel, im a game developer, cant but imagine a game where armies clash! Your knowledge fuels both imagination and comprehension of medieval times!
"cant but imagine a game where armies clash!" Medieval II Total War with the Stainless Steel mod (and the bugfix mod on top of it) will serve you very well for a magnificent battles with appropriate armies!
@@DutchGuyMike nice, ill check it out! But imagine having to buy your own gear and heal your wounds properly, with a organ and body part dedicated system, that'd be cool!
@@LunarBulletDev In those terms you are talking of - buying your own equipment/healing wounds you would be looking the game Bannerlord (Mount & Blade) where it is very much that, minus the organ part (but there could possibly be a mod that adds that).
@@DutchGuyMike Yes ive played bannerlord too! and even warband! pretty good ones! but i imagine a more personalized approach, something like kingdom come but multi player!
I have heard that with a steel crossbow, they have been known to fatigue and fail, whipping both broken bow halves around and striking the crossbowmen! I have also heard that in later years they came up with a safety - a stout cord which was attached from end to end of the bow, hanging with just a little slack, which would prevent the broken halts from flying back and injuring the crossbowmen. Sounds feasible, but I have never seen one.
Honestly? I highly doubt that. It's not like metalworking was a new fangled idea at the time, people had spent thousands and thousands of years making stuff out of metal, and passing that knowledge down to their apprentice. Maybe the most primitive crossbows in the 7th century BC, but by the late medieval-early renaissance era people knew what they were doing
If that were the case, armies would have sticked to bows or even slings, as were the custom in the previous era. There’s a reason why so, so many armies and militias opted for crossbows; even with its complex firing mechanism, it was one of the most reliable and easy to use projectile weapon. Medieval times have a false bad reputation attached, it was a period full of innovations and master craftsmen.
@@schooloftheautarkicsun4625, exactly, longbow users were trained from childhood and you had to fill and army with them. Suddenly a complex mechanism doesn't seem that bad.
@@schooloftheautarkicsun4625 Except by the Renaissance era, handguns basically overtook them, crossbows a terrible battlefield battle weapon, too many problems can occur that can interfere with the firing, along with it being really slow without that much benefit, it is just smarter to invest in firearms and not fight in the rain (you wouldn't want to fight in the rain regardless), but hindsight is 20/20 and they wouldn't have known the full potential of firearms.
@Colton R First, training is irrelevant in this context, except there is more moving parts with a crossbow that leads to delays in firing or malfunction, which leads to the next point. Secondly, it is literally impossible for someone to load a 500+ lb crossbow(a very respectable weight for a military crossbow) in 10 seconds, we know this from historical accounts and physics, because if you can load a 500+ lb by hand there are way better things you can do with that kind of strength. All crossbows that exceed the 100 lbs draw weight needed a tool to load it, if you could load it by hand, it was incredibility weak, because the draw distance is much shorter despite having the same draw weight as a longbow, since there is less "time" for the cord to exert force onto the bolt, its the same principle as to why long guns are "stronger" than pistols. Third, these lower draw weight crossbow were basically terrible against armor, for reference you need to exceed 900 lb for a crossbow to even DENT full plate, something that can be done with 160 lb longbow, so any those crossbows you can load in 10 seconds wouldn't be able to do anything against armor. However crossbows store mechanical energy with tension so they can exceed the power of a longbow, however that takes more time as torque is the inverse of speed. Which is why i said its a terrible "battlefield" weapon, you dont have the time to load a very powerful crossbow, you do in siege though. Fourth, reliability is largely the same between the two if not worse for crossbows, again many moving parts. If the cord or winch gets damages, the crossbow is useless. Powder becoming wet is the only issue, as long as you store it dry and load it quickly, it wont squib easily. If the gun explodes thats because of operator error, they loaded too much powder. Sand is also irrelevant, because if it can jam the action on a handgun, you can jam a crossbow, the actions are very similar. Handguns were also smoothbores, its a metal tube, just clean it with the ramrod and cloth. Fifth, bolts being mass producible is irrelevant because bullets and arrows are too. Proper heads were much more important than their weight, else it wouldn't pierce the armor effectively. Sixth, history agrees with me. Handguns entered europe in the latter half of 14th century, by the late 15th to early 16th century it was basically fully adopted. It only took about 150 years to replace the 800 year existence of the crossbow.
("Just missed the head, but got the man behind him") I thought that was quick wit at first and then I realised the longbow man was right and it paints a picture of the battlefield scene.
Good shooting Kevin, nice look at ancient arms, to think how deadly an infantryman is today with small arms, medium MGs and heavy MGs. As the old Drill Sergeants used to say, the Infantry is Dirty, Grimy, and lethal!
Another goodie Sir- keep up the good work. I like your no-nonsense straightforward presentation style. No frivolous, non-relevant graphics. A good communicator only needs a robust West Mids accent from the bowels of the black country to keep folk enthralled. Flaxen Saxon
I'd be scared to death trying to reload with the enemy shooting at me. Thanks, Kevin, for showing us what it really was like to fight a battle in medieval times.
I've heard one of the real drivers for improvement in steel quality in the later Middle Ages was not the need for better swords- even with a superlative quality sword you're not going to have the muscle to deal with decent maille let alone plate- but because of the need for crossbow prods which had the power to deal with armour and did not deform or, even worse, snap unexpectedly.
Yes, good point. It's quite frightening when you hold one of these crossbows in the aim and you must wear a helmet because if it snaps, the power transfers back to you, so the need for a new kind of steel that wasn't brittle was very important. 👍🏻
@@BlurbFish Well, yes and no. Apart from some of the welded wrought iron pieces like Mons Meg, which fell out of fashion, bronze was still the preferred metal for guns for hundreds of years except by the British who invested in cast iron guns because of cost.
@@rasalgooch8204 Talking artillery, not small arms. Wrought iron was used for small arms until the 1860's, muzzleloaders using black powder didn't really develop internal pressures great enough to be a problem. Steel barrels started coming in during the 1860's partly because of breachloaders and also steel barrels had the rifling wear more slowly.
dear kevin and camera wife. i'm a fan that first saw your shows at warwick castle years ago. inspiring. you enjoyed and played to the crowd. i'd like permission not trying to be a pest but when i watch a movie several times i'd like to make more than one comment as there is much more going on in your movies. yesterday i shot six shots today 12. getting stronger. boy those bolts are are devastating ammo. when you said they'd go through plate it caught my attention. i guess having a shield carrier and it being slow to reload seemed worth it if it had the power to split the plate. our ancestors must have had strong minds. these days i'm shooting my holmgard bow like they found in a bog in denmark. dated 9000 years. my longbow "ebb" is a bit long for my indoor range. i found the holmgard and ebb shoot the same technique because the bows are about the same diameter. thank yew so much. good shooting gary
Hey Gary, glad to hear you got out again today and managed to double your shoot - don't overdo it though! Yes those crossbows really pack a punch, mine's a real beast and I'm always nervous when I shoot it. Thanks for watching and you're not a pest 👍🏻
Saw one of these in a display case next to a medieval armor, in the Saumur castle (i think, they had a musuem inside but with all the Loire castle i visited in this holiday i may mix up) I was amazed by the sheer size of that beast.
Hi Declan, they carried a quiver full of bolts. I can easily get a dozen bolts in my quiver, but I've seen drawings from the day of crossbowmen with bolts stuffed in their belts all around their waists. The paver would have carried the same, and then they were also resupplied from the baggage 👍
Kevin these videos are so fucking dope. I love them. I don’t know why they are addicting to watch. I really don’t care about any of this historical stuff, but your videos just suck me in.
I kinda liked those military type crossbows in The Crossbow TV series with Willy Lyman. Those had shaped body, kind of spikes with horns made from steel plates, used for aiming and as bayonet, mounted at the front of the crossbow. I was searching on the internet, but wasn't able to find them. I was wondering if they had in Switzerland at that time such a design, but maybe they were made only for movie purposes.
One common misconception though. They won't pierce plate armour. They will go through chain mail though. But put a 1 mm breastplate in front of it and it won't kill anything behind it.
P sure that was one of the reasons the bangsticks replaced them. Didn't hurt that guns very clearly had whole lot of "modernisation reserve" left to grow into whereas basically the only thing that could be done to increase crossbow performance was even MOAR draw weight which just exercebated the problems. Or that firearms had Hell of a lot more psychological impact. And made a whole lot better hand-to-hand weapons in a pinch.
its way more complicated, a muzzleloader smoothbore is just, powder, ball, ramrod, lite match, cock, fire, you technically don't need patch, it just makes things a little more reliable, and you can do all of this in about 15-20 seconds, compared to the 30 or more you need for a crossbow
@@nuhrii3449 Actual practical rates of fire were closer to 2 shots per minute, though. All the fussing with the smouldering match - getting rid of which being a big part of why the flintlock was a real step forward - and the inevitable buildup of gunpowder residue in the gun didn't help any. 'Course, experience and practice helped a lot. Seasoned shots knew which steps of the procedure could be shortcut to save time and just plains executed the motions faster, as with all such things.
I've had the opportunity to shoot one of these. I didn't set it, only fire it. And boy oh boy I understand why he says it scares him. It outright terrified me.
i can understand why you’d be scared: broken bones at a minimum, a huge gouge in you legs, groin, or arms at the worst. if you aren’t concerned and watching what’s going on throughout you’re going to get seriously hurt
Thats a very nice crossbow and such a long rail. Rare to see that in the middle ages styles. As an arbalest yes the crossbow is your life you will figure out ways to set you windless or any crank system for ease of access and use. Not much really changed on that front lol.
Good question! There were entire workshops devoted to their production, especially in Northern Italy as I understand, but I only know how to shoot it. Thanks for watching Toby 👍🏻
Look up "Tod's workshop" channel. He specialises in making all sorts of ancient & medieval kit & has done several videos on different crossbows. He makes them & often takes time to answer serious questions. This is a good place to start:ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DSMogEnD0OU.html
