WEAPONS. A Pictorial history

The medieval years were rough times. Just as in the twentieth century, citizens were often attacked and robbed, so nobody went about in public without arms of some kind. The tradesman, priest or knight in civvies wore a short sword (or long dagger) called a baselard suspended from the belt of his gown. Lesser men carried the quarter staff and some sort of dirk. Gentlemen's daggers were often hung around their necks or carried in a pouch. Even women wore fancy little daggers fastened to their girdles.

Tilting at the quintain

Everybody was in some way involved when an army had to be raised, but to judge from the records, some of the service was on the casual side and the draft boards apparently weren't very tough. At least one archer who went to the wars was required to stay with the king's army "until he had shotte away hys arrowes," and another took with him a flitch of bacon and was a soldier only until he had finished eating it. However, the British yeoman, because he was allowed some self-respect, was gradually becoming a foot soldier who made his weight felt. On the Continent where the peasants had no rights and were treated like cattle, they behaved accordingly.

Foot soldier

Medieval armies didn't go in heavily for organization but there was some attempt at subdividing the mob. An army was made up of three battles, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of routes or retinues containing from twenty-five to eighty men each. A route might consist of the retainers of only a single lord or knight-banneret, or several such retinues might be grouped together as a route. Command of an army so organized was badly complicated by the fact that each soldier would obey only his own landlord, each landlord felt responsible only to the baron from whom he held his fief, and this nobleman in turn disregarded everybody but the earl to whom he had sworn fealty.

In battle, archers and crossbowmen were usually placed in front of the mounted knights, and after the footmen had shot their arrows, the cavalry would charge through them; or in France sometimes over them – after all, they were only dogs of peasants. At the battle of Crecy the Genoese crossbowmen, when they had shot their bolt for the French, were ridden down by the French and suffered more hurt from the knights of their own side than they did from the English.

Up to that battle there had not been, since the heyday of Rome, any question as to the superiority of mounted knights over foot soldiers, but at Crecy the English longbowmen, standing on their own two feet, began to embarrass the horsemen. They caught the French knights in a crossfire and annihilated their horses with carefully placed arrows. On the same day, the Black Prince made some of his knights remove their spurs and fight, on foot with shortened lances. He seems also to have used a cannon, but we'll talk about that later.

The Greeks and Romans planned whole campaigns in advance but strategy was a forgotten idea in the Middle Ages. Attacking and defending armies seldom knew where they were or where the enemy was; sometimes they played hide-and-seek for weeks and went home without ever finding each other. There were no maps. Often an invading army arrived in front of a town either with no idea what town it was, or else quite sure that it was some other place entirely.

Crecy was fought in 1346, and in the battle the English used some tactics planned in advance. Up to then nobody had thought much about such things. Most battles were a series of personal combats between knights, and the nearest they came to concerted action was to help a friend out of a tight spot now and then. Because of the resulting confusion it was necessary to have rallying points of some kind. Banners marked with coats of arms or "badges" were one device for this. Similarly the king had his standard and a picked group to defend it; often this banner was flown from a staff mounted on an ox-drawn wagon. As long as the standard could be glimpsed above the fight, the men who followed it knew they were not completely licked.

Men also needed to be seen above the melee and recognized, so knights began to wear crests on their heaumes. These were carved from wood or molded of leather, and usually represented some animal or object which served as a secondary trade-mark for the knight. The first crests were just little fans of feathers, but when it was realized that they made their wearers look taller and more imposing, the crests became very elaborate and very, very high.

Scalling ladder

Battle cries were popular, and in addition to whooping up the fight, like the Japanese "Banzai," they helped to rally men around a leader. It's difficult to imagine a battalion of American GI's attacking with shouts of "Liberty and the United States" or "Ha, Eisenhower!" At times they shout as they attack but the words are quite different.

The trompe, the oliphant, the claironceau and a dozen other horns with handsome names were sounded for rallying, and the tabour or tambour (drum to you) was beaten for the same purpose though it's hard to see how it was heard over the racket, which prevailed.

Siege was no small part of medieval military operations, and the reduction of a strong castle was a long, weary job. It took Oliver Cromwell's Puritans three years to capture Corfe Castle, even though they had cannon and muskets by then and the garrison of the place consisted of little more than the doughty Lady Bankes and her serving wenches.

The oldest and simplest of siege weapons was the battering ram, but against a ten-foot-thick stone wall it wasn't worth a hoot. Medieval armies used them against town gates when they could be worked. The "mouse" was a drill as the Roman terebra had been. It was rotated by sim ple handles and it, too, had small chance against a stone castle.

The "mouse"

The fighting tower, officially called a beffroi, was known to the soldiers of the Middle Ages as a "cat." Usually it couldn't be brought close enough to a castle's walls to be effective, since it was necessary to fill in the moat to make a passage for it. Under the name of escalades, ladders of various kinds were used to try to climb over high walls; but a man on the top of a tall ladder has no perceptible advantage over a group of armed men above him who are trying to push his ladder over and to stick him full of spears and arrows.

In view of these things it isn't hard to see why the besiegers of castles depended mainly on missile-throwing gyns for their assault. In the old days of wooden castles the springal did very well. This was a version of the Roman falarica which propelled darts by spanking them with a springy timber. Usually the darts were incendiary and kept the defenders busy putting out fires. Lead came to be used as a material for roofing castles largely as a protection against attacks of this kind. Because it was the lightest of projectile-throwers and because ships were highly inflammable, the springal was for centuries an important naval weapon.

Springal

Quite a bit more powerful than the springal was the ballista, which was sometimes called an arbalest, but because the latter name is also applied to the high-powered crossbow, we'll stick to the older term. This gyn was really like a catapult and was never as large or as powerful as the Roman ballista had been. The medieval one had no skein of twisted fibers; it was simply an enormous bow, bent by a windlass. The Roman sliding trough was missing; the trigger was a simple forked slip-hook. The medieval ballista pitched a javelin in very good style however and was probably the most accurate of the siege weapons.

Ballista

The mangonel was mounted on four wheels and was familiarly known as a "nag" for the same reason that the Romans called it a "wild ass," because it kicked up its rear-end when it was fired. The mangonel threw stones. In later years the word was shortened to "gonne," and since the first cannons also threw stones, they became known as gonnes too. In principle the mangonel was exactly like a Roman onager; but in practice it was a much cruder machine and puny in comparison. Its great advantage was that it could be moved; it was a "field gun." The skein which was its "propellant" was never as efficient as the Roman version. It seems usually to have been equipped with a scoop for holding its projectile and was seldom given a sling; on the other hand the trebuchet almost invariably had a sling.

Mangonel

The trebuchet was the heavy howitzer of medieval artillery. Usually it was so large that it had to be constructed at the scene of action; its verge or beam ordinarily was made of an entire tree. While it never equaled the range of the classic ballista and seldom did walls any real damage, it turned in a performance good enough to scare the daylights out of the residents of a castle. To understand the trebuchet, picture a seesaw with one short end and one long one. Put three-hundred-pound Uncle Henry on the short end and hold the long end down while you put thirty-pound Junior on it. Now let go and watch Junior sail over the house—never mind what happens to Uncle Henry.

Large Trebuchet

On the actual gyn the seesaw was pivoted at its balance point, and instead of Uncle Henry there was a large box of stones and earth hinged to a fork on the short end. The means of setting and releasing were like those of a mangonel except that the windlass was under the main trestle where the skein-winch would be on a mangonel, and the setting ropes were led to it under a roller at the back of the base frame. The trigger was often a large hook which held the verge itself, making it necessary to unhook the setting ropes before shooting. The stone projectile was placed in its sling on a long platform which began just back of the windlass. It was snatched from here by the released verge, and swung in an arc at the end of the pole. At a point about two-thirds of the way up, one side of the sling slipped off the end of the verge and the stone sailed free, following a high curve to its target.

In large trebuchets there was nothing to stop the verge after the projectile left it. The weight swung between the trestle legs; the arm threshed forward and back and came to rest standing straight up. Apparently it was then necessary to shinny up the verge and hook the ropes onto the pole again after every shot! The weight on a small trebuchet usually dropped to a rest and lay there, the arm never reaching an angle much higher than sixty degrees. That was all right because with a sling, the stone had already left when the arm got that far up.

Trebuchet is the French name of this gyn; used of course by the Norman aristocracy, it has somehow remained in modern English. In the English of its own day it was called a "trip-gate" or a "trap-gate." A stone from it was "trapped" at the target and we still practice trapshooting at small projectiles thrown by a machine.

The trap-gate was used as a siege weapon-well into the sixteenth century without any change of principle. Metal bearings improved its operation, and the substitution of a metal weight for the old box of junk made it handier and more permanent. However, it's doubtful if the ornament lavished on it added even an inch to its range or accuracy.

You will have gathered that siege engines had small effect on strong castles beyond annoying the tenants; sometimes the besiegers, knowing this, would concentrate on being as annoying as possible. Along with their rocks and spears, they would toss in the carcasses of very dead animals or, if they had caught one, a live prisoner, sometimes the courier sent by the castle to bring help. People weren't squeamish about little jokes of that sort in "the good old days."

The besieged castle had gyns of its own which operated from the court. They'd have been more effective from a higher point but the towers wouldn't stand the shocks of discharge. In their day the Romans had built special towers which were solid all the way up, expressly for mounting ballistas, but in the Middle Ages nobody remembered that or thought of it.

We've mentioned mining several times as an effective way of toppling walls by digging under their foundations. The work was done in the way a coal mine is dug today. As the tunnel advanced, it was shored up with heavy timbers. When the digging had progressed far enough to be directly under the masonry, the castle walls were supported on the shoring; then the diggers soaked their timbers with oil and pitch, set fire to them and went back to camp. Unless the defenders could find a way to flood the tunnel, the wall fell down when the shoring burned away.

Attempts also were made to set wooden gates afire with oil and pitch; so slots were angled in the castle wall above the gates in such a way that water poured through them would drench the outer face of the wood.