Medieval Warfare, Phil Davis

Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois

History of Weapons
Medieval Warfare

Phil Davis
SCRA meeting 2/6/06

March 2006 GunNews

Do you know the true meaning behind the nursery rhyme Ring around the Rosie? Davis asked members to raise their hands if their mother or someone sang this song to them as a child and to keep their hands in the air if they knew what the song meant. One member said the song is about the black death.

Think about the words to the song. One of the symptoms of the bubonic and neumonic plague was large pustules surrounded by a black ring. The pustules were bright reddish black and rosie. In medieval times people believed the plague was caused by bad air so they would breathe through pouches of flower petals that were sewn up and known as pockets. People died so quickly in large cities that they did not have time to bury the corpses. So they burnt them in bonfires and the ashes would fall from the sky like snow. If anyone brought the plague home to their family everyone would die. So think about it. Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

It was a warning to children in the middle ages to beware of strangers they might meet because they could bring this drastic plague home to their towns, their villages and their families. The plague was also one of the first biological weapons.

In the middle ages, feudal lords lived in a castle. Another feudal lord or king would lay siege to that castle by surrounding it and trying to batter down the wall and sack the city. They starved people out, they poisoned the castle's water with lye, manure, and uric acid (urine). These were early forms of biological and chemical warfare. There was no such thing as collateral damage back then. Anyone within the castle was a target. After a protracted siege, should the defenses be breached, the defenders could usually expect no mercy.

Knights in shining armor wore scale plate, such as the gauntlets pictured here, but they had to be able to move. So in between the patches of giant steel plate they had mesh which is called chain mail. Chain mail will stop a sword. Chain mail will stop an ax. Chain mail will not stop an arrow. An arrow will go right through chain mail. Archers eventually put an end to the era of armored knights.

In the middle ages there was no gun powder yet so artillery consisted of several different things that were used to lob missiles of one type of another.

Ballistas
One siege engine was the ballista. It was just like a giant cross bow. It shot a bolt of steel with a barbed point, sometimes with a point that carried a charge of Greek fire, a form of primitive napalm inside a ceramic jar. When an arrow would strike and shatter the jar it would spread the napalm throughout. Also it was used to fire at lines of infantry. These eight and ten foot long spears would go slashing through the lines and impale ten and twelve men on one spear.

Trebuchets
By the middle ages the catapult had been refined into two different weapons. The one that we know the most about is called the trebuchet. The trebuchet does not use spring power or roll power. It uses leverage and weight. It had a long arm that would swing with a sling on one end and a platform where they would stack weights on the other end. They would pull the arm back and load it. When they cut the arm loose, the weights would push straight down and cause that long arm to whip around. They were very accurate and they could adjust their range, distance, height and elevation by how much weight they put on and how long they cut their sling. Trebuchet handlers were specialists, devoting themselves to the use and maintenance of that weapon. They were the forerunners of the artillery gunners.   Some people said they could take a take a stone ball and put it through the window on a castle turret. Thats how good they were.

Quite frequently they would have large iron projectiles that looked like iron crosses which would go whipping through the air working like giant saw blades as they went down through the roofs of houses.

Even more insidious and demoralizing projectiles were used. Imagine you are inside a fortress under siege with thousands of soldiers around you on the outside and you know that that some of your troops have been captured. All of a sudden you hear the scream of one of your captured soldiers, as a trebuchet launches him back into the fort. He would usually hit the ground at the speed of about 150 miles per hour, near terminal velocity. This was to demoralize the people inside. Quite often if they captured a noble they would send his head back into the fort by way of the trebuchet. They would also find a cow or horse diseased with anthrax and lob it in. If they had someone who was sick or died of the plague or a bloating dead body they would lob those back into the fortress as well. Large canisters of Greek fire would be lobbed up to the roof top; they would shatter and spread fire over a large area. The trebuchet was the terror weapon. It was truly the weapon of mass destruction of medieval times, the king of the battlefield.

Mangonels
The other weapon that evolved out of the Roman catapult was called the mangonel which was a battering weapon. A rope powered it. It had an arm that had to be set and when they let go, it would fling the arm forward and hit against a metal stop and fire straight ahead. This was for throwing granite balls. It threw them with such force and so accurately that from 900 yards away they could hit the same spot on the castle wall over and over. A mangonel crew would keep up a steady fire, day and night cocking and firing until cracks started to form in the walls of the castle.   They wouldn't aim at the base of the castle, they'd aim about half way up. As soon as it started cracking they would bring in more mangonels and keep firing at that same spot and eventually that wall would collapse, fall across the moat, and form a natural ramp for a storming party to go up. The mangonel was the battering artillery of the medieval days.

Siege Towers
Another useful weapon was a siege tower. These would be built on site to be taller than the walls of the castle they were besieging. It was armored on the sides with plates, and had stairs that ran all the way to the top. They would roll this tower, which might be ten, fifteen or even twenty feet higher than the wall, right up next to the wall of the fortress and then run archers up to the top to fire down onto the fire steps to the castle to clear out an approach for the storming parties to come up.

Battering Rams
In old black & white movies like Frankenstein, a mob would grab a log and go running up to front and start beating on the drawbridge to the castle. In real life medieval warfare, this would be a good way to die!   They used battering rams but they were mounted to very sophisticated devices, carts on wheels, and they had a peaked roof above the battering ram. They didn't have to carry the great big huge log, but the one they had would be set on ropes and they would swing it back and forth. Bash! Bash! Bash! until they broke the hinges loose on the walls. The peaked roof would protect the crew from arrows, rocks, flaming liquids, and other weapons launched by the defenders on the castle walls.

Attackers also had what they called a tortoise, an armored vehicle they could push and roll right up to the castle walls. This would protect troops, who would storm the castle should the battering ram succeed in breaching the door. Archers also used mantles, which were nothing more than big wooden plates that the archers could take cover behind.

Defensive Measure
In the movies, moats are portrayed as lovely places with ducks swimming on them. In medieval times the moats were usually stagnant water where the castle's sewage was dumped. There were stakes eight to ten feet long below the surface of the water so anyone who fell in would be impaled.

The storming parties, after dealing with a sewage moat, would then have to deal with the archers, spearmen and crossbowmen from above who would be on the firing step, a ledge on the inside of the top wall. Archers used battlements, the staggered brick-looking things at the top of a castle wall, for cover. The men could stand behind the battlements, step around, fire their arrows and step back again. Windows in the old castles looked like crosses but it was not a religious statement. Those were firing ports. It gave defenders side by side as well as up and down fields of fire, while protecting them from most enemy missiles. Attackers had to be good to be able to fire from the ground and hit through a foot thick wall with only a few inches of exposed space.

Castle defenders also had other devilish devices for protection. They dumped the contents of caldrons off the top of the fortresses. Actually in places like Notre Dame and Paris, they had a gutter system where they dumped different sorts of evil liquid things into a trough and the contents would come out the mouths of gargoyles and spray out onto the crowds below. Liquids of choice included molten lead which doesn't melt until it gets to about 750 degrees fahrenheit. To get it to really flow they had to heat it up to around 1000 to 1200 degrees until it was glowing red. Another chemical weapon used by defenders was lye, which would blind attackers it was sprayed on. Defenders would also dump flammable liquids on the crowd of attackers, then fire a flaming arrow down into the middle of the crowd and set it all on fire. In the movie "The Messenger, the Joan of Arc Story" they used burning lye and oil to repel the people at the siege of Orleans. They used oil, Greek fire, anything they could set on fire or that would scald. They would boil water when they ran out of led and dump that down through the chutes. Gravity was their ultimate weapon because they had ten, twenty, and thirty foot walls to protect them from their enemies.

The English fortresses at Orleans had big tubes built into the walls, straight down, ten, twenty or thirty feet and then a right angle that came straight out. They fed great big 36 inch granite balls that weighed about 1200 pounds down these chutes. Once they let go of the balls gravity would take over and the balls would get to 130 or 140 miles per hour and shoot straight out. Anyone who was in front of that instantly found out what hamburger felt like. They were smashed flat!

Another weapon used by castle defenders was a very ugly, devious thing called a porcupine. It would be loaded it with as many as three hundred arrows in strips and it was as wide as the drawbridge. They cocked it by setting a giant spring. Then they would drop the drawbridge to make the enemy think they were succeeding. The enemy would think they had somehow broke the hinge because the drawbridge had fallen. When the drawbridge fell everyone went into the tunnel of the drawbridge. Fire! Three hundred arrows went flying out and would mow down everyone out there. Then the bridge went back up. When the enemy started beating on the door again, they opened it, let them in and fired again. They could keep this up at the rate of about one volley every three to five minutes. By the time they dragged all the bodies out of the way and started battering on the gates again, the porcupine was loaded again.

Davis teaches world history at Lanphier High School in Springfield and what you have read is a small portion of his speech on medieval fortresses.

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