"How Medieval Arms Race Led to Swords ..." Topic

…Capable of Killing ‘Tin Can' Knights.
"…Part of our purview on the project, an interactive story that's being turned into a book trilogy, was to portray Western martial arts correctly. Thus began my crash course in the evolution of arms and armor over several centuries of medieval life.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this education was charting the changes that occurred as a result of this medieval arms race. Let's start with the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, as recorded by the Bayeaux Tapestry, which is more than 200 linear feet of embroidered pictures of men in armor.

They're wearing hauberks, long shirts that hang nearly to their knees made from interlinked iron rings. They called it "maille," plain and simple, and if the troubadours were getting all poetic about these battles, they might refer to this maille as a "net." Never "chain." Why? Well, because it was a net.

Their helmets were nothing more than brain buckets with a metal strip hanging down in the front because the nose tends to stick out a bit. Add a shield (teardrop shaped — big and round at the top, narrow at the bottom), a sword and a lance, and you were ready to head off into battle. This was the basic outfit for your medieval fighting man, and it worked for a century or two.

There's any number of reasons why this changed. Maybe the wealthy nobles said, "F*ck walking to battle. We're riding horses." Or maybe the gear tweakers figured out that hauling a shield around was a loser's game — you carried it all the way to the battlefield and it got chewed up in the first hour (they were made from wood, after all). Perhaps some data miner noticed that fighters who hit first tended to survive and extrapolated on how to increase that ratio.

What happened was that swords got about 6 inches longer. It might not seem like much — less than the distance from the base of your hand to the tip of your middle finger — but 6 inches is more than enough on the battlefield…"
Full article here.
link

Hope you enjoy!.

Amicalement
Armand

thx,this is fascinating!

I don't think chausses came into fashion because swords were getting longer, rather because unarmored legs were vulnerable to infantry while a knight was on horseback. For the same reason you saw such a disbalance of armor for mounted archers and infantry: plate leg defences while the upper torso might simply have a gambeson.

Damon.

Left out the easier and better making of steel and other weapons that made maille alone useless. Swords were never a good weapon to take out a well armored fighter.

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. There is no substitute for properly accredited historical research.

This is typial of the usual broad-brush web posts. There's some small amounts of good material but on the while this wouldn't get you more than a C grade from a university tutor.

As Margard says, there's a plethora of well researched, referenced and high-quality works on kights, rmour and weaponry out there.