SimonBrooke said:
SimonBrooke said:
Two handed swords were mostly "for show". You're kidding, right?
;D
Killed anyone with one recently? Didn't think so.Yes, two handed swords look 'cool'. And they look very effective in the sort of five-minute fights that 're-enactment' people put on.They were widely used by high status people in the highlands of Scotland and in the Hebrides from the twelth to the fourteenth centuries. Why did they stop being used? Because the people who used them got killed by people with lighter weapons - the exact same reason the battle axe stopped being a serious weapon at about the same period.A battle with melee weapons is an intense physical effort which goes on for a long time. People die because they get tired, lose their concentration. The person who gets less tired has a big survival advantage over the person who gets more tired. Obviously you also need to have a weapon which is effective enough both offensively and defensively, but once it's long enough to be effective making it longer - and therfore heavier - isn't an advantage. That's why the progressive evolution of the sword was first that it got longer from bronze-age swords through the roman gladius to the tenth century longsword - about a metre to 120cm long over all - and from there on swords remained about the same length but got lighter to the modern rapier and sabre, so that my father's army sword (yes, officers still had them in the British army in the second world war...) was 108cms long.
Ok, I can't quite let this rest. I know we're talking western or European swords here and I would agree that the bastard and claymore type swords would tend to be towards the upper end of the useable scale, but I think historians underestimate what the human physique is capable of and if a higher percentage of them would take up a martial art which includes sword fighting as part of its syllabus, the professional opinion of historians as a group would shift quite a bit. Personally, I practice Chinese martial arts and train and teach the use of the Chinese broadsword and straight sword and have had some training in the use of the Chinese two handed straight sword. The broadsword is a single edged weapon and its use differs considerably, but the straight swords are basically the same weapons as the ones used over here, with the two handed version being as long as 1.5 metres. There is a difference (I think/assume from my experience, because I have never been able to find anything specifically related to what sword techniques were passed on in Europe) in how they were used following from different approaches to armour, but the base principles are the same: you have in your hand a plate of metal, sharp on both sides with a tip on one end and a handle on the other. In Chinam straight swords were a nobleman's weapon. Peasants would use broadswords and there is a reason for that: although there are prescribed and preferred methods of use for the broadsword, it lends itself to unschooled hacking with slighly lower risks of unintentional self-mutilation. The straight swords are not.Again, never having been trained in the western school of medieval swordsmanship, part of this will be conjecture. Chinese armour was geared towards agility more than protection, whereas the European knights went the other way. This in turn (chicken/egg thing here), leads to the way the Chinese use the straight sword: all techniques are aimed at a very specific part of the body. Namely those parts where the armour weaknesses were because they were made to be flexible. So a lot of the techniques are aimed not so much at killing directly, but at disabling limbs by severing tendons with small taps. Even a disabled thumb is enough to drop a sword and a sword on the ground does not aim to kill you while the owner of the sword sans sword is quite likely to attempt to get out of your way. Like I said, in Europe they went the other way. That is to say, knights (again, people higher up in society) went the other way. This meant the swords and their use had to adept though. Now this is where East and West meet again. Remember, same metal sheet tool (even down to independently developed pattern-welding techniques). For different reasons, they would have had to use similar techniques, which is to make the sword pivot around its balancing point. In China because after half an hour of tapping away with a 5kg sword, the precision tends to lessen so they had to make their moves as economical as possible (tapping a tendon is fine, tapping the bone next to the same tendon while painful, certainly doesn't have the same effect). In Europe, because they had to find the leverage to get their sword through a substantial bit of plating. And if not the sword, than the impact. Again, just bluntly swining a 5kg sword around might do the trick for a while, but, well, you get the picture. So they had to find leverage so they could keep going for longer. And it's there. In the sword. If it's made properly. Which I most definately think they were, or they would not have put in enough time to come up with pattern welding.When you swing a stick-like object around, it has a resistence. This resistence is bigger the longer and heavier the object. However, when you poke the same stick like object this resistence is hardly noticed. You can try this for yourself. Now move your body as if you're swinging the stick, but instead, let it drag behind you with what would be the tip pointing backwards. So your hand is going forward bottom first (the side that you would smash a table with if you were trying to make a point in a particularly heated discussion
). Near the end of your body's range of movement going around, let your hand whip around, literally as if you are trying to whip someone. Even though you have the same weight in your hand, this way is much easier and takes considerably less effort from your arm. It's not easy to get as much physical impact in that move as you have in just swinging the stick around, but it is possible. And that's why (I think) both in China and Europe, it was nobility wielding those weapons: they were the only ones with the time and sometimes even the duty, to dedicate time to learning how to use a sword properly.Anyways, long-winded way of saying, I'm sure Simon's reasoning why these swords became obsolete is correct, but I don't think they started "life" off quite as ceremonial and useless as he makes out. I do think re-enactment fights using those weapons (or at least the ones I've seen) are completely unrealistic. Because they do swing their swords around as if they're lumberjacks felling trees. And parry/block in a way that would have their sword useless and/or broken in two strikes. But anyways. As I said, I couldn't quite let this rest, I do apologise
