I was watching conquest on the History Channel recently and they had a show about weapons that could be used against knights. More to the point they made it seem like there were few good anti knight weapons a peasant could use. However will watching it I also had to think of a modern low tech weapon that was used against modern knights, aka the tank. Did peasants in those days ever use a version of the molotov cocktail against knights? Were there any “rules” that prevented someone from doing that?(For example that no one could use fire at all since that was the realm of witches and the like.) Was it simply a matter of not having good fuels for the weapon or that the jugs they would use would be too brittle?
Cavalry was useful in open terrain where the horses could run in the open but they were still vulnerable. If you had enough infantry the horses could be tripped or stabbed in the belly etc. Horses were pretty useless in tight quarters so the best tactic was to fight on your own terms if that was possible.
The average peasant? No, the average peasant was SOL. Really, their only defense was polearms and spears.
Longbows. As the flower of French chivalry found out at Agincourt.
To makes this work properly, you need
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[li]Glass–which holds together well, until broken with a sharp blow. Glass was rare and expensive in the Dark/Middle Ages. Peasants didn’t have it. Period.[/li][li]Range—no greater than can be thrown. Tanks got ambushed inside cities during WW2. The wars of the Age of “Chivalry” took place in open territory.[/li][li]Hi Opal. :)[/li][li]Peasants seldom traveled far. Most fights would be near their home village, & the fields they depended on to live. Incendiary weapons are a no-no under these circumstances.[/li][li]To make a Molotov Cocktail, you need gasoline, alcohol, or crude oil. The first won’t be refined for centuries, the art of distilling was unknown in many parts of Europe, and crude oil at the surface is largely unknown.[/li][/list=1]
Well, there’s always Greek Fire, though I doubt many Greek peasants had access to it.
Peasants usually just got the hell out of Dodge.
Y’see, knights were courtly and chivalrous… to each other. If you beat the patootie out of your opponent, you could claim him as your prisoner, and ransom him off.
Peasants, being poor, were considered resources if they were yours, target practice if they were the enemy’s. “Chivalry” towards peasants simply didn’t exist. Basically, peasants’ best bet was to bury the valuables, get the animals out of sight, and go hide in the woods until the nobility got tired of hacking up the old people and burning the cottages and went away to go besiege the laird’s castle or whatever.
That is, assuming you had any warning they were coming.
English longbows were an anomoly in Europe. Remember we are talking average peasants here. England had a unique archery culture where everyone was shooting since the time they could walk, which made for very effective and accurate archers.
Most other European countries didn’t have that advantage, so most peasant archers were poorly trained, ineffective and much more likely to be killed than to kill.
Like I said, the average peasants best chance on the field against mounted cavalry was a long polearm or spear. Outside of that, he was toast.
One thing that boosted (albeit long before the Longbow hit centre stage) archery in England was the decriminalization (where have I heard that before?) of accidental shootings during archery practice.
In addition to what has already been said:
Molotov cocktails (or the like) are essentially only useful in urban/guerrilla combat. Guerrilla combat was an alien concept for medieval Europeans, and incendiary weapons in a medieval town would very likely burn the place down (assuming you could get your hands on the requisite materials in the first place). For molotov’s to be effective, your target must be close, and you have to be able to get away before their friends shoot you or hack you to death.
Incendiary weapons were used in medieval seige warfare, but they would be used to target wooden structures, not mounted soldiers. More than a few knights were probably taken down by flaming pitch launched from a trebuchet, whether it be result of poor aim or early attempts at psychological warfare, but I’ve never heard of such a thing being common practice. Until modern fire-fighting methods were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, fire was a huge fear for anyone living in a city. It was avoided as a weapon by many armies because, not unlike modern chemical warfare, it posed almost as much threat to friendly assets as it did to those of the enemy.
The ultimate answer to your question is that technological limitations and the nature of medieval combat didn’t make incendiary devices an effective weapon against calvalry.
Well, peasant archers were one thing. Yeoman archers were another.
Actually, “peasant archers” were largely French, and served as lovely targets for English longbowmen. The longbow is NOT an easy weapon to learn or use, and the short bows used by French draftees were a joke compared to what the English were fielding… because the French never really trusted or understood the idea of institutionalizing longbow training for people who weren’t technically part of the nobility… and what nobleman would want to use a longbow if he could afford armor and a warhorse?
Well, in the defense of keeps and castles, there was always the boiling oil they poured over the battlements…easy enough to set it afire, I would suppose.
However, out on the field, fire arrows (arrowheads soaked in pitch and lit) were probably more common as well as pitch-soaked projectiles hurled from trebuchets and the like.
The problem with using fire during medieval battles is that it had to be done at relatively close range, putting your own men and property in almost as much danger as the enemy.
Fire was used more liberally when an army was abanoning a position and wanted to make sure not to leave anything behind that the enemy could use, be it equipment, food or shelter.
Hmm… we’ve got one guy asking about wearing chainmail, and someone else asking about anti-knight weapons. Do I sense a conflict brewing?
Anyway, the problem for peasants against any kind of cavalry is that they didn’t have much in the way of training or equipment. While it’s possible for infantry to defeat cavalry with pre-gunpowder weapons, as the Romans and later the Swiss showed, it requires disciplined infantry, not a hastily assembled peasant rally. One common way for infantry to deal with cavalry is to take long spears (like pikes, though anything long and pointy would work) and set them versus the charge, and prepare to hit any cavalrymen that get through with hand weapons. While there are all kinds of variants on this, all of the variants require that the infantry work together and not run off as the cavalry get near - not something a hastily-assembled rabble can do, and also not really a good choice for an individual.
You may wish to consider that a peasant taking on a knight would be almost as terrifying as a present day infantryman trying to molotov and or limpet mine a tank in close terrain. Attacking better equipped units like that is desperation and or delaying tactics. Killing armor is the job of armor, not the grunts. Sometimes it happens, but not by choice.
Just like you or me would quail at the idea of engaging the army in direct combat unless placed under extreme duress or forced to.
A couple hundred heavily armored horsement in most cases would rout peasant units without a fight just from them being scared of being trampled to death.
The easiest way was to attack the horses. They were bigger targets, and knights in full plate armour could hardly get up after fallen to the ground.
Crossbows were powerful weapons that didn’t necessarily require weeks of training. One quarrel shot could kill a knight, and it’s a ranged weapon obviously, so the intimidation factor of peasant vs. charging knight might be lower.
Could a peasant learn how to wield a 15-foot-long pike or such effectively within a few days? After all, he’d have to be thinking that if the knight got past it, he’d be dead meat.
Learn to wield the pike in a few days? Probably. Learn the discipline and teamwork needed to make a pike formation that will actually hold off a cavalry charge? Not bloody likely. Over the course of a campaign, though, I’d think you could turn peasant conscripts into reasonably proficient pikemen who’d make knights think long and hard before making a frontal assault, assuming you could keep them alive long enough.
There were lots of god anti-knight weapons available. Longbows, cross bows, spears, pikes to name a few. However, to be effective, they all required trained, disciplined infantry e.g. English longbow men, Swiss and Landsknechte pikemen. The infantry had to be unafraid of the knights, which wasn’t the case with untrained peasants, no matter how well equipped they were, otherwise the tendency was to run rather than trust your friends to stand with you and fight.
Cavalry were only effective against other cavalry and unsteady infantry. Steady infantry, from the grunts who dragged pikes for Alexander to the British squares at Waterloo, always defeated or held off cavalry charges. The exceptional cases always had some other confounding factor that made it something other than a straight cavalry charging against infantry battle. For example, Carrhae (53BC), the Parthian horse archers were grinding down the Roman legionaries without any hand to hand combat and every time the Roman cavalry (actually Gallic auxiliaries) tried to drive them of, the Parthian cataphracts beat the Gauls back, allowing he horse archers to continue grinding.
Full of typos, must remember - Preview is my fiend.
I saw the program in question. I happened to be in Canada at the time, I expect the program will turn up in the UK in due course.
I had serious doubts about the portrayal of how knights actually fought. The analogue of the tank is very misleading. Duals and tournaments were one thing, but on the battlefield no knight would want to be caught on his own. Knights on horse or foot went into battle en masse and in the company of their own retainers: squires, men-at-arms etc who would also have pretty effective armour of their own.
I’ll stick to discussing a foot knight, as this is what the program concentrated on.
The sword may have been a noble weapon, but on the battlefield it was more akin to a personal sidearm. The program correctly pointed out that a single-handed sword was not much use against a heavily armoured opponent and that alternatives were necessary. For close up fighting maces and war hammers were common favourites. For a first contact weapon, by far the most popular choice was a pole arm of some sort.
There were all sorts of poll arm designs available. Most had a pointy spear end, a side spike that could be brought down great force on piercing the armour of an immobilised opponent and some sort of hook. The hook may be a push-pull and axe combined.
In the design of armour, especially the ‘white’ (i.e. articulated polished metal) armour of a knight, there were a number of design objectives. Of course, these included deflecting and resisting a blow. Another was to avoid having anything that an opponent could hook or hold onto. Well trained and only moderately equipped men-at-arms could defeat a small number of heavily armoured knights using teamwork – use pole arms to immobilise the victim, push or pull him over, and then deliver an armour piercing death blow with the side spike.
Knights also carried pole arms – those guys have to be kept at a distance.
As for alternative anti-knight weapons, well castles were equipped with “murder holes” for delivering projectiles, boiling water, boiling oil and possibly burning oil/pitch. Liquids must have been very nasty weapons especially for a knight who might suddenly find that his all too hard to remove armour has become a liability. The use of liquids in defence of a permanent fixed position is well attested. I have never read of their use on the battlefield.
The idea that a trebuchet could be employed as some sort of anti-personnel weapon is, IMHO, ridiculous. The rate of fire was very low and the time taken to aim the weapon and the low speed and great range of the projectile meant that a potential target could simply step out of the way. Much the same goes for all siege size weapons: they were meant to knock down walls, not men.
BTW, one of the other crucial design parameter of armour was the avoidance of heat exhaustion. This is not often mentioned. Men at arms and yeomen might be equipped with relatively inexpensive, but highly effective armour. Broad brimmed metal helmets and hardened leather and jerkins with riveted metal plates (there were endless different types). You wont find many examples of these armours in museums; they are not the sorts of things people passed down from one generation to the next. However, these armours were still very effective. However, being at least semi-flexible, they required a good deal of padding (as did chain mail) to distribute the force of a bone-breaking blow – and that means you are going to get very hot. A knight in expensive white armour does not need so much padding – he can keep going as his lesser opponents fall back exhausted.