I watched Kill Bill this weekend (both volumes) and was reminded of a question I have every time I watch a martial arts or jousting-type film: how exactly is a person supposed to defend him/herself against a heavy metal ball being swung around at high speed? I mean, the thing is so heavy and moving so fast that even if you block it with a shield, it will knock you over and probably knock you out.
So?
The classic defense against a ball and chain, which I have learned through my countless hours of watching Hollywood movies (and no other training, I should point out), is that you stick something into the chain (sword, pole, whatever) and let the chain/ball wrap around that, then give it a good yank and pull the whole thing out of your enemy’s hands.
[Indiana Jones]Stand well back and shoot 'em.[/Indiana Jones]
based on what I’ve seen on the history channel (I love TV) most midevil weapons are only 2-3 pounds because anything heavier is hard to control. Anything lighter is too weak to do any damage.
So a 2-3 pound mace or ball and chain is not going to be nearly as hard to defend with a shield as you may think.
As an aside, where did they use a mace in Kill Bill. I don’t recall.
As for the question I think you are over estimating how much a mace or ball and chain weapon weighs. There is no reason for it to necessarily knock you over or knock you out if you are using a shield…unless perhaps you mean while standing on the ground and being attacked from horse back? Besides using the method engineer_comp_geek said, I’d simply angle the shield so that it glanced off (instead of taking the full force head on).
-XT
I always wondered if a ball and chain style mace was a good weapon at all. It looks like a really hard weapon to use. It seems to me that after the first swing it takes a good deal of time and effort to get the thing under control for the second pass.
I imagine if you have the strength (and skill) to use it the weapon would be great against someone using a light wooden shield and wearing chain mail…or perhaps no armor at all. Even someone in plate getting hit on the head…well, they’d know they’d been kissed I imagine.
I think the ultimate hand to hand weapon was proably the mace though.
-XT
First of all, there’s a reason they used clubs for thousands of years: beating people with hard, heavy things works really well.
Second, letting the chain wrap around something of yours and then yanking on it only works if you’re faster on the yanking part than the other guy, and he’s probably more used to the timing of the thing than you are.
The big advantage of a chain weapon is that if it wraps around a body part, you can control that body part. If you can exert force with it, you can hurt your opponent, whether he’s wearing armor or not.
The real destructive power of the flail is that if the chain hits something, the ball keeps moving, and accelerates as it spins around whatever the chain hit. So, if the chain hits the top of a shield, the ball pivots around the top of the shield and hits the helmet really, really hard… harder than it would have if the shield wasn’t there.
So, the defense against a haft, ball & chain weapon is to block the ball, or don’t get in the way of it at all.
The crazy young schoolgirl who was O-ren’s bodyguard has this ball thingy on a chain, which has spikes poking up from it when a button is pressed.
The best defense against a ball-and-chain is a pre-nup.
As others have noted, the weight of a chain wepaon was never so great as to be able to knock someone over if they are properly balanced. And if they are off balance a poke from a sword will still be easier to use to knock them over than anything swung.
The second point to consider is that real fighting is nothing like hollywood fighting. The objective of a fight is not to stand back 3 feet, square off and hit the other guy’s sword or shield very loudly. Real fights take place with all sorts of ranges, often with less than 6 inches between combatants. They also take place off square. And most importantly the idea is to hit the other guy, not his weapon or shield.
Becase a real fight is so dynamic it becomes fairly trivial to simply step inside a chain weapon, or off square where it can’t be brought to bear. It’s all about timing. In fact chain weapons are easier to get inside of than almost any other weapon. They get one good swing and then have to complete at least a quarter circle before they can be brought to bear again. In that time an experienced fighter can easily step into a position where the weapon is useless. In contrast a weapon with a cuttting edge can initiate another cut immediately as part of the recovery stroke. Even a simple mace or club can recover more easily than a chain weapon.
And once someone does get inside a chain’s range it is almost useless. If you have a ball -and-chain and I am standing against you nose and toes what exactly can you do with the weapon? You can attempt to use the handle as as a club and that’s about it. Whereas as a cutting weapon can be used perfectly effectively at that range and even a club is useful. In contrast a chain weapon tends to become a liability for extremely close in work.
For those reasons it’s often actually easier to defend against a chain weapon than most other weapons. Manouvering alone can render it almost useless. The great advantage of chain weapons was never that they couldn’t be defended against. Their advantage lies in their speed and unpredictability.
I will agree with almost all you have said, but will mention thatI can certainly see how a chain weapon can be used close-quarters for leverage.
I hear a similar argument when speaking about longswords. People tend to think that once your inside, they are useless. Not so, they remain a useful leverage tool (with sharp edges even!) to bring to bear on your enemy.
Care to expland on that? I can see how the handle could be used for leverage just as a club can be, but i already mentioned that. But how can a chian provide leverage? Isn’t it flexible by definition?
I’d be far more concerned with the sharp edges and being hit between the eyes with the pommel than any potential leverage. ‘Longswords’ weren’t normally razor sharp but they were axe-sharp, which is plenty sharp enough to cause serious lacerations when drawn across the skin. And there are plenty of other moves that make a sword dangerous at close range without worrying about leverage. A sword is every bit as dangerous up close as it is from 3 feet away.
Blake’s answer is much right on. I think the leverage Kinthalis was thinking of is in grappling and strangling attacks. You can use the length between your hands as a lever, a bit like using a staff or pole weapon shaft for the same thing. It’s hard to explain in words, but you’d get it immediately if you saw the principle demonstrated.
Like Blake said, the advantages of a flexible weapon are speed and unpredictability, though I’d also add the advantage of range. If you void the reach by getting inside the arc, you’ve taken away a lot of the advantage he’s got over you. Trapping the chain or binding it in a way that doesn’t allow your opponent to regain control and mobility of the weighted end is another way to counter it.
The unpredictability is the reason why you don’t find many examples of those kind of weapons outside the cinema. It takes a lot of practice with something like this kusarigama to get good enough to use it against someone who is even halfway decent at fighting. On the other hand, if you are good, you can do some really nasty things, hitting your opponent from angles they wouldn’t have believed possible or swiftly entangling and unbalancing them unexpectedly.
Flails usually had very short chains whose only purpose was to enhance the impact of the head. A lot of stuff you see being offered for sale now is not historically accurate; the chains are usually way too long to be useful.
Another advantage to long flexible weapons is that you can entangle and partially immobilize an opponent. That can work against you, however, in that you can have half your weapon tied around someone when you really need it. Even if you were successful in killing the first guy, you might have his corpse inconveniently tangled in your chain when his buddy decides to try and gut you. A lot of long flexible weapons have a blade weapon attached to the handle not only for dispatching your primary but for some kind of defence against a secondary target if your weapon gets tied up.
Close in, flexible weapons can be used for binding, strangling, and grappling attacks, but again this takes a decent amount of training. While I might be able to use a kusarigama or a kyogetsushoge successfully against a guy with a sword, as I have trained with using them, I wouldn’t have that as my first choice if I were alone. Working with a partner, its advantages are clearer.
I don’t know anything about the sort of fights where one would be attacking me with a mace, but there’s a rather clever training sequence in the Shaw Brothers film, “Five Shaolin Masters,” where one of the 5 remaining members of the destroyed Shaolin temple devises a fighting style based around a bamboo pole as a weapon, to defeat the invincible flying axe (an axe head on a rope) of somebody-or-other.
I suppose it’s the sort of thing you’d want to practice a while before using this defensive tactic in a fight.
There’s a pretty neat description of the use of ball-and-chain weapons in China in the Robert van Gulik Judge Dee novel The Red Pavilion, where a dwarfish constable (nicknamed “The Crab” )is an expert in their use. One aspect of the book I liked is that The Crab was constantly practicing, using melons they grew as targets and being drilled by his companion at odd and unpredicatable times so he’d always be ready to use them. It’s one aspect that’s rarely shown in martuial-arts flicks -0- if you’re going to be proficient in the use of some weird weapon, you’ve got to practice, practice, practice. Gogo Yubari would’ve been tough to hang out with, even if she didn’t fillet casual companions all the time.
Van Gulik’s characters claimed that the use of those chain-and-mace contraptions was restricted to small,light people, and that The Crab’s companion couldn’t use it because he was too big a guy. I don’t know how much truth to that there is, but van Gulik usually researched things pretty well. And Gogo certainly fit the bill.
In films following the western tradition, I’ve often seen them used from horseback. Decent-sized haft, short chain, moderately-sized spiked ball. Used in a ride-by attack. I suppose they give extra flexibility (in more than one sense) over a sword.
What’s not realistic is the Witch-King’s mace from Return of the King. Totally OTT.
In the “real world”, as I understand it, the most commonly used ball-and-chain weapons were adapted from threshing flails.
i.e., 3’-6’ of pole, at most 1’ of chain, and an oblong ~four-pound weight.
The idea is that you have a weapon which is at least passingly familiar to your emergency peasant armies (the examples I’m thinking of were used during one of the Bohemian rebellions in the 1300s-1400s), and you combined the flexible defense of a quarterstaff with a significantly enhanced bit of striking power in the whirly-chain-thing on the end.
Other types certainly existed, but I don’t know much about them, and my medieval studies classes indicated that what I’m describing was the original/most common of the type.
I once saw some show on the History Channel in which they explained that the giant-axe wielders in Harold Godwinson’s Anglo-Saxon army spun them to create a large, unapproacheable area. Could a flail be used similarly? Of course, even with the Saxon axemen, it seems, that there was a danger that the movement of the axe would be stopped and the axeman would become defenceless.
