First, I viewed these and they both involve dead animals, for anyone wondering.
Holy fucking shit. :eek:
After watching these I cannot understand why a professional executioner would ever have to take more than a single stroke. (Doesn’t prove you can sever a person’s head without moving it out of place, but still.)
I heard this identical story maybe 35 years ago, about a Gurkha using his kukri on a German soldier in the trenches in North Africa. It was to me clearly a UL even then, when I’d never heard of them.
The fountain of blood spurting up through the neck would tend to destabilize the head, wouldn’t it?
What about a blade that is 1 atom thin? Thats as sharp as it gets.
And completely incapable of resisting any shearing effects. Short of some scienmagical ‘statis field’ or whatnot, this isn’t a viable material.
Stranger
Inexperience, incompetence, drunkenness and nerves – usually in combination. Beheadings in England were relatively uncommon, and were performed as Marley23 describes – with the victim kneeling with his neck on a block – by the common hangman (or, in some cases, whoever could be bullied or bribed into doing the job) using an axe. It was often the first time the executioner had beheaded anyone, and in front of a potentially hostile crowd at that.
In continental Europe, particularly France and Germany, beheadings were more common, and there were skilled professional executioners who used a sword specially designed for the purpose. The victim would kneel, but upright rather than bowed down, and the executioner would use a stroke very similar to that used in the video to bisect the deer carcass.
This is why Anne Boleyn famously requested a French executioner for her date on the scaffold – he could be relied upon to do the job quickly and cleanly.
Worth watching if only to learn the excellent new word ‘diangular’. I think we should adopt this and use it wherever possible from now on.
The results could be very ugly. If you have an executioner, you want his nickname to be Death or Mr. Accurate or One Chop or something… not “Bungling Jack.”