I was watching the LOTR:Return of the King Extended Edition this weekend and I was thinking about the physical strength of someone like Aragorn. Liken him to your run of the mill medieval warrior and some surprising inferences can be made to the physical stamina that must have existed in someone fighting at that time. According to this well written article regarding misconceptions of the weight of medieval fighting swords, most medieval swords were under 4 pounds.
As a reference, let’s use 4 lbs as a rule and really think about extending your hand with 4 pounds resting in your palm. Keep holding it out, and then move it about for say 10 minutes without putting it down. I’d imagine your arm would start to get a bit tired.
Now think about weilding it as a weapon to kill a person, and defend yourself in a battle lasting say 45 minutes (some battles were much longer). How on earth would a medieval warrior have the stamina to last that long whilst weilding a several pound sword?
Factor in an unhealthy diet and many additional pounds of chainmail and armor, I don’t see how these men could last more than say 45 minutes max, or in short bursts. Anyone have any facts on duration of battles and stamina of average medieval warriors?
Accounts exist of battles that started at dawn, & went on until after dark.
Knights were professional warriors, often trained from birth for strength & stamina. Their diet was protein rich, usually at the expense of their serfs.
They had at least as much stamina, probably more, than a modern pro athlete.
Bear in mind also that the armies shown in LOTR are orders of magnitude larger than what was normally fielded. Several thousand troops would have been more than enough to besiege a major city (of several hundred thousand…), so the ratio of trained solders to populace didn’t have to be that good. Saruman mustering 10,000 troops for his battle against Helm’s Deep is a little over the top.
Actual fighting itself almost never took longer than an hour. Take Agincourt, for instance. The two lines faced each other starting at dawn, but nothing happened for about four hours. Then the English moved their lines up and hit the French with a few volleys of arrows, prompting the French to attack. The initial melee between French men-at-arms and the English took about 30-45 minutes and resulted in the annihilation of the first two French lines. The third French line slunk away and that was that.
Medieval battels didn’t last long, not because of fatigue, but mainly because it really doesn’t take that long to kill a bunch of people when you’re face to face in a melee. It generally doesn’t take long for one side to realize that it’s losing and to break and run.
Medieval people of all classes must have had a lot more stamina than most of us today, simply because of the primitive technology of the time. Even if you were fortunate enough to have a horse to ride instead of walking, you still expended more physical effort in getting around than someone driving a car today. And horses couild not be used everywhere; high social position presumably didn’t relieve you of the need to do a lot of walking, especially since the absence of telecommunication meant that everything had to be conducted face to face.
Training… Most people today can’t hold their hands up in a guard for three minutes, much less fight nine rounds in a boxing match. Most people who start sparring, either boxing or martial arts, are surprised by how exhausted they get just holding a guard stance and doing the footwork, not to mention taking and delivering blows. Once you train for it, it’s not so bad.
I also know guys who could barely lift a bale of hay, but after spending all summer on the farm they could spend hours at a time stacking bales on a trailer. The muscle-bound jocks could handle a few bales, but they couldn’t keep pace with the wiry guys that did it all day every day.
I respectfully disagree. Granted, historians of the time grossly exaggerated the size of the armies, but even so, some of them were massive. For example, Mehmed beseiged Constantinople with 150,000 troops Genghis Khan, at one point, apparently had 250,000 troops and a million horses under him. Saladin attacked Richard at Arsuf with 80,000 troops. A large medieval army of 50,000 troops wouldn’t be that unusual.
As for how long the battle went on – some went on for days. I imagine that the individual warriors did what athletes do now – they rested occasionally to catch their breath. And yes, some of them (particularly the Crusaders in the hot climates) just dropped dead of heart attacks or heat stroke or were so exhausted that they became easy targets.
What micco said. In college I worked one summer in a small lost-wax process foundry. There were two other college guys also working there at the same time. One of the guys worked in the wax room, dipping forms into plaster slurries and hauling them out to dry. By the time a mold was ready to go, there was a 15 - 20 lb, wax form covered in three or four layers of plaster. We used to kvetch at each other regarding who had the hardest jobs–with the second guy and I noting that we worked out in the humid air with the burnout furnace and casting furnace at our backs while the first guy worked in a perfectly climate controlled room (so that the wax would not deform and the plaster would dry).
The guy in the wax room insisted that his job was harder because he had to lift heavier objects all day. (Once the casting was poured, the actual cast objects were cut off from the “tree” and most of our work involved moving the discrete forms around rather than lifting the entire original mold.)
One day we got into it and began arguing about the weight of the castings we were deburring, with the wax room guy insisting they weighed no more than 4 lbs, and the other shop floor guy and I arguing that they weighed 8 lbs. At the end of lunch, we picked one up and threw it on the shop scale–15 lbs.! Over the course of the summer, we had gotten so used to holding these pieces up while shoving them into a grinding belt to knock off the “gates,” that our estimate of the objects’ weight had nearly halved, even though we were holding them into the grinder for 10 hours a day.
I know folks who can throw 40 - 50 lb hay bales for 8 - 10 hours a day, as well.
The Battle of Hastings was essentially an all-day battle. Fatigue became a major issue by mid-afternoon. The heaviest weapon in use might have been Norse battle-axes, but probably very few men on either side using those.
All-in-all, in came down to tactics and the better training of the Normans.
Nah. Check out suits of plate armor, and you’ll see they’re not actually that bulky, but they do have lots of room in the shoulders. And because the suits distriv=bure the weight evenly, you can actually sprint in them and do somersaults (although not for very long…)
Remember too that the majority of people in the medieval armies were conscripted peasants who were nearly all farmers - with all the conditioning and strength that implies.
Someone’s probably going to argue that with me, but the point was that the “average” person was a farmer and significantly more used to that sort of rigor than one would expect.
Medievel battles were also pretty straightforward types of things - one group on a hill being attacked by another group charging up the hill. Soldiers usually marched to the battle site, so at least one side was tired and footsore. There was not much redeployment and manuvering once the battle began, and except for sieges, it was cavalry and infantry against cavalry and infantry. Distances covered during a battle were very small, and there was not much if anything in the way of supplies or any kind of relief. By modern standards, the armies fought on a very compact area, and most could see what and how their side was doing. So if one part of your army retreated, you might see that and think it was a good idea too.
A long, drawn out battle would be difficult if you consider the amount of water, for example, required by the knights and their horses, let alone the foot soldiers. It’s must have been tough to stop for a beer or a nice chardonay when being charged by knights, dodging arrows, or hacking away at a foot soldier.
I’m a carpenter. I work with my hands all day long. In particular, I swing a 22oz framing hammer. While that’s only about a third of your 4lb sword, I assure you it felf extremely heavy when I first started using it. Now it’s and extension of my body and I only get tired after swinging it all day long. Likewise, I don’t consider myself to be in particularly good shape, but I can work your average office worker into the ground. I often outlift guys my size with obvious “gym muscles”. I assume that a medieval knight was in far better condition than me, and his weapon was probably equally an extension of his hand. Even yon peseant farmer was in great shape compared to today’s average American.