Medieval Combat World Championships

Poland's Marcin Waszkielis and Suzanne Elleraas of the United States took first prize in the male and female divisions of the Medieval Combat World Championships, which was held this week in Belmonte Castle in Spain.

The four-day event began on May 1st, with dozens of men and women competing in combat with the medieval longsword.

"The sport is based on the traditional 14th and 15th century tournaments, mostly the rules have been developed from a book by a guy called King René of Anjou and he wrote the seminal book of the tournament in the early 1400s," Martin Cazey explained to the NTD.TV.

Both the BBC and Ukraine News One were on hand to report on the tournament:





You can also see this slideshow of pictures from the Medieval Combat World Championships from Reuters.

Why the soldiers of the First World War should have looked more like medieval knights

Michael Vlahos offers a fascinating article in The Atlantic about how "hundreds of thousands of lives" in World War I could have been saved if soldiers wore helmets and body armor just as medieval knights did hundreds of years earlier.

He writes, "medieval armorers and men-at-arms knew a secret that would have spared perhaps 30 percent of those who died in battle. We have the evidence right at the Metropolitan Museum itself."

For example, when helmets were introduced (two years into the war) the British and French made them in a way that wasn't very effective at protecting the head and neck. Meanwhile, the Germans based their design on the medieval Salade (or Sallet) helmet, which was much better preventing injuries or deaths.

Bashford Dean, an expert on medieval armor at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, even designed a battle harness that would offered strong protection against shrapnel from exploded bombs and even bullets from pistols, but the American army never made use of it when they entered the First World War.

You can read more at Could Body Armor Have Saved Millions in World War I?

One in the eye for history: experts still fighting over the site of the Battle of Hastings

It is the most famous battle in British history, fought, as every schoolboy knows, in 1066 at a site now marked by Battle Abbey, near the town of Hastings. But while the date of the Battle of Hastings might still be universally accepted, the location has been called into question, with two experts proposing not one but two different sites for where the fighting actually took place.

They believe that for almost a 1,000 years, the battle has been commemorated at the wrong spot, with one historian claiming the fighting actually occurred a mile to the north, on Caldbec Hill, and another stating it was two miles away, to the south, at a place called Crowhurst.

In an effort to settle the matter for good, a group of historians assembled by the Battlefields Trust have spent months evaluating the three competing claims to decide which one is correct and they believe they are now ready to deliver their ruling.

For nearly a millennium there has been little debate that the encounter between the armies of England's King Harold and William the Conqueror had taken place on the fields around Battle Abbey, a few miles north of Hastings, at a spot known as Senlac Hill.

Click here to read this article from The Telegraph

Click here to read the latest statement from the Battlefields Trust

Click here to read more about The Battle of Hastings

Funding given to commemorate the 500th Anniversary of the Battle of Flodden

The Flodden 500 Project will receive £887,300 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to commemorate the 500th anniversary of one of the largest battles ever fought between Scottish and English forces.

The battle of Flodden was fought in the county of Northumberland in northern England on 9 September 1513 with over forty thousand men on the battlefield. King James IV of Scotland died in the battle, the last monarch from the British Isles to suffer such a death to date.

The project, which is being managed by the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum, will bring together communities of the Scottish and Northumbrian border areas. It will last over a four year duration to ensure that legacy is created beyond the actual commemoration events in 2013.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Crusader sword sells for £163,250

A rare medieval sword, which had been given to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and then looted from them by the same Crusader king, sold for £163,250 at auction this week, with an entire collection taking in bids over £ 1 million. Bonhams auction house in London held a sale of medieval and Viking swords, with many of them selling for six or seven times the expected price.

 The crusader sword was estimated to sell for between £40,000 to £60,000. The Italian-made weapon was given as a gift to the Mamluk sultans of Egypt as part of a gift sealing a treaty. The sword was kept in Alexandria, but did not reside their long. Peter I launched the a crusade in 1362 against the Mamluks and his fleet captured Alexandria. They returned to Cyprus with immense amounts, including this sword.

 David Williams, Head of Bonhams Antique Arms and Armor Department, says: “The fascination of this sword is that it has survived some six centuries having been gifted by a Christian King to a Muslim ruler and kept in the famed Alexandrian armory and then taken by force by Crusaders and returned to Europe. It is a remarkable survivor of the Crusader period.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Mary Rose archers were among the elite soldiers of the 16th century, research reveals

The archers who fought on Henry VIII’s warship the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, would have been elite soldiers for their time, standing over 6 feet tall and able to pull weights over 200 lbs. These findings come from a new research project being carried out by sports scientists at Swansea University and the Mary Rose Trust to discover more about the lives of the 16th century archers on board the ship.

When the ship was raised from the Solent in 1982, many thousands of medieval artefacts along with 92 fairly complete skeletons of the crew of the Mary Rose were recovered.

Nick Owen, Sport and Exercise Biomechanist from the College of Engineering at Swansea University said, “This sample of human remains offers a unique opportunity to study activity related changes in human skeletons. It is documented that there was a company of archers aboard when the ship sank, at a time when many archers came from Wales and the South West of England."

Click here to read this article from Early Modern England

How Medieval Arms Race Led to Swords Capable of Killing ‘Tin Can’ Knights

I grew up on an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons and John Boorman’s Excalibur. The image of the tin-can knight — clanking and rattling as he walked, hoisted onto his horse by a crane — was the first part of my childhood that had to go when I started working on The Mongoliad, an epic collaborative tale about the Mongol invasion of Europe in the early 13th century.


Part of our purview on the project, an interactive story that’s being turned into a book trilogy, was to portray Western martial arts correctly. Thus began my crash course in the evolution of arms and armor over several centuries of medieval life.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this education was charting the changes that occurred as a result of this medieval arms race. Let’s start with the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, as recorded by the Bayeaux Tapestry, which is more than 200 linear feet of embroidered pictures of men in armor.

They’re wearing hauberks, long shirts that hang nearly to their knees made from interlinked iron rings. They called it “maille,” plain and simple, and if the troubadours were getting all poetic about these battles, they might refer to this maille as a “net.” Never “chain.” Why? Well, because it was a net.

Click here to read this article from Wired Magazine

Click here to read more articles on Medieval Warfare

In everything we say, there is an echo of 1066

It’s Sunday, and let us hope that you are about to have lunch. As you prepare to enjoy the roast beef, it may, possibly, occur to you that but for an event on this date, October 14, centuries ago, you might be about to eat the same joint but you wouldn’t be calling it beef. That event was the Battle of Hastings (aka Senlac Hill) in 1066, as a result of which William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, became William the Conqueror, King of England.

The English language is unusual in that we have different names for farm animals in the field or byre, and the flesh of these animals when they appear on the table. In Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, a Saxon peasant explains that the oxen, calves, swine and sheep are good Saxons tended by Saxons when alive, but turn into Norman-French when they are ready to be eaten as beef (or beeves), veal, pork and mutton.

So, if you were to begin by asking, in Monty Python style, “what have the Normans ever done for us?” you might first reply that the most enduring consequence of the Conquest is the richness of the English language, with its Anglo-Saxon base and Franco-Latin superstructure. This mixture gives us a huge vocabulary, and many words with essentially the same meaning, yet a different shade of emphasis: fatherly and paternal, for example.

Click here to read this article from The Telegraph

Rain cancels Battle of Hastings re-enactment

A re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings on what is believed to be the original battlefield has been cancelled because of torrential rain.

 English Heritage said for safety reasons the event could not go ahead because of unacceptable levels of mud on the battlefield and public areas.

 Sunday's re-enactment marked the 946th anniversary of the battle when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold.

 Hastings Borough Council said the cancellation was a disappointment. "It is understandable but it is a real shame because the organisers put a lot of time and money into organising and advertising it," said spokesman Kevin Boorman.

Click here to read this article from the BBC

English Civil war grave found in Northamptonshire village

Archaeologists believe they have discovered a site where soldiers were buried after the Battle of Naseby was fought in Northamptonshire.

 Experts from Cranfield University carried out a study of the battlefield at the end of last month. They believe they have found the spot where dozens of soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army were buried immediately after the battle was fought on June 14, 1645.

 Naseby expert, Martin Marix Evans, said: “It would be a guess at the moment, but I would imagine we’re probably looking at a site containing anywhere between 30 and 60 bodies.

 “And we hope this will be the start of a series of archaeological studies of parts of the battlefield which will reveal more of the events of 1645.”

Click here to read the full article from the Northampton Chronicle and Echo

Maurice Keen, historian (1933-2012)

Until the second world war, most British medieval historians avoided cultural history, remaining more concerned with the church, government or the law; institutions and politics. Except for the literate pious, what might have made medieval people tick was treated as self-evident, immaterial or unknowable. In the subsequent revolution of approaches, Maurice Keen, who has died aged 78, played a seminal role, even if his unshakable modesty would probably have denied it.

 His major book, Chivalry (1984), which won the Wolfson prize that year, remains one of the great works of history in English of the past 70 years, comparable with such landmarks as his old tutor Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages or Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity. After Chivalry, no one could look at Keen's subject, the knightly life, unaffected by his comprehensive and nuanced exposition of the nature and significance of the culture of those who ruled western Europe for half a millennium.

 Keen demonstrated that chivalry existed as a serious feature of medieval politics, religion, nobility and society, not an exotic distraction. Using a vast array of literary, visual, legal, academic and archival evidence, he dismantled the then prevalent view associated with the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga that chivalry was a decadent expression of the waning of the middle ages.

Click here to read this article from The Guardian

See also: The Telegraph's obituary of Maurice Keen

See also: Maurice H. Keen Dies at 78; Redefined Chivalry, from The New York Times

Descendants of Alexander the Great’s army fought in ancient China, historian finds

A recent article is examining the possibility that a contingent of soldiers from the Mediterranean fought at the Battle of Talas River in 36 BC, but instead of being Roman forces, new research suggests they may have been descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great.

 Christopher A. Matthew’s proposes this idea in his article, “Greek Hoplite in an Ancient Chinese Siege”, which appears in the latest issue of Journal of Asian History. It re-examines a theory put forward more than 70 years ago by Homer H. Dubs, in which the historian believed that Roman legionaries were serving as mercenaries in a city besieged by Han Chinese nearly 2,000 miles to the east of Roman territory. When the city fell, these men were captured and take east and eventually settled in a town on the fringes to the Han Empire.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Historian uncovers cases of ransoms paid to Vikings in the 11th century

How much were two women worth in 11th century Iberia? For the Vikings the price was a blanket of wolf skin, a sword, a shirt, three scarves, a cow and some salt.

This fascinating story is part of research done by Helio Pires from the New University of Lisbon. His article, “Money for Freedom: Ransom Paying to Vikings in Western Iberia”, appears in the latest issue of Viking and Medieval Scandinavia.

Pires’ article examines the taking of prisoners and collecting of ransoms by Vikings on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula. He was able to uncover two documents, dating from the first half of the 11th century, where people described the payments they made to Vikings to return family members.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Indigenous martial arts evolved in the west as well as the east

For most people, martial arts are inexplicably tied to the Far East. However, as special guest author John Clement of the Association For Renaissance Martial Arts details below, a sophisticated science of self-defense was prevalent in the west during Medieval and Renaissance times:

With the evolution of the armored knight as the consummate professional lone warrior, an indigenous art of personal combat developed to an exceptional degree in Western Europe. Once guarded as secret skills, from the early-1300s to mid-1600s these long forgotten chivalric fighting traditions were practiced as a highly effective and systematic “science of defence.”

Click here to read this article from A Blog about History

How did medieval Europeans deal with Greek debt? They sacked their capital city

Historians of the Fourth Crusade (1202-04) have been seeking explanations why the crusaders decided to sail to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople instead of Egypt. Some believe that the crusaders were tricked into doing it by the Doge of Venice or some other conspirator, while others argue that the decision to go to Constantinople was almost an accident, where unforeseen events led to the crusader army.

But Savvas Neocleous, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Medieval History, states ”the real reason for the diversion to Constantinople in 1203 by the Venetians and the crusaders, and for their subsequent attack on the imperial capital in 1204, was a simpler and, in their minds, increasingly pressing concern: the payment of outstanding debts.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

9 Most Important Medieval Assassinations

The mythos of the assassin fascinates even as it horrifies. It fascinates because it allows for the actions of one to bring down a corrupt or tyrannical regime that has no avenue of redress for those not in power. It horrifies because the sudden actions of one can threaten an entire nation--or in the case of World War I--the world's stability.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our political discourse and disagreement has never been more bitter and divisive. And while it is bad, there have been many periods in history that were equally--if not more--vitriolic and downright nasty. Take the Middle Ages, for one. Not only was it a politically raw and power hungry time, but the average citizen had very little say in matters of government.

Historian Barbara Tuchman suggests this might be attributed to the fact that the Middle Ages was a very young society, with over half the population under 21. Many of the leaders of medieval kingdoms and dynasties were on the tail end of adolescence--or younger. William, Duke of Normandy, later known as William the Conqueror of England, was only seven years old when he became duke. Charles VII of France was 19 when he was crowned king, and Louis I, became Duke of Orleans at the ripe old age of 20. All that power un-tempered by age or wisdom was a heady thing and ripe for abuse. Assassination was an oft-used tool in their arsenal.

Click here to read this article from the Huffington Post

Towton was our worst ever battle, so why have we forgotten this bloodbath in the snow?

Today, March 29th, should be a significant and melancholy date in the English calendar, known and marked by all schoolchildren. For on Palm Sunday, March 29th 1461, as church bells rang out across the land, two vast armies met on a bleak, snow-swept Yorkshire plateau near the village of Towton to fight what was to be our country's biggest, bloodiest and longest battle.

When it comes to superlatives, Towton has them all. Even England's other epochal, history-changing clashes, Hastings in 1066 and the Somme in 1916, for example, cannot challenge Towton for the butcher's bill of the slain. Hastings was a battle that changed the ethnic, political, and linguistic culture of the land forever, and lasted across an autumn day until dark. Yet neither the numbers that fought there (7/8,000 on each side) nor the casualties inflicted, approach anywhere near the later medieval battle. The first day on the Somme, July 1st 1916, when almost 20,000 died, is generally seen as Britain's greatest military disaster, cutting the flower of the nation down like summer corn. Yet Towton trumped even that bloody day in carnage and sheer savagery. As the Civil War battle of Antietam, America's bloodiest single day, is to the US, so Towton is to England. Why, then, is it not better remembered?

Click here to read this article from the Daily Mail

Mixed Martial Arts Celebrity Recruited for Ancient Roman Army

Millennia before modern-day military recruiters talked up potential soldiers in shopping malls or put up posters, one Roman city took a rather different approach to recruiting soldiers for the emperor's army.

A newly translated inscription, dating back about 1,800 years, reveals that Oinoanda, a Roman city in southwest Turkey, turned to a mixed martial art champion to recruit for the Roman army and bring the new soldiers to a city named Hierapolis, located hundreds of miles to the east, in Syria.

His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each other unconscious or into submission.

Flavillianus proved to be so successful as a military recruiter that it was decreed that he be made a "cult figure in the band of heroes" after he died, with each tribe of the city erecting statues in his honor. The inscription, written in Greek, was engraved on the base of a statue found in Oinoanda's agora (a central public space) and would have been erected by the people of the city. Discovered by a team in 2002, it wasn't until now that researchers translated and published it.

Click here to read this article from LiveScience

Sports scientists examine the medieval archers of the Mary Rose

A unique project about the historical warship the Mary Rose which is providing information about life in medieval times is benefitting from 21st century technology.

For the past 18 months the Mary Rose Trust has been working with sports scientists from the College of Engineering at Swansea University to discover more about the lives of the medieval archers on board the ship.

When Henry VIII’s warship, which sunk in 1545, was raised from the Solent in 1982, many thousands of medieval artefacts along with 92 fairly complete skeletons of the crew of the Mary Rose were recovered.

Nick Owen, Sport and Exercise Biomechanist from the College of Engineering at Swansea University said, “This sample of human remains offers a unique opportunity to study activity related changes in human skeletons. It is documented that there was a company of archers aboard when the ship sank, at a time when many archers came from Wales and the South West of England."

Click here to read this article from Early Modern England

Viking mass grave linked to elite killers of the medieval world

A crew of Viking mercenaries – some of the fiercest and most feared killers in the medieval world – could be the occupants of a mysterious mass grave in the south of England, according to a new theory.

The intriguing hypothesis is being put forward in a documentary, Viking Apocalypse, which will premiere on National Geographic UK on Wednesday, 25 January, and attempts to piece together the identities of a group of men who were apparently the victims of a horrific mass execution around the turn of the 11th century.

Their burial pit, at Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, was found in 2009 while archaeologists were working in the area ahead of the construction of a new road. In it, researchers made the gruesome discovery of the decapitated bodies of 54 young men. All had been dumped in the shallow grave, and their heads had been piled up on the far side.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net