Cool

as someone who watches both of you, I would certainly love to see you stab more stuff on your channel too! That or more colabs with Todd!

I'd love to see the same test with a Gladius. A weapon that spent most of it's time versus mail wearing opponents.

Hey ... do you have any insights on the handle orientation? I think several people here are reallky curious about that!

@@Hedgehobbit I suspect that it wouldn't be *as good as* the rondel, but a gladius appears to be a stabby stabby weapon more than a slashy slashy one. So I think it would probably still get the job done. I'm inclined to think the answer to Todd's question is that weapons during maile were effective enough that they didn't feel the need to design a dagger just for defeating it.

I'd love to see you involved in some of these types of films with the rest of the gang.

@@DRB3055 Rondel dagger from horseback, that will be something. It won't be practical, but it will be something.

@@fduisterwinkel oh people dove off horses with daggers all the time. It works very good.

@@fduisterwinkel Well you can say estoc blades are somewhat inspired by rondels and as far as I remember estocs were sometimes used by cavalry if their lances were lost.

Thanks Jason I know we keep trying to do something together and one day I am sure we can pull something off.

The time honored anti knife technique of running would be my first option against this I think.

@@MrPlainsflyer Just better hope you are faster than guy running after you with this. Would be awful feeling to realize he is getting closer, and closer as you run

@@lalli8152 You surely know that running with a sharp object is dangerous!

@@MrPlainsflyer unfortunately a lot of stab victims in the UK were running away when they were stabbed. Don't get me wrong, 'not being there' is the number 1 preference. But once the attack starts, very few victims are actually able to run away at all.

@@scholagladiatoria quite often people who try and run away are not already in motion whereas the attacker is so you need to have substantial amount of burst speed to pull away safely and overcome his initial advantage. The two times I have been stabbed I never saw it coming until I was hit and I got lucky they used tiny folding knives (one of the stabs was with a Swiss Army knife of a mere 3 inch total blade length for example). For me it was more a sudden agonising pain in lower abdomen and than going absolutely berserk with anything to hand to get them off me when they tried to stab again, I gotten lucky both times. If they had even an average sized kitchen knife that first stab would likely have put me out of action due to the surprise and much more damage that would have done and how much more difficult it would be to stop those knives than a small folding knife.

Two rings with an average stab got me 😂😂😂😂

He used to struggle against all the penetration, but now he seems to like it.

They haven´t tested the real way it was meant to be used, which was to knock down an armor clad knight to the ground, sitting on top of him, and putting the entire body weight on top of the rondel. It would go clean through, from side to side. I suspect a combination of a billhook and this dagger, would kill even the heaviest knight. Once the knight went down, he was dead.

@@Biden_is_demented well yeah, but this test shows that would obviously work since not even going full force penetrates metal and gambesons and maille super easy. Its just not as easy to set up a test like you said it would be used.

“Boards don't hit back”. Well, now we know why.

I love when he's like "I thought the mail would do better" but you can tell he's absolutely delighted.

"huh... that happened"

Good point - so lets test earlier blades

Yeah, I think a big factor could be that spears, polearms and lances may have done that job most of the time but with much greater reach. The need for a dagger to fill that role may not have been in demand until much later when plate armor came around.

I imagine spears would have played that piercing role much more. Swords are a lot less common

@@tods_workshop not blades, but spears

@@tods_workshop Yes please! And maybe spear? If the tip of a spear can penetrate mail with some force, it would be way better than a dagger, especially in formation.

Thanks

@@tods_workshop most excellent of collaborations

Better to have and not need than need and not have

There are flat bits of any breastplate though and the back plate is far more flat. Granted I don’t think it would go through against a struggling opponent which would cause more slipping. Just goes to show why in the age of mild steel/wrought iron armor plates why they still often wore mail and/or gambeson under the plate.

@@ShiningDarknes absolutely! The struggling opponent always makes a huge difference. And the sheer ease of being able to inflict a lethal blow, even through thin plate like that, amazing!

It’s mild steel and on the thinner end of what armor would be. (It’s close to the thickness of what you might have on your arms, where the diameter would be smaller, increasing the chance of glancing off.)

I have something else to mention. In both attempts the plate was braced. On the first go it was braced against the table, and on the second go it was braced against the door. A person wearing plate has nothing to brace them aside from bodyweight, which provides far less resistance than a table or a door/wall. A more authentic test would be to position the plate against a punching bag roughly equivalent to the weight of a human, and I guarantee that he wouldn't have been able to just push through it. The bag would just move backwards with the push before penetration is achieved. He might still be able to thrust through it but not nearly as deeply. Resistance is a huge factor.

@@jacobesterson very true.

Yeah, I think I would have felt safer if Todd had also been wearing armour for that bit! :O

Thank you, safety is an every day reminder. Complacency is what harms. We all know Tod is incredibly professional, but moments like these deserve criticism.

Noted. I felt the tip stick so it felt OK, but yes watching back perhaps it was not a great choice - apologies

@@tods_workshop You are a marvel of knowledge and practical aplications of medieval weaponry, i'm just happy if I can help you in any way, keep the good work.

It's the one thing I think professional filming has over the scrappy do-it-yourself backyard KZfaq productions: requirements for insurance and (thus) someone on set whose entire job is watching and thinking through the safety aspects of everything that happens on and off-camera. Well, that and gobs of money to throw at professional experts and assistants. Oh, and craft services -- can't forget that! :P But as a single (or very small team) content creator, you have to wear all the hats at once: concept, design, engineering, execution, performance, on-camera persona, scheduler, safety coordinator, director, cinematographer, editor, etc. It's easy for one or more of those things to slip a little, and you REALLY don't want it to be safety! I'm surprised we don't have more deaths or at least serious injuries; Kentucky Ballistics cones to mind.

@Tod, note the above for future testing equipment: a heavy canvas boxing heavy bag shouldn't be too difficult to acquire or run up on the machine, shirley? It could be used vs bowfire too..

Also, since you're opponent wasn't wearing plate either, you didn't need all the extra precision a dagger offers over a spear for example.

The only counterpoint would be the shorter blades of some peoples, yes while not as short as this it's a similar idea. I wonder if it wasn't chosen as when it does go through that you don't really have that large of a wound channel as compared to a "normal" blade which still worked well enough to get through maile.

I'd like to see how effective a Gladius was in similar circumstances. I suspect that they would penetrate mail just as easily.

@@NotThatGuyJD I think it's more likely that shorter blades = dedicated infantry weapon while longer blade = can be used on foot and while mounted without being at any significant disadvantage .

@pp oh absolutely but I was wondering if the "standard" blades of the day weren't already good enough to defeat the chain of the period in some instances and thus no need for a dedicated anti chain dagger. Even when you had groups who fought in very close ranges.

I Agree 100%. Probably the most effective weapon on the battlefield after watching this demonstration.

I would argue they are still for gaps (at least against plate armour) based on the armoured fighting techniques we see in treatises. All the wrestling, levering and looking for gaps is wasted effort if you can reliably stab through the plates.

Daggers are significantly less likely (if they even can) pierce armor that’s been shaped, hardened (through work hardening or quenching), and often times thicker than the steel tested here.

It's also worth noting that one's opponent is rarely going to simply lay still and flat to soak up a full-power stab at a clean angle. If you're close enough to stab with a dagger you're probably in a wrestling match and not at liberty to use all your strength to stab just any place you choose.

@@Robert399 True that. That shows that even if a dagger can reliably go through a flat thin plate, it would not go reliably through an actual armor - it could be curved, or it could be a bit thicker (and you couldn't just ask your foe "prithy, Sir Knight, is your armor under mm at its thickest point?"), or it could be hardened instead of "soft" steel (same oke here), or the rival could move a bit (and he would MOST DEFINITELY not collaborate standing still even if you asked nicely)... so instead of trusting an unreliable punching through plate, even if it could certainly be done, you would go for the gap that you KNEW would go through like hot knife through butter.

So true. What I love most in life!

Two friendly professors is exactly the vibe I got from this. Terrific video.

I was going to say some of this. I’m an Old Norse specialist, and part of the puzzle for Scandinavia favoring broader swords despite the presence of mail was the rarity due to cost. Mail is time consuming and expensive, and most people seem to have not possessed extensive armor. Especially if we look at Iceland for example, with their being a very small number of professional warriors around, armor is extremely rarely mentioned in the Sagas of Icelanders, and even seldom mentioned in sagas that take place in foreign lands. So my assumption is that their weapons were catered towards what they encountered most often: lightly armored opponents. Additionally, the mail of the Viking Age typically left the lower arms, neck, and especially the legs exposed, leaving a whole host of options for an attacker unprotected. And given that like you said, mail is flexible and offers virtually no protection against blunt force, mail did not render broader swords, axes, or even heavy leaf-shaped spears harmless given one puts their back into it.

@@ravenfeeder Adding to this, rondel daggers are really short weapons, so it makes sense we see them grow popular when knights get well enough armored to start doing a lot of grappling, as otherwise the other guy would likely just keep bashing you with the longer weapon from outside your reach.

@@the_mad_fool Also a good point, and important to remember that warriors of this time, like now, never carried a single weapon. Several sources note that medieval Scandinavian warriors carried a long knife, a sword, and a spear together, sometimes even an additional axe. This allowed them to address as you mentioned, the constantly changing range of combat, and the different types of challenges they would come across on campaign. Axes were particularly good for raiding, because if you try to break down a door or bust open a coffer with a sword, you would look pretty stupid very quickly.

All the above plus you stab a person standing and they will "give" with the blow. Indeed, even on top, people are "squishy" and will absorb some of the force. But I'm not volunteering to be a live test dummy!😱😱

This makes killing a knight seem allot easier now, that dagger is scary !

"you can just get on top of them and put your weight on the dagger" This is wrong. The steel in the video was poorly shaped, and relatively soft. Plate has curves and is much harder. You probably wouldn't ever try to push through someone's plate when they're on the ground, because it's still much easier to go for the gaps. Which means nothing has changed really. Far *far* more importantly, in terms of groundwork it's much easier to push someone out of mount if they're applying all of their bodyweight into one spot instead of spreading out. Granted, not every armoured knight is gonna be a BJJ blue belt, but that doesn't make it any less true. Being taken down and stabbed is plate armour's worst weakness so you're really incentivised to learn good groundwork. It's a good idea to at least get to the point where an untrained individual of a similar size stands basically no chance against you. Like for MMA, some degree of groundwork should be considered *essential* because most fights end up going to the ground at some point. Doubly so for people wearing plate, because taking you to the ground is the single easiest win condition.

@@jake4194 most knights (French) were killed by bobkin arrows

@@drew2364 Demostrably untrue. I know you are talking about Crecy and Agincourt (and likely coflating both battles, because 90% of the French knight deaths at Crecy were because British knights pounding on them with pole weapons, not by archery - the archery was a setup for the former), but most knights on the several centuries of medieval France weren't even alive at the time of those two battles.

kevlar is effective vs bullets... I don't think it actually does all that well against regular knives? I unfortunately don't have a proper source handy to back that up. could be wrong.

@@DraconianEmpath It doesn't. Any remotely sharp blade will still sever the fibers, so it's no better against knives than any other type of tough canvas. Kevlar is only really useful against small arms fire where the rounded projectile binds the fibers on impact and lessens penetration. Rifle rounds which are pointy and have much higher momentum will defeat it easily, which is why body armor still has metal plates in it.

Kevlar is useless for stopping anything really pointy, it will go through kevlar like butter.

​​@@luminusprime sappy plates aren't metal. I'm not sure of the material but it was some kind of composite. At least when I wore them over a decade ago. Edit: a quick Google search shows some body armors do use metal plates, so I was mistaken. Also the sapi (I misspelled earlier) plates are made of ceramics.

You potentially answered their question here of why the design was not seen in the age of mail. It was not something easily stumbled upon.

Yes I was surprised by how well it stood up

​@@dgmt1 it's not costume mail. It's real steel. It just isn't super high end. And it wasn't the joint that broke, the dagger cut through the ring.

I would also like to see tests with metallurgically accurate armor, but I am not sure that modern mild steel rivet mail with solid rings is going to be so much weaker than wrought iron. Mail made in period would inevitably have more impurities in the alloy then modern steels. I would be very interested if you had any scholarly articles which demonstrate that period accurate wrought iron mail is stronger than modern mail. Though even if it is stronger, based on these tests I think that the rondel could still pass through without too much trouble because Matt still had a lot of juice in the tank when he penetrated this mail and he could easily add a little more force to get through the period accurate mail if he needed to.

@@dgmt1 don't confuse commercial with reenactment. It was made of steel flat rings (probably mild steel), whole and riveted, and cut through both of them. Ofc actual chainmaille would be a bit more resistant, but this is still a useful analog

@@dgmt1 Its not that at all. Stop with the disinformation.

@@dgmt1 By all means feel free to send us more mail to stab. I am genuinely interested if there is mail that will perform notably better than this mail, but please note that this Indian mail is mild steel of the correct size and thickness, and every single stab *sheared* the steel. It didn't burst inferior rivets, or find places that there were missing rivets, it simply cut through solid steel every single time. And then stabbed to almost the same depth through 1.2mm steel sheet....

Yes I was actually thinking the same thing while filming this video - the fact that a few select armourers went to HUGE effort to create plate articulation in the gaps where mail would normally be should tell us something. Mail is great and has many advantages, but rondel daggers (and things like the spikes on pollaxes) were designed to do a specific job.

@@scholagladiatoria if I may ask Matt, based on your experience with the dagger, do you believe the Rondel would be able to get through those plates? The articulated plates in the armpit and elbow I mean.

@@andrelaboy2002 I honestly don't know - I think the whole outcome would be very different when the plates are curved and the 'target' is a moving fighting person. I don't think Tod or I are here to argue that stabbing through real armour in a real fight is ever going to be easy, but what we were surprised by was how deep we went through a 1.2mm steel sheet... we were not expecting that, so it changes the bar on our expectations of everything else.

A thoughtful KZfaq comment?

@@scholagladiatoria Wouldn't proper armor not be mild steel but hardened, though?

Possibly, though swords evolved to have very pointy ends (ala rondel daggers). The fighting style then became using a sword as , effectively, a wrestling bar and a dagger in one. So both swords and daggers end up killing in similar ways.

Good longbows, and then crossbows made armour pretty much useless.

@Wiz Rom This really isn't true. Ranged weapons did have a period of extreme dominance over personal armour, but it was much later. Even during the Napoleonics heavy cavalry still wore armour (infamously the French Curassiers).

@@wizrom3046 You might want to watch the videos on this channel about that...

Imagine trying to use a dagger in battle: "Excuse me, low born infantrymen with your long polearms, move aside and watch us knights grapple while you can have your formation battle with your peers. Don't you dare interfere and bash me over the head with that halberd while I role around on the ground trying to slip this thing into my opponent's armpit." So you've somehow lost your shield or your 2 handed polearm and are now grappling with a dagger while the enemy remains in formation. You have bigger priorities, like running back towards friendly lines to fetch a proper weapon. A short 1 handed weapon is not a "workhorse". It's a side arm of last resort.

Ooh missus!

Other daggers could have been fine at it? Spears, hammers, axes, swords etc give more range. Until plate made simple percussion less effective, the dagger as the tertiary weapon may not have had much thought.

Agreed, along with two other thoughts. With the quality of the metallurgy improving - when your thin rings start getting made of better, tougher steel your old daggers and sword shapes probably start to struggle rather more to get through sufficently, creating the requirement to change the weapon. There is also the usefulness as a tool - your leaf blade dagger can be used as needed around camp, around the dinner table, to skin and butcher as well as on the battlefield, the longer swords reasonably functional as a machete to clear brush - this very strong triangular spike profile is pretty much hopeless at anything but killing through armor - nobody wants to carry an extra 1Kg if they don't get anything for it, so while your more versatile blade forms are functional enough on the battle field there isn't a great need to change.

Thanks and I was also surprised by so much in this film, but partly the mass of the gauntlets

@@tods_workshop Absolutely. The mass contribution of the gauntlet and the energy transfer wasn't something I would have thought to account for. It makes sense in hindsight. I am wondering what would happen with the steel layered over the appropriate cloth padding and the pork? Would this mitigate enough energy transfer to avoid penetration?

Thanks - I was unaware of that

Yeah. It's because of shields and infantry formation tactics. A rondel dagger can get stuck in the shield, and the blade can be grabbed more easily than that of a gladius (infct there's a lot of blade-grabbing in Fiore's treaty). It's not nice to have your blade grabbed by a Legionary, while another cuts your arm.

The solution to armor during that period was simple to hit people where they're not armored. Full coverage wasn't really thing. And most combatants were unarmored anyway.

@@majungasaurusaaaa depends on the period, not sure which u r talking about

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pbSbf7pzudXbips.html

I think you may be overlooking the role of momentum here. 75J is one thing, but the difference between it being delivered by an 80g arrow vs a 6kg arm or indeed a whole torso of weight makes for a very different action

@@tods_workshop I'm curious to see how attending to momentum & other factors may enrich existing models for assessing & understanding armor. Neither The Knight and the Blast Furnace nor the drop tests for modern stab-resistant armor that Alan Williams followed use momentum as the relevant measure. Instead, they use kinetic energy. Stab vests have ratings in joules. Dropping a point with a weight behind it does differ in various ways from shooting an arrow or striking or pushing with knife/dagger. The advantage of focusing on KE is that is relatively easy to measure (especially for projectiles), but it may not tell the whole story.

@@tods_workshop the mention of momentum doesn't track in your's and B.H comments. Could you elaborate? When I think of momentum I'm thinking of mass with movement. That IS kinetic energy, E=mc^2 So 75J from an arrow is an arrow moving much faster than 75J from an arm. The difference would be that Energy per unit area would be a lot smaller for an arrow than a fist, when considering penetrative power. What am I missing? OP seems to simply be saying that other tests also found that mild steel could be penetrated with a knife. And that the better geometry of the rondel is making it even easier than in the referenced test. So your tests are consistent with other independent testing. That's a good thing.

@@erithanis A bit late but if you are still wandering, momentum is mass times velocity, so when you have a heavier object with the same mass of the ligher object it will have more momentum, it is more related to the amount of movement a body have. Basically, given that the same force is applied in two objects with different mass and same energy, you will need to apply this force for a longer time in the heavier object, so it`s harder in this sense to stop this object.

That was my thought, too. The rondel dagger may have had to wait for shields to become much less commonplace before its development could really take off.

@@khublaklonk4480 that is a good point and keeping mind shields were pretty big for the time period where mail was the main form of high end armour so you might have had trouble to reach around and stab an opponent with the dagger.

Maybe daggers were around and simply not documented, discovered or were reused for a long, long time.

did they use thin narrow spear blades like that rondel dagger? that thing on the end of spear shaft would be scary.

@@MusMasi Some angons have a similar edge geometry to some rondel daggers. And many of the late medieval polearms of course. But most of those narrow spearpoints I have seen are square in cross section unlike this dagger.

Still in the edit - about a month I think

Good question - my guess would be that the fabric and mail would still penetrate but the plate would glance off. Glancing off might still be deadly because you might slide sideways to a gap in the plate.

The mass of your armour, your body weight and a shit ton of adrenaline behind it all. Would go through easily.

After seeing this video I wouldn't be surprised if the dagger did pierce the breast plate but I don't think it would go very deep.

I don't think you'd get through a shaped breastplate made of the appropriate thickness and type of steel with a dagger. A lot of this is about whether or not the tip "grips" before it slips off. I'm certain that a bodkin from even a modestly powerful bow would go straight through this 1.2 mm mild steel... this is more representative of the thinner bits of armour on limbs or articulated to cover the groin or joints than it is the main plates.

@@chemistrykrang8065 Most breastplates in the late 14th through the 15th centuries were made out of wrought iron with a fairly high slag content. Their generally high slag, sulfur and phosphorus content made them mechanically more like cast iron. Modern medium carbon steel is superior to all but the very best steels that were used to make breastplates and other armours during the late medieval period. Only something like 5% of men in plate armour on the late medieval European battlefield would have had breastplates as good or better than the one Tod tested. If Tod's armourer had recreated the original breastplate his replica was patterned on perfectly, because of its unusually high carbon content and above average thickness, it still would have been better than ~85% of late medieval breastplates.

@@Marmocet It's definitely true that armour quality would be very variable, and I think it's reasonable to argue that the breastplate used in the archery tests by Tod represents the better end of that spectrum... but also that rich folks intending to go do stuff that would entail having arrows shot at them would probably be trying to get that quality and could afford it. Honestly I think the rondel dagger would probably struggle with 3 mm of curved (i.e. shaped like a breastplate) mild steel too to be honest. Hardness does definitely make a huge difference but given the relatively low mass and momentum of a dagger (vs a polearm etc) I think a bit of a curve and some extra thickness would help a lot.

​ @Chemistry Krang I should have added that what I said was based heavily on the survey and metalurgical analyses of medieval armour conducted by Alan Williams in _The Knight and the Blast Furnace._ Williams' work actually lets us put some figures on this subject. Based on Williams' work, we can estimate that the median (50th percentile) fracture toughness of late medieval armour was ~180 kJ/m^2. The fracture toughness of pure wrought iron (iron without slag or other impurities) is ~200 kJ/m^2, so the metal used to make half of late medieval armour wasn't even as tough as pure wrought iron. This is because medieval iron and steel typically contained large amounts of slag, sulfur and phosphorus. Pure wrought iron was tougher than ~63% of late medieval armour metal. Modern 1005 steel, the grade of steel with the lowest carbon content you can typically get today, has an average carbon content of 0.05%. Modern 1005 steel contains manganese, something that medieval iron and steel did not. Because of its manganese content, 1oo5 steel has an equivalent carbon percentage of 0.12%. Its average fracture toughness is ~220 kJ/m^2. It is tougher than ~74% of medieval armour. Modern 1020 steel, which is probably what Tod used in this test, has an average carbon equivalent of 0.28% and an average fracture toughness of 250 kJ/m^2, making it tougher than ~83% of medieval steel. The replica breastplate in Tod's "arrows versus armour" test was based on the Churburg 14 breastplate. The Churburg 14 breastplate's average carbon content is ~0.6%. Its slag content was not tested, but Italian armour of that period typically contained 1-2% slag, so the original breastplate's fracture toughness is probably 240-255 kJ/m^2, making it tougher than 80-85% of late medieval armour. At 2.5 mm at its thickest point, it was also ~14-19% thicker than the median breastplate of its period, so it would take ~75% more energy per unit area to pierce it than a late medieval median quality, median thickness breastplate of the same design. The original was not an average quality breastplate, as Tod's armourer suggested. In its day, that breastplate was close to top tier quality. The replica of the Churburg 14 breastplate Tod used was made of modern 1050 steel, which has an average carbon equivalent of 0.635% and an average fracture toughness of 320 kJ/m^2. That is tougher than ~94% of late medieval armour metal. Combined with the breastplate's above average thickness, it would take *~226% more energy per unit area* to pierce it than it would to pierce a breastplate of the same design of late medieval median quality and median thickness. It would be seriously in error to form your expectations about what would typically happen to armour when shot/stabbed/struck on the basis of Tod's test. A breastplate of the quality Tod tested would have been rare, not typical.

Our pleasure!

Thanks

Yes. We shouldn't take the mail tested here as representative of all historical mail. However, we have long known that historical manuals instruct stabbing at areas of a plate harness covered with mail gussets. So it's perfectly expected for a dagger designed for armored fighting to be able to defeat the sort of mail worn over the armpits.

@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 By all means yes, I am aware. I was referring to the discussion on why there wasn't many anti-mail daggers/swords in the age of mail - maybe the rarity and elite status of mail, as well as the construction of the rings on the majority of the body, possibly combined with how the martial arts systems worked at the time (as far as I know we know very little on how people fought at the time, but I assume there were systems which simply were not preserved in a manual, like in later periods) made the thrusts less reliable on a battlefield and civilian settings than the cuts? How relevant my observation may be is up for debate, but than again, that's why I've posted this here - to provoke a discussion, so thanks for the answer.

😅