This chapter is taken from the same book, "Western Warfare in The Age of The Crusades 1000 – 1300.", as the one concerning fortifications ect I posted earlier.
Pt/1
War, society and technology
Medieval metallurgy was advancing. Although primitive bloomery hearths, which could only produce a maximum of 40kg in a session, continued to be used, larger and more advanced furnaces, such as the Corsican and Catalan types, with powerful bellows could smelt up to 150 kg of iron in one process. The Stückhofen, which was developed in Germany at the end of our period, was 3–4m high and capable of producing up to 900kg in a single operation.
None of these furnaces could produce liquid iron except accidentally and under the most favourable conditions, when the subsequent cast iron seems to have been rejected as too brittle to use. They produced a soft malleable mass of iron, the bloom, which could be forged into wrought iron, or, at great trouble and expense, into steel.
By the end of the twelfth century there was substantial industrial production of iron in virtually all of the countries of western Europe. Larger furnaces put pressure on wood reserves and as a result coal was used from about 1190, although this was only to bulk out charcoal. Water-driven bellows were employed from the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth century hammer mills using water power are known. The scale of production could be considerable – the great iron forge-building at the Cistercian abbey of Fontenay in Burgundy is testimony to that. Trade in metal was vigorous, with Flanders, for example, importing iron from Spain.
The development of a flourishing iron industry all over Europe was a product of the great European expansion of the period 1000–1300, whose most obvious symptoms were the growth of populations and the flowering of cities. But the demand for arms must have been a powerful stimulant, for by the end of the thirteenth century there was large-scale weapons production in most European countries, with very notable centres in Italy, Flanders and Germany, especially in the Rhineland.
The scale of production could be very large: in 1172, the ironworkers of the Forest of Dean sent 100 axes, 1,000 picks, 2,000 shovels and 60,000 nails for Henry II’s expedition to Ireland, and 50,000 horseshoes were supplied for Richard I’s crusade. More particularly, the demand for weapons must have stimulated production of steel. Since Roman times there had always been an awareness of the superior qualities of steel, and medieval sources distinguish between the two metals.
Since there was no science of metallurgy, the production of weapons and other metal goods was a craft process that was dependent on the skills of the individual smith, whose experience taught him how to create iron with the right qualities. Even large-scale production of arms was essentially craft-based, and remained so through to the nineteenth century. Production methods for many weapons were probably pretty routine, but the production of steel involved great skill.
The sword, the finest of all weapons, was created by the pattern-welding of strips of iron, which produced a strong, flexible steel that could take an edge and stand up to the violent hammering on hard surfaces that characterized medieval warfare. Damascus and Toledo blades were much admired in the West, which for a long time did not have access to the Indian crucible steel from which they were forged. But the very high international reputation of German swords shows that even by the eleventh century European techniques were developing.
The hauberk was made of rings, some of which were punched out of carefully flattened steel; mostly, however, they were drawn from wire, shaped on a mandril and the ends holed for a rivet. Each ring was threaded with four others and the rivets inserted to build up the whole. It was a very slow process that required great patience, an impression well conveyed by a fifteenth-century illustration. Once it was assembled, the whole hauberk was annealed in the forge.
Plate armour only began to appear towards the end of the twelfth century and then it seems that small reinforcing pieces were fitted under the hauberk. It is unfortunate that we do not have any early pieces. It was only towards the later thirteenth century that plate armour proper emerged, and we can assume that this was the result of smiths gradually working out how to produce, at reasonable cost, good-quality steel which was light and designed to fit well, yet was strong enough to protect.
It is interesting that manuscript pictures of armourers nearly always include the making of helmets, and this presumably reflects the fact that the fabrication of any kind of large plate involved considerable skill. Sometimes the pointed helmet was made by hammering a single piece of metal: tenth-century examples are the “helmet of St Wenceslaus” in the treasury of Prague cathedral and a Kievan example in the Artillery Museum in St Petersburg. In the form called the Spangenhelm, fabrication was by welding together a series of shaped segments on a conical frame. The appearance of these helmets varies considerably in the Bayeux Tapestry, with some seeming to have horizontal or vertical bands and others not: however, this may relate to decoration rather than structure. In an age of artisan production, knowledge of techniques must have spread slowly and unevenly, for there was no real technical literature or tradition of teaching.
Although the level of skill involved in the the production of minor weapons – spear and arrowheads, for example – was limited, it still involved much time and labour, especially if specific shapes were needed with hardened cutting edges. There were varieties of arrowheads, with long narrow types being used for piercing mail.
The basic smelting of the iron was difficult and required careful judgement of times and temperatures, and the whole manufacturing process was a handcraft that was dependent on individual skill and knowledge. These were expensive processes: tools were commonly made largely of wood, and shod with iron only at the cutting edges. A spade of this kind appears in the twelfth-century manuscript illumination of the “Dream of Henry I” and in the Maciejowski Bible, and precisely similar tools dating from the nineteenth century can be found in the Beaune wine museum.
It is difficult to establish what costs were in the Middle Ages, not least because of regional variations. In tenth-century France, a mailed coat was valued at 60 sheep or six oxen. In early fourteenth-century England, the price was a sterling pound, the equivalent of about 20 sheep or two oxen, while at the same time in France it was three livres tournois. Although there were variations, on the basis of such figures it is possible to postulate a real fall in prices over the period under consideration. But demand for iron was clearly rising and the development of the industry was proceeding apace, even though it remained, broadly, a craft industry.
It was this huge expansion of production, rather than any pattern of innovation, that made possible more and more sophisticated weapons in the thirteenth century. In the early ninth century, Charlemagne demanded that each pair of freemen summoned to the host should bring between them a lance, a shield and a bow with two strings and twelve arrows. This would have involved a very minimal amount of iron. By contrast, vassals were expected to come well armed with a mail shirt and provided with horses.
By 1181, iron weapons were evidently more common, because Henry II of England promulgated an Assize of Arms in 1181 requiring all those who possessed £100 Angevin to provide themselves with a horse and full knightly equipment, while those with £20–40 should have a hauberk, iron cap, lance and sword, and even those of lesser status were to have a quilted coat, iron cap and sword, or bow and arrows. The Assize for England commanded that the burgesses and the “whole body of freemen” should have a padded surcoat, an iron cap and a lance, while knights were required to provide themselves with a hauberk, iron helmet, shield, lance and horse.
By the time of Edward I’s Assize of Winchester in 1285, the regulations demand even more metal weapons. Those with land to the value of £15 and with 40 marks per year must have a full hauberk, helm, sword, knife and horse: lesser men with land worth £10 and incomes of 20 marks can make do with a short-sleeved hauberk, but must have helmet, sword and knife. The 100 shilling freeholder must provide a padded surcoat, iron cap, sword and knife, and a sword is expected even of a 40 shilling freeholder, along with a knife, bow and arrows. Even the 20 shilling man must produce a spear, scythe and knife, and only the poorest are limited to bows and arrows.
Communal charters in the Low Countries tell the same story. In 1244, the better-off amongst the Luxembourg bourgeoisie were expected to serve their lord armoured and on horseback, while at Mortagne in 1251 and at Bruges at about the same time they were required to produce a sword and elaborate equipment. The less well-off in these city ordinances were footsoldiers with a padded surcoat, iron cap and lance.
By the end of the thirteenth century in Flanders, weapons were much more common than ever before and the widespread circulation of the short-sword, which was of Italian origin, is particularly indicative of this. In the Italian cities the communes required men to serve well armed either as infantry or, in the case of the wealthy, as cavalry, and laid down minimum specifications. By the mid-thirteenth century, Florence was divided into six quarters (Sesto), each of which was responsible for a proportion of the specialized troops required, from heavily armoured cavalry through crossbowmen to Pavesarii (shield-bearers) and sappers.
Such provisions were commonplace in the cities of Italy. And this new availability of iron, which gave western Europeans a huge advantage over the peoples on their periphery, was a result of the general development of the European economy, which had great influence on the conduct of war.
