8 ms·

The curious case of the weapon that didn't exist

87 points by hendler 10y ago

Gravityloss 10y ago
You could also test if it works in the various historical battle groups, instead of speculating? For example, if the opponent is carrying a large shield or is lightly armored on the back, the flail could be used in a wrap around hit. Maybe it already has been done.
- mhd 10y ago
  It's way easier to disprove something with the reenactment approach than to prove it. A lot of things could have worked (the Greeks inventing gun powder or actually using glue for their linothorax), but that doesn't bring them in existence retroactively. Although in this case I'd probably go with the "it just was very rare" crowd. We've got all kinds of weird weaponry: three section staves, dueling shields, executioner swords, hunga mungas, mancatchers... People tried and still try a lot to kill other people, but in the end it comes down to the basics most often (like swords, spears and open office plans). At least we'll always have enough evidence for all three squazillion variants of polearms.
saiya-jin 10y ago
what a hyperbole. he picks pics of few flails made for hanging on the wall (like many swords were made, some of them as pure decorations and would break in real fight) and hence all in the world are probably fake. I've visited countless museums/castles in western, central and eastern europe, most of them if not all had some flails shown. no decorations on them, just varied length of spikes and size of the head ball. chains looked rigid enough to last many battles, probably much longer than bearer would survive. somewhere I read that flail was very hard to block if used by skilled warrior - the chain would go around any blades, axes and shields and just hit the body. of course in unskilled hands, I can imagine it can easily harm/kill the bearer, compared to say a plain good old sword.
- vacri 10y ago
  The bit that got me was the first bit of evidence the article provides. "This would be a bad weapon of war because [I can't imagine it being good]". I've seen a few modern people say that X would have not been used in the past 'because it's not tenable', despite X actually known to have being used in the past. Quite often it's amateur military historians making this claim. A common variant of this 'imagination' error is most of the esoteric stuff that is attributed to the katana, for example. Finding few mentions in the literature or the examples you can examine being decorative rather than functional are better arguments (though not necessarily definitive, as you say).
- Jetrel 10y ago
  Rather than reading about it, I've experienced this firsthand in martial arts, and you're dead right - the purpose is to "lariat" around any obstructions in front of the victim. They can hold up a shield, or a sword, and it won't help them when used in the normal way - it'll either loop around the side and smash their face, or more likely, wrench the sword/shield out of their hands - either one gets the job done - and it can be done to multiple people at once. The biggest point to the flail was to be a 'focused impact' weapon, and to have much more heft than a person could manage with a mace. The primary weapon used against people in plate armor was impact weapons like this - especially with sharp studs on them, because - believe it or not, armor actually worked. Swords couldn't cut through armor, and it was really hard to get around armor - nobody went after a knight by hoping to slide a blade through joints in the armor (as has been depicted in various films), because it's nearly impossible to do - nobody's going to stand still and just let you do it, and even if they did, it's surprisingly hard to control a sword like that (to illustrate this, try flipping a light switch with the far end of a broom handle - that's a still, unmoving target, and you might find it takes a rather surprising amount of manual control). If you wanted to take out a dismounted knight, you went after one by punching a hole in his armor (or by hitting the armor with so much heft that it dents; either one works). Swords aren't an option, and until the late period crossbows/arbalests, very few arrows had the stopping power to punch through it (english longbows being a noted exception). The best bet was a spike - basically a large chisel on a stick. It needs to have a lot of momentum to have a hope of punching through - unfortunately this usually means it has to be extremely heavy. This usually results in a really unwieldy thing with the heft of a sledgehammer, that's so slow you can't fight well with it and are liable to be unable to dodge/block someone striking you with something much faster. A moving weight on a chain solves the momentum problem by moving in a circle - it gives much more momentum than you could get in a single swing, since you can accelerate over a few rotations and continue to swing the weapon. It also is an inherently scary-looking thing, and has a powerful "crowd control" effect in a melee - the big point of a commander fielding something like this is to break up enemy cohesion/formations. A guy swinging a flail around repels people like oil and water. A few of these who bum rush a shield line (along with a general charge of their fellow fighters) are - more often than not, going to make a hole in the shield line not from actually hitting anybody, but from regular humans just getting the hell out of the way. Break up the enemy line, and they lose all of the strengths of being in formation. This is what "shock troops" are. The flail is very similar to a number of asian designs (some of which are fairly mundane western-looking things, and others which are pretty exotic like the meteor-hammer/monkey's paw). It's absolutely daft to dismiss a design like this, where not only do all of the parts of its shape serve a very direct, functional purpose, but also which has managed to "independently evolve" on multiple continents because it's just the only reasonable solution to dealing with armored shield-bearers. It's crazy.
dkbrk 10y ago
This is examined in some detail by the Youtube creator "Lindybeige". He talks about: the name of the weapon; how the weapon may have worked; the veracity of the historical evidence for its existence; and its effectiveness, based on historical evidence, speculation and live action role-playing experience. In particular, from his communications with the Metropolitan Museum it appears the examples in their collection are likely forgeries from a later era. His general conclusion is that it may have existed, but if it did it wasn't very popular and almost certainly not very good. Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-y6oirEsZA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-y6oirEsZA Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzE8YMkC5s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzE8YMkC5s
- logicallee 10y ago
  I'm sorry, I glanced through the write-up and I just don't buy it. Who's going to forge a flail? This just screams "No true scotsman" to me. Give an example of a flail and, well, it's not a TRUE flail because... The paintings of flails aren't TRUE flails because... The example of a physical flail isn't a TRUE flail because... The last time I saw someone actually minutely go through all the evidence and point by point address why it must be dismissed, it was in a flat-Earth video. Seriously. "Where's there's smoke, there's fire" exists because if you can show flails all over the historical record then there were probably flails. Look at this quote from the article: >“But wait,” you may ask, “what about those flails at the Met that you just mentioned?” This is where the story gets interesting. My working hypothesis is that all the flails at the Met, and those in similar collections occasionally found elsewhere in the world, are, as Warner asserted so bluntly, fakes. Well, actually this makes it really easy to be a flat-Earth apologist. "What about the NASA missions, people going to orbit and seeing the Earth? Faked, forgeries. Done in a studio. People have been painting for millennia, it's just that now it's digital. What about the fact that you can talk to someone in China or Australia and ask them about where the sun is? They're lying or simply mistaken. How can they be mistaken about whether it's day or night? Concussion, dementia, practical joke, etc. Point is it's fake. Okay what about the fact that ships disappear hull-first as they recede into the distance? Optical illusion or a trick of the eye. Not real. Okay, what about satellites, GPS? Fake, a forgery. It's easy to come up with a fake system, you could do it on your own computer, you could model a fake "planet" that is a sphere a hundred times the size of earth and make a fake "GPS" system that reports fake values. But why would anyone do that? I don't know, why would anybody fake a flail." -- EDIT: I don't know why you guys are downvoting me. When authors write provocative pieces purporting that something never existed at all, they're almost always wrong. Example: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teeth http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teet... [Here's Mitchell later on: "In 1964 Mitchell published the second of two profiles of Gould for The New Yorker, later collected in the 1965 book Joe Gould's Secret. Mitchell asserted that the Oral History never existed. Upon the publication of Mitchell's "Joe Gould’s Secret," in September, 1964, people began to write to him and send him notebook copies of the Oral History. "I wish I had had this information when I wrote the second Profile," Mitchell told people who wrote to him, "and if I ever write another article about Joe Gould, which I may do, I’d like very much to have a talk with you.""] Please see my reply below for where our author uses the same very extreme viewpoint.
sklogic 10y ago
I always thought that flails were designed for disarming.
Isamu 10y ago
What happened to the term "morning star"? I thought the term "flail" was used for threshing flails, a peasant weapon along with scythes, sickles, etc. That the spiked ball and chain was not a particularly good weapon, I'll grant, and it represents a dead end. It just looks fierce, it always did. But don't conflate that with "didn't exist".
- mhd 10y ago
  In common parlance, "morning star" can mean both flail and (spiked) mace, so it doesn't seem to be used as often these days (just like "longsword"). And dead end? How dare you! You can always put on more chains. Until you end up with a cat-o-nine-balls.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Strictly speaking, a morning star is a mace or club with many radiating spikes. Applying the term to spiked flails is a modern permutation.
sandworm101 10y ago
The OP makes no effort to address the class distinctions among weaponry. Crushing weapons, heavy things either with or without chains/rope, were far easier to make than cutting things. A stick, a bit of rope, and a lump of iron. That's far easier for a village smith than a forged sword. So perhaps the reason we see so few is that they weren't carried by the history writers. And, i suspect, such a literally flexible device is far more likely to survive that first impact without shattering than even a weighted club. Note the LOTR clip where it was used as a left-hand weapon, essentially a shield. It doesn't need to do any actual damage. It's all about keeping your opponent at a distance and their eyes off of you. A lump of iron flailing around almost uncontrollably does exactly that.
failrate 10y ago
The author complains that the chain would tangle with swords. In my mind, that would be exactly the point. I know it's not a historically accurate film, but The Messenger shows how a soldier could use one flail to snare his opponent's weapon and another to kill the opponent with a strike to the head.
mcguire 10y ago
This kind of thing is hardly unknown, particularly when discussing out-of-date weaponry. A more recent example is cap-and-ball revolvers; the early designs from Colt lacked a top-strap on the frame, making the frame weaker. (Seriously; it at least some models, the only thing attaching the barrel and the front of the frame to the grip, back, and bottom of the frame is the wedge through the cylinder pin.) The claimed advantage of this design is that it makes removing and replacing the cylinder easier and a user could reload by removing the spent cylinder and replacing it with a previously-loaded cylinder. There are plenty of reasons why this seems unlikely in reality. It's faster than reloading a cylinder, but it's still not all that fast. On some models, at least, removing the cylinder requires hammering out the wedge from the frame and cylinder pin---something you don't want loose while firing. Dropping any of the parts would be a bad idea. But the major unfortunate problem with the theory is that there is no record of Colt manufacturing large numbers of spare cylinders. Nor, during the American Civil War, are there any records of the United States government ordering any large numbers of spare cylinders. This isn't to claim that no one ever did it. That would be ridiculous; someone would certainly have thought about the idea anyway. But there's no evidence that anyone was ever trained to do it, or that large numbers of anyones ever had the materials necessary.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  Perhaps the faster-loading of extra cylinders was just marketing, something the salesman would say. You buy the gun thinking that one day you might improve on the purchase by getting second cylinder, but it never happens once you realize the issues. I'm thinking of those BMWs that were once "wired for a CD changer" mounted in the trunk, but nobody who bought a car without the changer ever installed one later.
StanislavPetrov 10y ago
Another article formed on a completely baseless assumption. >as a weapon of war, the flail is not a good design. The fact that its not a good design does not mean that it didn't exist. The world is filled with things that actually exist, today, that are terribly designed. A careful study of history will likely turn up more things that are terribly designed then things that are well designed. Its amazing anyone would contend, "it couldn't have existed, because it was a bad design". Just what society did this author grow up in?
zipwitch 10y ago
While it doesn't speak to the weapon's historical existence, fantasy author an Society for Creative Anachronism founder Paul Edwin Zimmer wrote at length about a 'war flail' consisting of a wooden handle attached by a very short chain to a long, triangular metal bar that was used as the striking portion of the weapon. I can easily picture how a 3' metal bar, spun as fast as a strong and practiced man could move it would be intimidating and deadly, shattering swords and shields, and chopping through any possible armor with ease.

87 points by hendler 10y ago

You could also test if it works in the various historical battle groups, instead of speculating? For example, if the opponent is carrying a large shield or is lightly armored on the back, the flail could be used in a wrap around hit. Maybe it already has been done.

mhd 10y ago
It's way easier to disprove something with the reenactment approach than to prove it. A lot of things could have worked (the Greeks inventing gun powder or actually using glue for their linothorax), but that doesn't bring them in existence retroactively. Although in this case I'd probably go with the "it just was very rare" crowd. We've got all kinds of weird weaponry: three section staves, dueling shields, executioner swords, hunga mungas, mancatchers... People tried and still try a lot to kill other people, but in the end it comes down to the basics most often (like swords, spears and open office plans). At least we'll always have enough evidence for all three squazillion variants of polearms.

saiya-jin 10y ago

what a hyperbole. he picks pics of few flails made for hanging on the wall (like many swords were made, some of them as pure decorations and would break in real fight) and hence all in the world are probably fake. I've visited countless museums/castles in western, central and eastern europe, most of them if not all had some flails shown. no decorations on them, just varied length of spikes and size of the head ball. chains looked rigid enough to last many battles, probably much longer than bearer would survive. somewhere I read that flail was very hard to block if used by skilled warrior - the chain would go around any blades, axes and shields and just hit the body. of course in unskilled hands, I can imagine it can easily harm/kill the bearer, compared to say a plain good old sword.

vacri 10y ago
The bit that got me was the first bit of evidence the article provides. "This would be a bad weapon of war because [I can't imagine it being good]". I've seen a few modern people say that X would have not been used in the past 'because it's not tenable', despite X actually known to have being used in the past. Quite often it's amateur military historians making this claim. A common variant of this 'imagination' error is most of the esoteric stuff that is attributed to the katana, for example. Finding few mentions in the literature or the examples you can examine being decorative rather than functional are better arguments (though not necessarily definitive, as you say).
Jetrel 10y ago
Rather than reading about it, I've experienced this firsthand in martial arts, and you're dead right - the purpose is to "lariat" around any obstructions in front of the victim. They can hold up a shield, or a sword, and it won't help them when used in the normal way - it'll either loop around the side and smash their face, or more likely, wrench the sword/shield out of their hands - either one gets the job done - and it can be done to multiple people at once. The biggest point to the flail was to be a 'focused impact' weapon, and to have much more heft than a person could manage with a mace. The primary weapon used against people in plate armor was impact weapons like this - especially with sharp studs on them, because - believe it or not, armor actually worked. Swords couldn't cut through armor, and it was really hard to get around armor - nobody went after a knight by hoping to slide a blade through joints in the armor (as has been depicted in various films), because it's nearly impossible to do - nobody's going to stand still and just let you do it, and even if they did, it's surprisingly hard to control a sword like that (to illustrate this, try flipping a light switch with the far end of a broom handle - that's a still, unmoving target, and you might find it takes a rather surprising amount of manual control). If you wanted to take out a dismounted knight, you went after one by punching a hole in his armor (or by hitting the armor with so much heft that it dents; either one works). Swords aren't an option, and until the late period crossbows/arbalests, very few arrows had the stopping power to punch through it (english longbows being a noted exception). The best bet was a spike - basically a large chisel on a stick. It needs to have a lot of momentum to have a hope of punching through - unfortunately this usually means it has to be extremely heavy. This usually results in a really unwieldy thing with the heft of a sledgehammer, that's so slow you can't fight well with it and are liable to be unable to dodge/block someone striking you with something much faster. A moving weight on a chain solves the momentum problem by moving in a circle - it gives much more momentum than you could get in a single swing, since you can accelerate over a few rotations and continue to swing the weapon. It also is an inherently scary-looking thing, and has a powerful "crowd control" effect in a melee - the big point of a commander fielding something like this is to break up enemy cohesion/formations. A guy swinging a flail around repels people like oil and water. A few of these who bum rush a shield line (along with a general charge of their fellow fighters) are - more often than not, going to make a hole in the shield line not from actually hitting anybody, but from regular humans just getting the hell out of the way. Break up the enemy line, and they lose all of the strengths of being in formation. This is what "shock troops" are. The flail is very similar to a number of asian designs (some of which are fairly mundane western-looking things, and others which are pretty exotic like the meteor-hammer/monkey's paw). It's absolutely daft to dismiss a design like this, where not only do all of the parts of its shape serve a very direct, functional purpose, but also which has managed to "independently evolve" on multiple continents because it's just the only reasonable solution to dealing with armored shield-bearers. It's crazy.

dkbrk 10y ago

This is examined in some detail by the Youtube creator "Lindybeige". He talks about: the name of the weapon; how the weapon may have worked; the veracity of the historical evidence for its existence; and its effectiveness, based on historical evidence, speculation and live action role-playing experience. In particular, from his communications with the Metropolitan Museum it appears the examples in their collection are likely forgeries from a later era. His general conclusion is that it may have existed, but if it did it wasn't very popular and almost certainly not very good. Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-y6oirEsZA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-y6oirEsZA Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzE8YMkC5s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzE8YMkC5s

logicallee 10y ago
I'm sorry, I glanced through the write-up and I just don't buy it. Who's going to forge a flail? This just screams "No true scotsman" to me. Give an example of a flail and, well, it's not a TRUE flail because... The paintings of flails aren't TRUE flails because... The example of a physical flail isn't a TRUE flail because... The last time I saw someone actually minutely go through all the evidence and point by point address why it must be dismissed, it was in a flat-Earth video. Seriously. "Where's there's smoke, there's fire" exists because if you can show flails all over the historical record then there were probably flails. Look at this quote from the article: >“But wait,” you may ask, “what about those flails at the Met that you just mentioned?” This is where the story gets interesting. My working hypothesis is that all the flails at the Met, and those in similar collections occasionally found elsewhere in the world, are, as Warner asserted so bluntly, fakes. Well, actually this makes it really easy to be a flat-Earth apologist. "What about the NASA missions, people going to orbit and seeing the Earth? Faked, forgeries. Done in a studio. People have been painting for millennia, it's just that now it's digital. What about the fact that you can talk to someone in China or Australia and ask them about where the sun is? They're lying or simply mistaken. How can they be mistaken about whether it's day or night? Concussion, dementia, practical joke, etc. Point is it's fake. Okay what about the fact that ships disappear hull-first as they recede into the distance? Optical illusion or a trick of the eye. Not real. Okay, what about satellites, GPS? Fake, a forgery. It's easy to come up with a fake system, you could do it on your own computer, you could model a fake "planet" that is a sphere a hundred times the size of earth and make a fake "GPS" system that reports fake values. But why would anyone do that? I don't know, why would anybody fake a flail." -- EDIT: I don't know why you guys are downvoting me. When authors write provocative pieces purporting that something never existed at all, they're almost always wrong. Example: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teeth http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/joe-goulds-teet... [Here's Mitchell later on: "In 1964 Mitchell published the second of two profiles of Gould for The New Yorker, later collected in the 1965 book Joe Gould's Secret. Mitchell asserted that the Oral History never existed. Upon the publication of Mitchell's "Joe Gould’s Secret," in September, 1964, people began to write to him and send him notebook copies of the Oral History. "I wish I had had this information when I wrote the second Profile," Mitchell told people who wrote to him, "and if I ever write another article about Joe Gould, which I may do, I’d like very much to have a talk with you.""] Please see my reply below for where our author uses the same very extreme viewpoint.

sklogic 10y ago

I always thought that flails were designed for disarming.

Isamu 10y ago

What happened to the term "morning star"? I thought the term "flail" was used for threshing flails, a peasant weapon along with scythes, sickles, etc. That the spiked ball and chain was not a particularly good weapon, I'll grant, and it represents a dead end. It just looks fierce, it always did. But don't conflate that with "didn't exist".

mhd 10y ago
In common parlance, "morning star" can mean both flail and (spiked) mace, so it doesn't seem to be used as often these days (just like "longsword"). And dead end? How dare you! You can always put on more chains. Until you end up with a cat-o-nine-balls.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Strictly speaking, a morning star is a mace or club with many radiating spikes. Applying the term to spiked flails is a modern permutation.

sandworm101 10y ago

The OP makes no effort to address the class distinctions among weaponry. Crushing weapons, heavy things either with or without chains/rope, were far easier to make than cutting things. A stick, a bit of rope, and a lump of iron. That's far easier for a village smith than a forged sword. So perhaps the reason we see so few is that they weren't carried by the history writers. And, i suspect, such a literally flexible device is far more likely to survive that first impact without shattering than even a weighted club. Note the LOTR clip where it was used as a left-hand weapon, essentially a shield. It doesn't need to do any actual damage. It's all about keeping your opponent at a distance and their eyes off of you. A lump of iron flailing around almost uncontrollably does exactly that.

failrate 10y ago

The author complains that the chain would tangle with swords. In my mind, that would be exactly the point. I know it's not a historically accurate film, but The Messenger shows how a soldier could use one flail to snare his opponent's weapon and another to kill the opponent with a strike to the head.

mcguire 10y ago

This kind of thing is hardly unknown, particularly when discussing out-of-date weaponry. A more recent example is cap-and-ball revolvers; the early designs from Colt lacked a top-strap on the frame, making the frame weaker. (Seriously; it at least some models, the only thing attaching the barrel and the front of the frame to the grip, back, and bottom of the frame is the wedge through the cylinder pin.) The claimed advantage of this design is that it makes removing and replacing the cylinder easier and a user could reload by removing the spent cylinder and replacing it with a previously-loaded cylinder. There are plenty of reasons why this seems unlikely in reality. It's faster than reloading a cylinder, but it's still not all that fast. On some models, at least, removing the cylinder requires hammering out the wedge from the frame and cylinder pin---something you don't want loose while firing. Dropping any of the parts would be a bad idea. But the major unfortunate problem with the theory is that there is no record of Colt manufacturing large numbers of spare cylinders. Nor, during the American Civil War, are there any records of the United States government ordering any large numbers of spare cylinders. This isn't to claim that no one ever did it. That would be ridiculous; someone would certainly have thought about the idea anyway. But there's no evidence that anyone was ever trained to do it, or that large numbers of anyones ever had the materials necessary.

sandworm101 10y ago
Perhaps the faster-loading of extra cylinders was just marketing, something the salesman would say. You buy the gun thinking that one day you might improve on the purchase by getting second cylinder, but it never happens once you realize the issues. I'm thinking of those BMWs that were once "wired for a CD changer" mounted in the trunk, but nobody who bought a car without the changer ever installed one later.

StanislavPetrov 10y ago

Another article formed on a completely baseless assumption. >as a weapon of war, the flail is not a good design. The fact that its not a good design does not mean that it didn't exist. The world is filled with things that actually exist, today, that are terribly designed. A careful study of history will likely turn up more things that are terribly designed then things that are well designed. Its amazing anyone would contend, "it couldn't have existed, because it was a bad design". Just what society did this author grow up in?

zipwitch 10y ago

While it doesn't speak to the weapon's historical existence, fantasy author an Society for Creative Anachronism founder Paul Edwin Zimmer wrote at length about a 'war flail' consisting of a wooden handle attached by a very short chain to a long, triangular metal bar that was used as the striking portion of the weapon. I can easily picture how a 3' metal bar, spun as fast as a strong and practiced man could move it would be intimidating and deadly, shattering swords and shields, and chopping through any possible armor with ease.