Medieval weapons master rates 11 weapons and armor scenes from movies and TV

• Tobias Capwell is the curator of arms and armor at The Wallace Collection in London. Here, he reacts to 11 memorable scenes featuring medieval weapons and armor and rates them based on their historical accuracy.
• Capwell looks at armor and weapons within fantasy franchises, such as Sauron's armor in the battle of Orodruin in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001).
• He addresses how helmets in "The Mandalorian" (2019) are influenced by Greek and Corinthian styles. And he rates how realistic shields and swords are in "Vikings" (2014) and "The Last Kingdom" (2015).

Below is a transcription of the video.

- [helmet clanging]

[knight groaning]

[armor clanging on ground]

Toby Capwell: Poor old R-Patz looks like a pile of garbage, I'm afraid.

Hi, I'm Toby Capwell. I'm curator of arms and armor at The Wallace Collection in Central London, but I'm also a practitioner. Since I was a kid, I've been riding horses and fighting in armor. I've taken part in competitions, armored combat all over the world. And today we're going to be looking at the treatment of medieval arms and armor in cinema.

"The Mandalorian" (2019-)

[punching]

[laser gunfire]

[armor clanging]

Oh, stop! Stop. Did you see that? He just got shot in the armor, and it knocked him, but it didn't stop him. And in a complete armor, a medieval knight can suffer horrendous physical punishment that would kill an unarmored person [snaps] like that, but you can take the hits. And in armored combat, there are times when you decide to let your opponent hit you because you know you can take it and you're gonna do something else. You're not gonna waste time defending what doesn't need to be defended. And the armor in this clip takes on, again, narrative significance. It's storytelling. He can take a shot right in the chest, so that's a pretty big character point, wouldn't you think? He's not clunking around, all cumbersome. He moves like a real knight. I've been jousting and fighting in armor for 30 years. I've built a lot of different kinds of armor, working with different craftsmen all over the world. Real armor of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, is like a steel skin. It's not bulky. It's your shape. The armor should fit you like a skin. It should follow your musculature. It doesn't have to be a lot of space under there. It's fitted. It moves with you. The plates are hardened and tempered medium-carbon steel, so they don't have to be thick and chunky. They need to glide over each other and move like you move.

Mando: Tell me where the Mandalorians are, and I'll walk out of here without killing you.

Toby: He hardly ever takes his helmet off, and yet you know everything about his expression, his feelings, his character. Historically, a knight has a very close, personal relationship with his armor. The armor is responsible for his safety, but he's also the guy who's gonna mold your character. That's never really been explored until this.

Stormtrooper: I said, where are they?

Toby: It's got a couple of possible sources of inspiration. On the one hand, it looks a lot like an ancient Greek hoplite's helmet, the ancient Greek heavy infantry of, like, 500 BC or of thereabouts. These very distinct spectacled helmets with these eye cutouts, they have a nasal for the nose and then the cheeks brought in. In the Bronze Age, they're trying, again, to get as much protection for the face and the head as they possibly can. So that's where that really closely set kind of spectacled profile comes from. That was then imitated in the Renaissance. In the 15th century in Italy, and very rapidly everywhere else, people became fascinated with the classical world again, and they started looking back to the ancient Greek and Roman precedent. And this style of helmet became fashionable again in Italy and Venice, in the Venetian empire, specifically. In the 15th century, most used by infantry, shooting crossbows and firearms and... more lightly armored troops. And in the ancient Greek period, they were the heavy infantry, but they still had shields to hide behind, and they're actively protecting their faces as well as relying on their armor. I'd give this a 10, absolutely.

Rating: 10/10

"Vikings" (2014)

[knight grunting] "Vikings" is a fantasy. You should really treat it as a fantasy. There's a lot of things to like about this show. And that makes it almost the more tragic for me, because those Anglo-Saxons are all wearing late-16th-century helmets. The burgonets, with the high comb and the peak. They are 800 years wrong.

[armor clanging]

[man screaming in pain]

The leather biker gear. There is almost no historical evidence for leather clothing. Almost across the board, people in the past did not make clothes out of leather. It's a distinctly modern thing.

[horse neighing]

[man shouting]

The ax is fine. I don't have a problem with the ax. I do have a problem with none of the main characters wearing helmets. You can't go anywhere near a battle like this without a helmet. So, I mean, someone like Ragnar Lodbrok or someone of that stature would have an amazing mail coat. He'd have jewelry. He'd have big, thick, gold stuff on him. He'd have a gilded sword. He does not have to look like a pile of leather crap. I'm gonna give it a three.

Rating: 3/10

"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)

[dramatic music]

[armor clanging]

That is metal. Nothing else looks like metal but metal in close-up. All that decoration is etched into the steel with acid. This is film armor as good as it gets.

[weapons clanging]

[dramatic music]

Now, there are lots of great spraying techniques, and you can spray plastic to look reflective. And increasingly it looks more and more like metal, but it doesn't behave like metal. Their armor, you can see, it's a little bit too flexy. There's something about metal that, it has a weight, it has a rigidity that rubber and plastic and polyurethane don't have.

[swishing mace]

[men shouting]

[swishing mace]

He walks into the battle, and you know everything you need to know about this guy, and it's all coming out through his gear. They've taken real 15th-century armor styles, mostly German, and then turned it up to 11. Sauron is wielding a mace. And maces are real. It's a hafted weapon with a wooden or a steel haft with a flanged or bladed head on one end. So all the weight of the weapon is balanced to the end. And it's a concussion weapon. And you're trying, rather than to cut or pierce your opponent, you're trying to smash through their defenses. That is way bigger in proportion to him than any real maces were. Real German Gothic high medieval maces of the 15th century are, they're usually pretty short. They're just a little bit more than a foot or a bit more long. The heads are quite small, but they got these really sharp blades on them, and you're focusing your energy on a really small area. A weapon doesn't need to be massive to have the effect that it needs to have. But massive always reads well on screen, especially when you've got a dark lord of Mordor. And how successfully does it use armor and weapons to bring its characters and its themes across? I gotta give this 10 as well.

Rating: 10/10

"The King" (2019)

[armor clanging]

Poor old R-Patz looks like a pile of garbage, I'm afraid. This is a mishmash. There are a couple of elements, the shoulders and the body armor, that are vaguely 15th century, but they're about a generation too late for Agincourt. His helmet is just ridiculous. I mean, that has a vaguely 16th-century profile to it, but it fits badly. It's too big. It's clunky.

[knight groaning]

[armor clanging on ground]

Ah, come on, man. What is this?

[armor clanging]

Well, this is obviously supposed to be the battle of Agincourt in 1415.

[sighs]

[clicks tongue]

[producer laughing]

At the real battle of Agincourt, it was very muddy. The French had 10,000 fully armed knights. That was the entirety of their army. They had archers, but they didn't use them. The Pas-de-Calais mud is like this thick, gluey clay stuff, very difficult to move through. And it would be difficult, regardless of what you're wearing. Armor often gets blamed for the French defeat at Agincourt, as if the French were wearing heavy armor that the English were too clever to wear or something. The fact is, the English, including Henry V here, were wearing full-plate armor of the time. The English had 1,500 fully armed knights whose job it was to protect those famous archers.

[men shouting]

They go about it sort of the right way, in that this knight is someone who's been trained to fight and kill people since he was a child, and he's very, very good at it. The only way you've got any chance of this if you're an archer or an English foot soldier or whatever is to get six or seven or eight of your friends and pile in all at the same time. Don't take turns. He will kill all of you. You gotta all go together, and four or five of you gotta hold him down, and then one or two of you have to stab him in the eyes and in the gaps in the armor. You don't stab through the armor. When King Richard III was killed at the battle of Bosworth, they immobilized him. They held him down. Someone took his helmet off. They probably cut the chin strap and took the helmet off, and then they can do as they like. They cut off the back of his skull. They stabbed him right through the brain. They did whatever they wanted. I'll give it a one, 'cause they've got mud and archers working together. But I can't give it any more than a one. It's a massive lost opportunity.

Rating: 1/10

"El Cid" (1961)

[crowd cheering]

[horses running]

It's a legal procedure where they're determining the ownership of territory with a trial by combat. They're attacking each other on the wrong side. If you can see, they're passing right to right, which is wrong. They shouldn't be doing that. Because your reign hand is in your left hand, so it can't wield a weapon. Your reign hand is in your left, so your left side is more exposed. So that's where your shield goes, and your lance is in your right hand. Nobody's allowed to be left-handed in the Middle Ages. In traditional knightly mounted combat like this, you always pass on the left side to left side. Unhorsing someone is very difficult, and it only happens when certain key factors all come together. The timing's got to be right. The impact, the placement of the lance on the body's got to be right. Where he is in his stride of the horse when he gets hit. There's lots of things that kind of contribute to the likelihood of being unhorsed. But as a general rule, it's very, very difficult to separate a good horseman from his horse.

[horse running]

[horse neighing]

If this was a later period, in, like, the 15th century when you have full-plate armor, you can be run over by a horse in full-plate armor and you'll be just fine. I've seen it happen. This is kind of a weird choice in this film, because El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, is a real person, but he lived in the 11th century, in the late 1000s. It's largely looking like the early- to mid-14th century.

[crowd cheering]

[armor rustling]

Uh-oh, the 16th century two-handed swords are coming out now. We assume for some reason that a bigger sword hits harder than a little sword. These are not firearms. This is not a higher-caliber sword.

[laughing]

They didn't have two-handed swords in El Cid's lifetime. What you're seeing Charlton wearing here is what's traditionally referred to as string mail. It's a knitted garment, knitted with big knitting needles. So you've got big loops in the weave of the knitting, and then they iron it flat, spray it silver, and it looks like mail, or they think it does. It doesn't really look that much like mail, but it's been the mail substitute for years and years and years. And it's fine for the background, and I'd still pass it for the background, but you can't have it in the foreground. Five out of 10.

Rating: 5/10

"Tale of Tales" (2015)

The diving suit is very much like armor in the sense that it protects you from a hostile environment of a different kind. It's a complete fantasy, because he's not got an air supply. Diving suits are a real historical thing. There are designs going back to the 14th and 15th centuries in the late Middle Ages, of designs for diving suits. The skills of the armorer would be recruited for doing something like this. They work purely on a basic system of water displacement. The suit is not watertight; the water can get in. You pump air into the helmet, and it displaces the water below your face. But the water, as the pump is going up and down, the water goes up like this, and it sometimes covers your face, and sometimes it goes down, and you hope they pump hard enough to keep you from drowning. It's dicey, but it's possible. I give it a seven. It's very, very interesting.

Rating: 7/10

"Game of Thrones" (2011)

[iron clanging]

Hey, what's he doing? Stop that!

[fire hissing]

No, you can't do that. That's not how you take a sword apart, I'm sorry. This whole idea of melting a sword blade down and then recasting it in a mold, which is what they're doing, you can't do that. If you reduce the iron or the steel to its liquid state, you lose all of the properties that you want. If you melt and cast iron in a mold, it's cast iron, and it becomes really brittle and you can't temper it and you can't heat-treat it. When you have a lump of iron ore as it comes out of the ground, yes, they heat the iron ore to separate the iron from all of the silicates and the rest of the stuff that it's mixed up with. You never fully melt it. You don't bring it up to the full melting point. You heat it up until the chemical reaction occurs in the ore, which separates the iron from all of the other junk. And it sort of gloops down into the bottom of the bloomery. Weaponsmiths are very, very careful never to fully melt anything. You cannot melt armor down and make new armor. I don't care if it looks good on screen, it's dumb. I like some of the things that "Game of Thrones" does with armor, but that's a fail. That's a zero.

Rating: 0/10

"The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003)

I love the sort of evil-Statue-of-Liberty sort of aesthetic here. I think the star of that scene is the flail. Real flails are derived from farm implements. The articulated staffs that are used for threshing wheat. And if you have a feudal peasant army and they need to take whatever hurty things are to hand, a flail, you know, agricultural implements are good. It's a staff with just an eyebolt articulation and then another piece of wood. When such an idea is weaponized more extensively, they add a short length of chain between the staff and the head. Flails almost exclusively are a lower-class, a common soldier, infantry weapon. The knights didn't use them. Because they're kind of scary and they have an inherent mechanical intrigue, they've become much more famous and much more popular to the kind of popular conception of the medieval knight than they really deserve to be. But it's great here. I mean, I get it. Totally works here. No flail was ever that big. No flail ever had a chain that long. But in this context it works great. I can't think of another weapon that would have the kind of visual and story, character-driven impact that this has in this scene. It's gotta be a 10 out of 10.

Rating: 10/10

"The Last Kingdom" Season 1 (2015)

[man screaming]

He'd be dead. Be very dead. One man can't attack a shield wall like that.

[men screaming]

Nobody ever used rectangular shields. I mean, that's ridiculous. It's stupid. And real early medieval shields, which were all circular as far as we can tell, if air can get through, then a lot of other things can get through. Most real shields of this period are made out of boards placed edge to edge, sort of like this. But they're placed properly edge to edge, and they're glued, and they're sealed. And there's arguments, good arguments to be made for them then being edged with rawhide or sometimes covered with hide or textile and glue. You should not be able to see that much air through your shield.

[men screaming]

[armor clanging]

[man shouting in pain]

He's been stabbed right through the chest between those plates. They're showing you how their own made-up, silly armor doesn't work. Now, maybe if he gets hit full in the chest with a spear that's wielded by someone who knows how to use it, his padded textile and mail armor, which is what he should be wearing, or even maybe a scale armor, maybe it wouldn't stand up either. Now, I'm sorry, I can't find anything to hold on to. That's a zero.

Rating: 0/10

"Excalibur" (1981)

[horse running]

[man shouting]

[armor clanging]

Bad lance technique. I'll give them a pass on that, 'cause they wouldn't have known what good lance technique is. It's a very common thing in jousting sequences in movies that they lower their lance to a horizontal, and then they kick on and gallop along. And they're galloping along with their lance on the level. You don't do that. You're sitting on a horse, you've got 12 feet of pine lance, and the horse is going up and down like this, and you've got it here. It's inevitable that it's gonna start to do this. And it's got a steel head on the end. There's weight right out on the end of that. And pretty soon this thing is going up and down, and you couldn't hit a barn door with the thing. You've got no chance of controlling where that spear goes. And you get the horse going, and then you won't have to worry about your opponent until the last second or so of the interaction. And then it comes down. Boom. It takes practice. If you're too late, you miss. If you're too early, you get tangled up and look like an idiot. But if you get it right, you're always on. A lance came down, it got tangled up with my lance in a joust, and it came down, and the steel spearhead, which has three prongs like this, two of the prongs went past my hand and the third one bypassed the defenses of my armor, the gauntlet. It went just under the plate, through the leather glove and into me. I finished the competition before I even realized I needed to go get sewn up.

[armor clanging]

Lancelot: Yield, sir! I have the advantage.

Toby: Now, again, this is all metal armor. It's all aluminum, aluminum sprayed black or aluminum polished, but look how good it looks. They worked hard to do what they were doing, and they knew what they were doing, and I think it deserves a seven.

Rating: 7/10

"Season of the Witch" (2011)

[armor clanging]

Traditional ranged weapons, like the longbow and the crossbow, the projectile isn't moving that fast, but it's still moving way fast enough. You can't block arrows.

Knight: Remove the hood and the mask.

[dramatic music]

[Toby laughing]

Toby: It's an interesting outfit he's got on. You know, who has he come as? He's got a vaguely 11th, early-12th-century helmet, but he's got full-plate armor under there like the 16th century or something. I'd give it a two because it's funny and it's Nicolas Cage.

[producer laughing]

Oh, it's funny.

[producer laughing]

I guess that's worth something.