Hello, I'm here with Marian at the Tremonia Fechtschule,
which is a fight camp, a HEMA camp, near Dortmund 
in Germany, and I've been teaching one-handed spear.
Now, why would anyone use a one-handed spear? 
Because as we all know, swords and axes and maces
are all much cooler and more 
popular weapons to learn in HEMA.
Well, one of the reasons I think that 
you might want to use it is to re-enact
how most people used to fight in the past.
Because throughout the stone age 
people fought with spears.
And then the bronze age started, and that went on for century 
after century of people fighting with spears and shields.
You look at pictures of Sumerians, Babylonians 
and all the rest of it, and spear and shield. They loved it.
And then the iron age started, in which case one-handed 
spear and shield was the most popular weapon.
Then you got to the ancient period, 
in which case it was one-handed spear and shield.
And then early medieval period 
it was one-handed spear and shield.
You're beginning to see a pattern, right? 
Throughout the entirety of the past,
this has been the main weapon used 
by a soldier against another soldier.
So I think it's reasonable to imagine that there 
was a good reason for that, they weren't all idiots.
So this must work.
And yet if you ever hold a spear 
with two hands, like this,
(and generally I put my strong hand, 
I'm right handed, in front),
we find that you can be quite vigorous with it, 
and you've got a lot of power and so forth.
And if you hold a spear in one hand, everything's so much 
slower and weaker. And you might think, "Oh, this is rubbish."
Well, you only ever used a one-handed spear in conjunction 
with a shield. So it's this combination that's really good.
Now before I get into the 
business of hitting people,
I'm going to talk about the way 
that one might hold a spear.
Now a lot of people conjecture 
that this is the way to hold a spear,
and I would agree that this is the best way 
to hold a spear if you're just about to throw it.
If I want to throw this as hard and as far 
as I possibly can, this is where I will hold it.
In the middle at its point of balance, with my palm 
towards me, and the thumb pointing towards the rear.
Okay, so I'm going to call this the [overarm] grip.
But in melee, if I want to hang on to my spear 
and fight opponent after opponent,
there are lots of really big drawbacks.
Now the biggest advantage of this 
big long stick is that it's long, its reach.
So if he's got a sword or axe or a mace or whatever, 
and I've got a spear, I should out-reach him.
But if I hold it in the middle here, actually by 
the time I'm in range of him, he's in range of me.
What's the point of having this big long stick 
if I don't make use of its range?
I can't thrust very far forwards because of 
the problem of the ... way my wrist works.
You may be anatomically eccentric, but 
I can imagine that you're probably similar to me,
in that you can cock your wrist that 
way towards the little finger a lot further
than you can cock it the other way towards the thumb.
I can get maybe 75 degrees that way, and 
maybe 15 degrees on a good day that way.
I have actually hurt my wrist yesterday doing a 
knife disarming class, so I'm not quite at my peak.
Anyway, this comes into play. 
So as I try to thrust horizontally,
very quickly I run out of suppleness in my wrist. 
And if I just carry on with my arm now, that happens.
... I can't get any further than that, 
it just goes down into the ground.
If I want it to carry on I have to drop my shoulder 
out of position, I've gone a little bit more there.
If I want to go further than that though, 
I have to then drop my whole body.
This is really, really awkward.
So reach is a big, big problem and you're 
just throwing it away. Another thing is
this is the point of balance. Which is 
likely to be actually shifted forward a bit
because the heaviest bit of a spear is the spearhead.
So most of this is sticking out the 
back as a great big counterweight.
So, if my opponent adopts this stance against me.
Now if I knock that, the back end of his spear
is acting as a counterweight, 
it's making it easy for me to do this.
It's really easy for me to 
knock his spear out of the way.
So all that counter-balancing spear 
out the back is to his disadvantage.
Another thing is parrying.
So if we could give it a try, yeah, sorry. 
So I'm going to attack him.
Actually, just drop the shield for a moment.
Right, so I'm going to attack him with an underarm thrust. 
And how can he parry? How can he block it?
He's got that, yeah? And that's it. 
You've got one movement, it's short, it's weak.
If I try to resist it, I will probably win
because I've got a ... much stronger 
spear position here. And I can go in.
And even if it works,
how can he now counter-attack? 
His spear point is pointing over there,
it's not threatening me in the slightest, 
where I could come back and attack again.
The underarm has far more options that way. Plus
direction, I can stab down at him and that's it.
I've got one attack direction, which is down, 
so he's only got one to worry about.
But underarm I can stab in 
all sorts of different directions.
Including if I want to, I can go high. If I want to get 
up here, I can just do that. It works absolutely fine.
And that's almost as strong a thrust.
And if I shift my hand back here and brace with 
my elbow, I can hold the spear like this all day.
This ... doesn't take much effort.
And look how much range I've got now 
against the guy with the overarm spear.
I am hopelessly out of his range.
So this has lots of advantages, 
one being look how much
volume of air I can sweep in front of me, 
so I can actually usefully parry.
And this is hugely important if I'm in a group. 
Because if there's a guy here and there's a guy here,
I can keep them safe by blocking the spears of several 
guys in the opposing line that might threaten them.
So as a team member here, I am really useful.
Whereas here I ... can't sweep anything like 
as big an area, and I can only do so weakly.
Don't forget also that on the back end of 
a spear you generally had a sharp ferrule,
there's a sharp point on this end.
Now if I'm keeping it here, it's reasonably 
safe for me and for the guy behind me.
But if I'm holding it like this 
and it's being knocked all over the place,
that spear, that, that ... you could 
have someone's eye out with that.
Dangerous. Okay, so.
This is why I say that most of the time 
they probably used spears like this.
And I can very easily get him in the foot. 
So I can constantly threaten his foot
whereas with ... the overarm, 
my ... feet are out of range or ...
... You can see I'm going to win this fight ... there's 
no contest when it comes to threatening feet.
And I can threaten low 
and go high, fake one way,
I've got so many more options, 
and I can parry and counter.
This is just a much, much better way of using a spear.
Now this is not particularly long, ... I'm 6 [foot] 
3 [inches], so this is maybe a 6 foot 6 stick.
Typically a spear would be more like 8 feet long [243.84 cm], 
in which case the contrast with this is even greater.
And you can rake the spears of the enemy, 
threatening a huge volume of air in front of you.
Right, so now,
that's why you would use it underarm.
Now with a shield,
now with a shield I can threaten down there, 
in which case if he drops the shield in order to block
look how much of himself he is exposing.
If I'm a member of a team I do this, okay, I don't get him, 
but one of my teammates now gets him.
He's exposed there. So perhaps the guy to my right
... if he was standing here, and he's watching 
what's happening, and he's, "Ah ha", and he gets him.
So, when you're fighting in a line with many, many people, 
it's almost never the guy opposite you who gets you.
But I can constantly be threatening him, ... and forcing him 
to defend himself and move about, and keeping him busy.
Which by so doing I'm keeping the guys next to me safe 
from him, because he's busy defending himself from me.
And all the time I'm not actually intent on 
killing him, ... in my peripheral vision
I'm watching the guy two to his right, because I reckon 
that he's waiting for an opening further down the line,
and when he goes for it, I can go, "Ha", like that. 
I can maybe threaten him and skewer that guy there.
Right, there was ... oh yes, now
one thing however that we can demonstrate with 
one-handed spear and shield is that for duelling, it's rubbish!
Let's duel! Okay, right, so we come in, 
it's actually pretty difficult to ...
if I go that way he can see that, 
go that way he can see it.
I can't blind him temporarily. 
This fight could go on for ever.
And in the Iliad when the heroes duel they start off 
with spears, but they quickly throw them
(oh, nearly got him there), throw them 
and they go in with their swords.
Because for duelling this really is rubbish.
The previous evening I had staged an 
experiment to demonstrate this point.
Duel, and see how long it takes 
for someone to score a hit.
- This allowed?
- Legs allowed, yes.
Anyone seen any good films?
Anyone know any jokes?
Anyone bring a book maybe?
I mean, I suppose eventually 
one of them will die of malnutrition.
More science now as I demonstrate how 
much better sword and shield is when duelling.
Aha!  Du bist tot! [you are dead]
Right, I got a glance to the ankle, 
he got a sword in the ... back.
Okay.
Du bist tot.  Nächster! [next]
Back off, back off. ...
Slash across the belly there.
Just a leg hit, granted, but we 
were taking all hits as fighting.
Next one! ...
Between my legs.
- You're not fertile any longer.
- Okay.
Doesn't get much closer than that, but a miss is a miss.
- Oh, he's ... keeping his spear back. 
Doing tactics! How dare you?
The point of this is not 
to show you that I am great,
but to show you that my weapons 
give me a massive advantage.
Not a great hit by me, I'll admit.
Oh, right.
That took more doing.
Okay.
So, one-on-one sword and shield beats 
spear and shield almost every time.
However, when closing with a group of spearmen,
the swordsman will expose his flanks to 
the spears of the men either side of him
See this guy here with the heater, I'm going to kill that guy.
- Ah, he won't.
- Remember guys, prodding, prodding, okay, prodding.
[ And now I'm dead. ] 
All right, all right, he was lucky!
I'm going to kill this guy with the round shield.
[ I got nowhere - killed instantly. ]
All right, I'm going to kill this guy,
this mean looking guy in the black hoodie.
Right then, aaargh!
Okay, I got him but I got killed.
Okay.
At no time was I ever killed 
by the guy I was fighting.
I hope people noticed that, 
I was always killed by someone else.
My sponsor for this video is ExpressVPN.
And I'm rather glad to be sponsored by them again. 
I'm also a little bit surprised, but also a little bit impressed
given how, shall we say, candid I was in an 
earlier video about certain limitations of VPNs.
So ... what's that? What is a VPN? 
And what has it got to do with spears?
Ah, well, ah, stay tuned for 
what it's got to do with spears,
but as for what it is, 
well it's a Virtual Private Network.
You see, you exist with your computer in your 
home somewhere, or your office, or wherever,
and you send a message via 
your internet service provider
via loads of different nodes to 
the website you're trying to access.
And then the message comes 
back via loads of different nodes.
But you don't know where those nodes are, 
you don't know what's going on,
it's the vast interweb out there 
of interconnected, you know, nodes.
If the message can't get through via that node, 
it reroutes it and goes via another.
And that's what keeps it all working, 
and it's pretty impressive really.
But some people like to feel a little bit more in control,
and they also don't like the whole of the 
web knowing where they are in the world.
Well, with ExpressVPN, when you log on you can pretend 
to be from some country where actually you're not,
and this has various advantages.
But why should you pick ExpressVPN 
as opposed to some other VPN?
Well, it's fast, as in the name ExpressVPN.
It's in 94 different countries around the world, 
which is a quite a lot to choose from.
And of course being in lots of 
places around the world means
(think of those nodes again), 
... it's easier to make it fast.
They have 24 hour, 7-day-a-week customer support. 
And, maybe this is the clincher, if you go to
www.ExpressVPN.com/Lindybeige, or 
click the link in the description, which is much easier.
I don't know why everyone 
just doesn't do that. Anyway,
then you can get three months for free!
So that's got to be good, so maybe 
that will tip the balance of your decision.
Now some countries block content ... on certain websites, 
or perhaps they put that content behind a paywall.
So pretending to be from another country 
is one way to get round these restrictions.
It could be that there's something 
which is viewable in Germany,
but because of copyright issues you can't 
view that video, say, outside of Germany.
But if you pretend to be in Germany via a VPN, 
then you can get to see the content.
And if you have something like Netflix, one of those 
many available alternatives, those streaming services,
many are available. Then you may feel that after a while
you've seen them all, you've seen 
everything you're interested in. You thought,
"I thought there was a lot more on this 
streaming service, I'm a bit disappointed.
... I've only been binge-watching for eight months straight, 
and now I feel I've seen everything I want to see."
Well, if you pretend to be from another country,
then you get to see what Netflix 
(or some other available service)
is showing to those people in that country. And 
you might see loads more new and interesting stuff.
And that might be what I tend to use it for.
But anyway, what else was I supposed to say ...
Oh yes. I'm also supposed to say that it 
works on all sorts of different operating ...
there's Windows of course, and Android, and Linux,
and for those of you who love spending 
money for some reason, Macintosh.
Because it works on all those various different routers. 
Yes, that's right, I'm British so I say router. ["rooter"]
It does sound very strange to us when 
Americans talk of routers, ["rowter"]
which conjures in our minds people 
running away in panic from a battle, [rout, "rowt".]
or, more commonly, a tool for putting gouges in a 
piece of wood. You can get modern motorised ones.
I'd like to think ... that very few of my fellow 
countrymen have been so stupid as to try to connect
a router to their computer.
- "It's not fair, I can't see (one of the many 
available streaming services), it's not working."
- "Yes, you've connected a router to your computer." 
- "He said to connect a router."
- "Yes, he was American. He meant router, 
and you're stupid."
Yes, ... a bit of a digression there. Ah.
Oh, yes! And what has 
ExpressVPN got to do with spears?
It's got an "S" in it.
And "P", and "E". Nothing. Sorry.
Right, so here we have two shield-walls, 
and we're going to fight each other.
And one thing that I think people liked about this 
formation is that it involved an awful lot of not dying.
Observe how we do not all drop dead immediately 
because our shields and our spears keep us safe. ...
Observe also how this brute with the particularly 
long spear is menacing me, menacing me,
but whilst I am defending myself, I'm 
looking at that guy because he was open.
So there was my target.
So if I'm duelling with this guy
I'm actually looking for an opening to my right, 
or maybe the left, maybe there's some there.
Right now then, what if maybe meanwhile 
this mean guy, this guy with the heater,
maybe he's actually looking at this guy to my right, thinking, 
"Ah, I see an opening." ... And maybe he goes for it,
but I keep that guy safe by raking down, raking down.
... Don't you dare, don't you dare, I'm raking it up,
don't you dare hit my friend. 
Okay, meanwhile everyone's doing the same
with their fellows, 
and still we're all still sort of alive.
Okay, now let's try to kill each other.
Obviously we can't go for faces, 
because that would be dangerous.
We're all still alive! ...
They have closed the gap up, we were too slow.
He's dead, right there are only two of them, 
let's get in there, aaaargh!
Once you're close ...
Once you are close the spear is a liability. 
Let's demonstrate that. So we get back to where we were.
... If you move to your left a bit. All right. Oh no, (no no),
this guy here has just died.
There is now a gap in our line, and 
maybe I was busy over here and didn't notice it.
And maybe one of their guys thinks, 
"Oh look, a gap. Let's charge into that gap."
He charges, that's it, he drew his sword. And I'm dead.
The point is that he has to go to 
something short. If I'm up against this guy,
and I manage to get past him, 
and I've still got a spear, this is really slow to turn.
... This length of the spear is a huge liability.
And if he's in a formation of troops with 
other ranks here, being in a formation
with this great big long thing 
is just an invitation to be killed.
And whilst I'm on that topic,
there is an idea commonly cited that 
the way people fought was not only with
(if we all go to this) overarm, 
but was with pushing shields.
So they would actually come right up to each other, 
and they would shove, ... push, push, push, push. ...
Whoa, okay, stop guys. Stop.
I'm going to swap over here so I can 
talk to the camera, can you take my place.
Right, I put it you, this is an untenable position. 
Why doesn't he just spear me in the face?
Why don't I just spear him in the face, 
or the guy behind him in the face?
In fact, why don't I just ditch this entirely, 
draw my knife and kill him and kill him.
Well one reason is he might do it faster. 
When you're that close to someone
the first person to go to a shorter weapon wins.
And in the ancient world people 
didn't have much neck protection.
So the ancient Greeks just 
pushing against each other like that
there would have been an awful lot of slit 
throats in the first few seconds of the battle.
And people are not suicidal. 
When people fight normally,
the normal thing you do is you get to 
about range, then you hesitate.
And then you prod, trying to keep safe, hoping that the 
guy opposite you is going to be killed by somebody else.
Because no-one wants to die, 
oh there you go, he got me.
So this is how I think most ancient battles happened.
I don't think they just crashed into each other, though we 
could demonstrate what happens ... when we try that.
Most of the time I think they came to measure, 
and then there was a prodding match.
We read in history after history that 
battles lasted hours, sometimes all day.
And you can't have thousands of people 
fighting constantly all day and no one dying,
unless they're doing something 
that's really keeping them safe.
Like not being within weapon range of the 
opposition and hiding behind big heavy shields,
and being in deep formation so 
that when you get tired at the front
you can be replaced by a fresh guy 
behind you, and the battle can carry on.
I said we'd talk about bashing through.
So what we can do is form up on the 
biggest psycho (that's you by the way)
psycho in the unit and he charges in 
and the rest of you try to keep him alive.
And he gets through and does he kill them all? 
Maybe he does, do he didn't.
But he might have, and the point is 
it is possible to smash through a formation
if you form into a wedge, a Schweinberg, a boar's head.
It is possible, but against spears the guy at 
the front has got to be one hell of a psycho,
because as he goes forwards
he's got so many spears coming at him from the 
sides that he's very, very likely to be skewered.
And don't forget in a large battle there's a second rank. 
So even if he smashes past these guys,
he's got the second rank and maybe 
the third, fourth, fifth to worry about.
So most people are not in a hurry to die, so 
most people will not go smashing into a formation.
There is of course one big exception to this, 
and that is the guys who were using these.
In the height of the [Roman] Imperial period 
you had professional, heavily armed,
heavily armoured legionaries with the pilum.
And they would, we believe, throw the heavy pilum 
at maybe this sort of distance, just a few yards,
and then all they've got is a short sword 
... and they have to get in, it's vital.
... But they're so professional 
that they are completely ... convinced
that the guys either side of them 
are going to follow them in.
Because if one goes in on his own, he's dead.
But if they all throw their pila at close range, and then 
immediately charge to a short sword gladius range,
then maybe you can start stabbing-stabbing-stabbing, 
destroying the enemy and winning the day.
So if you've got a highly trained 
professional army of guys who
absolutely have confidence in the 
guys next to them, that can work.
But in the later Roman period they stopped doing that, 
and they also had less professional armies.
And I do not think that these 
two things are coincidental.
Super-slowly guys, ... nothing above the chest, 
chest and hips, okay, and you're just prodding.
Okay, just prodding, it's just an experiment, 
we're all playing nicely.
So.
When I was teaching, I got people 
to first try without shields or masks.
And off you go.
Later we tried with shields. 
Although we didn't have quite enough for everybody.
Listen to the clacks of the spears as well as the thuds 
against shields. The spears are doing a lot of the defending.
Look how alive they all still are!
All right, now then.
Here we go again.
After a few goes, we were able to ramp up the aggression 
a bit, and people started to show some initiative.
Hit! It's a hit!
Okay, ho!
This was an exercise in threatening 
the front foot of your opponent.
The main point I wanted to get across was 
to not plant all your weight on your front foot,
because you have to keep it mobile.
Actually parries with your spear 
will usually keep your foot safe.
And if someone does keep thrusting at your foot, 
you can try stamping on his spear to break it.
But that wasn't an option for us.
So now everyone wearing masks. People were 
allowed to feint low and go high for the face,
or feint high and go for the foot. 
I don't think anyone got hit in the foot.
The foot is a small mobile target down on the ground, 
and hard to reach without exposing yourself.
Not many face hits either mind: thighs, torsos 
and shoulders tend to make the best targets.
Now I want to draw your attention 
to an absolute cracker of a hit.
Note that this chap has fallen back a bit behind the rest of 
his line, so he's not giving much cover to his neighbour here.
This chap spots the opportunity, and with 
one accurate jab, BAM, dead centre of head.
Let's see it again.
Ah, marvellous!
Now one of the glories of a centre-grip shield 
is that you can hold it way out in front of you
and defend a very large volume of space in front of you.
But there is a drawback, which is that if I whack the outside 
of it, it opens it up for another guy to take advantage.
That's another thing you can do.
But I do not believe people would ever really 
smash into opposing shields with much force, BAM.
Which is something that re-enactors try, 
because they've got blunt safe things.
But of course if this is a sharp spear and that's a wooden 
shield, that's a really great way to get your spear stuck.
So I think most of the time they were actually just prodding, 
not hard enough to get their spear stuck.
They're just constantly threatening, 
because they wouldn't want that to happen.
And that's one of the problems with ...
- thank you gentlemen -
with another conjectured way of fighting because
with this overarm technique what you can do is 
throw it forwards and then catch the end like that.
Of course as soon as you do catch the end, 
it's going to fall down unless you're incredibly strong.
Some fixings, the lizard killers 
that the ancient Greeks had,
they do have a couple of ridges that you 
might be able to catch reasonably easily.
Otherwise the normal spear just has a 
spike on the end, which is quite smooth.
So there's no physical evidence that they ever did that.
But that is a possibility you could do that sort of
spear ... and capture technique.
We cannot experiment with this safely however, 
because there's just no way with a full-weight stick
you can safely, even if they've got 
fencing-masks on, I would not want people
throwing these full-speed, 
full-weight straight into people's faces.
So we cannot try that one out.
Personally, I think that someone 
probably did try that.
They saw an opportunity, they were perhaps 
defending a wall and they felt safe for a moment,
and they saw there was someone who's just out of reach, 
but maybe if they did that they could get him.
Then maybe they did it. But I can't myself believe 
that was ever the main way of using spears.
As soon as you've recaptured the spear, 
you're so weak and vulnerable having to get it back.
On the other hand, with an underarm technique 
I can very quickly retreat to ... half distance.
So if someone is looking as though he might 
break through the line, through a gap here let's say,
I could perhaps go to half distance and I can 
threaten low and high with this very effectively.
Incidentally, if you've got it overarm,
threatening low and high is much 
weaker and slower, and just rubbish.
Now then, we've got three against three here. I would say 
that with three people it's worth forming a shield wall.
With two though ... I'd say it's time to go 
to some other weapon, like your sword.
But with unequal numbers, one side should have a 
longer line and of course threaten the flanks of the other.
And what tended to happen was that 
people would duck behind their shields.
So I want to keep my shield to my left, 
he wants to keep his shield to the left,
and so ancient armies tended to 
wheel about a bit in this direction,
because no-one wanted to 
be the guy to expose himself.
So that's a common thing that's 
written about in the sources where
large formations of troops tended to wheel round like 
that with each guy trying to stay behind his shield safely.
In aid of - SCIENCE - I experimented by pitting 
one-handed against two-handed spears.
The one-handed should have won, and probably 
would have in a world that had missile weapons in it.
But these HEMA fighters were 
all fixated on the person in front,
and the team with the shields 
did not take full advantage of how
vulnerable the shield-less 
fighters are from their sides.
We tried twice, and the 
two-handed team won both times,
but had a much harder time of it the second time 
after I'd given the shieldies a bit of a talking-to.
You have to attain the skill of 
attacking using your peripheral vision.
[ More science now. ]
Help!
[ A feasibility study of alternative shield use. ]
- Arggh!
- Ah!
- Okay, I am deaf on this ear now.
[ Just to be extra clear: I am not saying that 
I know how spears were used with shields
(and there were probably a few ways), but through 
experiment I have come to these conjectural conclusions. ]
Lindybeige!
[ Experimental archaeology to answer other questions 
might be even more death-defying. How did stone age 
Man discover which fungi were safe to eat? ]
[ My current hypothesis involves 
highly-trained truffle mammoths. ]
