Real Medieval Fire Arrows! (Sorry Hollywood)

This suggests to me perhaps that they existed a little longer and we have clues that the oxidizers in incendiary charges predate gunpowder. Ingenious

fire

arms didn't end in the 15th century, there are many in the 16th, 17th century and obviously up to the present day, but this book, Weapons of War, is incredible, look it up, it's about the finds. on the Mary Rose, from the mid-16th century and has many pages about the very, very wide variety of

fire

arms and incendiaries they had on the ship when she sank. But look at this great image here, which lists some of the different types we have.

So here we have a crossbow arrow with incendiary material, we have this strange type of rocket motor, which is basically on the end of a stick to go through portholes or something, again another stick with a bag of incendiary material. compound in it and of course our fire

arrows

. But as far as I can tell, these are built very much like the

medieval

ones and the 15th century ones, basically no different. Weapons of Warre shows us the extraordinary variety of weapons they had on the ship and how they were constructed, but not how they were formulated or how they were used.

This is The Pyrotechnics of Biringuccio, it is the most extraordinary book. This book is a practical manual on how to do everything with fire, all the different crafts, activities and functions, domestic and military. So if you want to know how to undermine a tower, here you go. If you want to blow up the doors of a castle, you have it. If you want to know how your Knights can come out of a sally port and scare everyone away with flamethrowers, this has it. And of course, he also has fire

arrows

. But what I find

real

ly interesting is that he designed, manufactured and supplied firearms, but it is also completely clear that he found them very unpleasant.

Very interesting, but I think we must now return to our 15th century fire arrows. Clearly these expensive weapons would be used strategically, the open battlefield simply isn't the place for that,

sorry

Hollywood, but there's also no denying that getting hit by one of these would be simply horrendous and we all want to know what happens. It's clear that the arrow has caused most of the damage, but it

real

ly is a bad day at the office. So if not   on the open battlefield, where were they used? They were great against structures, fodder stores, alleys, windows, and ships.

That's what they're really good at. Now, clearly fire is distracting and is a real problem if you are trying to defend yourself, but also don't forget that these produce a lot of really thick, noxious smoke that will also be a distracting factor. So between those two things, you have two aspects: you have fire, but you also have smoke. 20 years ago I worked in special effects. I was making a large batch of this fire fighting compound for a job and accidentally lit it. Surprisingly I managed to keep my job, as expected when I read this phrase from Biringuccio I remembered it. "Smoke is harmful, but fire much more so." But the thing is, smoke is harmful.

Biringuccio has specifically mentioned that the smoke is unpleasant and that got me thinking. Because when my experience happened, I can now tell you that it was not possible to be in that building, the smoke was so thick and so sulfurous that it was horrible. What is happening? Well, I think we need to take a look. Well, as you can see, the burning compound produces a very thick, choking smoke, but the recipes list all sorts of weird things, but a few stand out, like camphor and arsenic. Obviously I didn't put arsenic in there, but what's that really all about?

So why would they put arsenic in fire arrows? Well,

medieval

people were superstitious, but they weren't stupid either, they knew that arsenic was poisonous and when burned it creates a poisonous gas, but it's actually not that bad. Could it be because it burns with a violet flame, making it something mystical and powerful? And then I talked to a biochemist and he pointed out that arsenic vaporizes at a really pretty low temperature and then creates a blistering agent. I'm going to say that again. A blistering agent. Medieval chemical weapons and recipes very often contained camphor in addition to sulfur, which is already there.

Now, with camphor we think of the modern world, rubbing the muscles. You end up with that combination of vapors that you cannot and will not want to breathe. In a recipe from   1628 it simply ends with "add arsenic if you like." Clearly, it was common knowledge what arsenic did and it's infuriating that we don't really know why it's there. So, was Biringuccio referring to the harmful nature of the smoke these things gave off? Was this a medieval chemical weapon? Well, the thing is, we'll never really know, but going back to the Book of Fireworks, they certainly deliberately made smoke charges to drive people out of houses and buildings, we know that, so we don't really know why they included arsenic, but Regardless of that, the very fact that it is there means that they would create noxious smoke.

It doesn't matter if it was deliberate, they were medieval chemical weapons. The smoke coming out of these is going to be unpleasant or very unpleasant, in modern terms that's "area denial", in medieval terms it's, I can't get in there, I'm going to get out of there, I'm not going to go. in that roof space, I can't operate on the deck of that ship. In my opinion, the combination of fire and vapors would make them fantastic for disrupting defense. Take a look at these scenarios. Let's see what happens when it enters your window. Good grief, well, you're not going to work in that room, that's for sure.

You really don't want to be there. Defenses were often made of heavy timbers, like this oak palisade. Let's see what our fire arrow does against that. Well, actually that was too hard for an 80 pound bow, so unfortunately the head bounced off. It just didn't penetrate far enough into this oak palisade, but of course, that's a very hard 80-pound bow, you know, with a 120,140-pound bow maybe it had gotten stuck. The fire is against the stockade, but it just didn't do anything. But let's not forget that at this time they could also shoot large logs of fire, as they were called by the cannons that packed much more of this material, because in the end there is not that much fire compound in an arrow.

But what about the houses, fodder stores and granaries, because they were often raised and waterproofed like ships? Let's see what that does. So what I'm seeing here is a really good mating surface burn. The pitch is starting to rise a little now and it also helps with the oxidizer that literally squirts out of the burn to the surface. I'm going to pull my head now, more like my shaft, because I want to try to save that and that's what would happen if a defender tried to, but you can see the throw and the wood is definitely lifting up a little bit.

So it clearly hasn't set everything on fire yet, but it's actually sustaining the burn in a way that in a thick wooden stockade just wasn't the case. So the fact that people painted their houses with tar is not a big deal in times of siege. One of these maybe not, 50 of them? It only takes one to burn down a building and we're gone. But you can see that he was really doing something. Now we have straw bales, so stables, fodder stores and it's the closest we can get to a thatched building and we look again at the smoke coming out, and it's just dirty.

Are you going to set the thing on fire? Well, I can't see any llamas yet, but you know if those are your stables, you don't want that. Let's give it some time and see what it does. It's okay there and it clearly burns and it's clearly a problem, so yeah, they certainly work. You can even hear it burning inside, bubbling. I'm going to rescue what's left of my arrow now and still it goes. Can you see the shaft inside? Actually, it's red hot. Clearly, against anything where there is straw or hay, stables or even that can be covered with straw if you go deep into a dry place, these things are going to be devastating.

I think the headline name "fire arrows" has obscured a lot more about this weapon. We think of the word "fire" and that's all we think about with these, but they were so much more. The sophistication of the design allowed it to be task specific, it allowed it to do certain things, the formulations that could be put into it meant that it could also generate harmful gases and smoke and fumes. They were much more than "fire arrows" and haven't really been considered, but that's just my hypothesis. What is my conclusion about the fire arrows? Well, they were well designed, very well designed, they were intelligent, very effective, they knew exactly what they were doing.

They didn't go out when you shot them, they stayed lit in the air, burning for a considerable time on impact. There were many different varieties they could choose from, they could make them their own, whether it was lots of flames, slow burning, fast burning, smoke, lots of sparks, sticky gel, etc. The Fireworks Book even suggests the different colors you should paint fire arrows to designate their properties, just like modern artillery shells. They certainly had area denial properties, they certainly prevented people from defending themselves properly. All in all, they were just fantastic. We have the manuscripts to back it up, we know they did it, we have the archaeological record of the heads, we know they made them.

The fire arrows were real. So by the time the 15th century ended, these firearms were fully developed and continued. The Mary Rose, sunk in 1546; They have recovered over 3,000 individual firearms from that ship and they were so important to the English Navy of the time that there were three magazines specially dedicated just to firearms and they continued. So even at the time of the English Civil War, in the 1640s and 1650s, arrows were still shot from muskets; You can imagine? These expensive weapons were used with care and discrimination, they were used against buildings, ships, castles, things you wanted to burn.

They're not for battlefield use,

sorry

Hollywood, that's not what it's about, I don't think you're going to stop using them because they're cool, I get it, but that's not what you're about. So what have we learned today specifically in practice? Well, you don't want them in your building, going through windows, boat decks, they'll be very, very unpleasant. You don't want one to shoot you in the face, belly, leg, or anywhere else. In a thick wooden palisade they will not be of much use, in a house or barn, especially if waterproofed with tar, on the side of a ship, with hard rigging, they will be much more interesting. .

But the other thing we've really learned is that they could be, maybe were, chemical weapons of the time. We saw that they were fantastic smoke generators and had a lot of harmful and unpleasant substances that could be mixed with them. Whether it was deliberate or not, I don't know, but the effect would mean it would create "area denial", places you can't go, you can't defend. If you're interested in this and I hope you are, come check out my Patreon page and be a part of the crazy things we do here. Really discovering the history. Lots of movies, documents, all kinds of things, come and check it out.

Thanks for watching. See you next time. Well, that worked. Hadrian, could you grab the rake?