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Heavy Armour at the Battle of Hemmingsted

Excavations at Hemmingstedt

Physiological studies of an athlete dressed in heavy armour helps to explain why some peasant armies were able to best their royal adversaries

In Februar 1500 the Danish King Hans musters an army of 12- 15.000 men to curb a rebellion in the Ditmarsh, a peninsula just north of the Elbe estuary. The king and his retinue consider it a fieldtrip and proceed on the frozen roads to the small city of Meldorf, which is brutally plundered by the mercenaries. Shortly afterwards the weather turns into thaw and inhabitants of the peninsula gather a small army of 4-6000 people in order to trap the Danish army which is now on its way out into the marches.

The Ditmarschian army succeeds. The Danish army is proceeding along one of the narrow lanes lined with ditches, when it suddenly runs into a heavily manned barricade at Hemmingstedt. At the same time peasants are positioned further out about to demolish the dykes so that the low lying fields may be swamped with the tide. The result is that the soldiers and especially the nobles wearing heavy armour drown in incomprehensible numbers. Only the king with a few of his council is saved, but they loose the standard, the war chest as well as all the truss. Afterwards the people of Ditmarsch leave the corpses to rot in the fields.

The battle is genereally remembered as one of the prime examples of how to use terrain in military tactics. It is, however, also remembered for the nonsencial and heavy armour of the mercenary army. It is quite plainly said that the army drowned.

New evidence

Recently the University of Leeds together with a number of other institutions have tried to measure the impact of wearing heavy armour as was a normal feature of the medieval and early modern armies.

By dressing a man in an steel plate armour and measuring how this impedes his performance, the researchers found that such soldiers would have been using more than twice the energy had they not been wearing it. An armour would typically weigh around 30 to 50 kg. Such a load is not in itself larger than a somewhat heavy backpack. But it impedes a person much more when it is spread across the body. Lifting the limbs become very irksome.

The research team included academics from the Universities of Leeds, Milan and Auckland along with experts from the Royal Armouries in Leeds, UK. Researchers worked with highly skilled fight interpreters from the Royal Armouries Museum, who wore exact replicas of four different types of European armour. They undertook a range of walking and running exercises, during which their oxygen usage was measured through respirometry masks, providing researchers with a picture of how much energy was being used by the participants.

The study also showed that the armour had a clear impact on the soldier’s breathing. Rather than taking deep breaths when they were exerting themselves – as they would have done had they not been wearing armour – the interpreters took a greater number of shallower breaths.

“Being wrapped in a tight shell of armour may have made soldiers feel safe,” says co-investigator Dr Federico Formenti from the University of Auckland. “But you feel breathless as soon as you begin to move around in Medieval armour and this would likely limit a soldier’s resistance to fight,” Formenti explains in the press release.

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Read more at Leeds University homepage

Read more about the battle of Hemmingsted

Read about the film from 2000 – Die Schlacht bei Hemmingstedt Februar 1500

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