Flailing About

Today's post was written at the request of a former professor of mine, and is response to this article. In it, the writer essentially ascertains that the flail either did not exist and was a creation of imaginative medieval artists, or did exist and was an extremely rare experimental weapon solely of late Medieval Europe. The piece is interesting, but unfortunately, I don't believe any of it.

Just to start, a flail was a weapon made of a weight (or weights), sometimes spiked, attached to a short chain which was then attached to a handle. You probably know it better as a morning star or ball and chain, both of which are technically incorrect names but this isn't really the place to get into that discussion. They have historically been used for harvesting grain plants, and were relatively common in one form or another across most of Eurasia since at least Roman times.

A Threshing Flail

At various points in history, these were turned into weapons. This was a pretty common practice in pre-modern warfare; militias, conscripted levies, and the like often used whatever items they had laying around as weapons as pre-modern states rarely had the case or surplus equipment to outfit these levies properly. Over time, many of these improvised weapons were improved upon and modified to become dedicated weapons. My favorite example is the bill.

Not that kind

The bill was a weapon mostly used by the medieval English. It was adopted from the billhook, a type of implement used in forestry and agriculture, used especially for hacking through grapevines, tree branches, and similar tough plant matter. Military bills were adapted from these by being mounted on poles. This produced a highly effective weapon that could be used as a spear or as a long-handled axe, and had the bonus of including a hook which was useful for dismounting cavalrymen, hamstringing horses, and pulling shields or pikes out of the way leaving the bill user's friends an opening to exploit.

That's more like it! A group of reenactors holding bills during an event at Cardiff Castle, Wales.

So, we have some background on adapted weapons and their use. Let's dig into the article a little more, shall we?


The article first cites two books, one stating that the weapon existed but was probably rare, the other stating that they were made up. The first book probably has the right of it; a flail offers few advantages over the much simpler to manufacture and use  mace (basically a highly-specialized club). The second book, from 1968, claims that they never existed, but the author goes into no more detail. 

The criticisms of the flail as a weapon which follow are equally ridiculous. The author states that the weapon was too unwieldy to be used safely, but I am not sure he is actually familiar with melee weapons. Some of the best attested, more common medieval weapons were extremely unwieldy. Two of my personal favorites are the German zweihander (a large, two-handed sword most likely used to batter enemy pikes down) and the viking daneaxe, a massive axe used to hack apart enemy shields in the early middle ages and famously carried by the Byzantine Varangian Guard. These weapons had to be swung in wide arcs to be effective. 

Actual medieval combat probably didn't look quite like the formations you see in film, and they were rarely especially dense as this could spell disaster on the field as men were squeezed together, unable to defend themselves as allegedly happened to the Romans surrounded by Hannibal at Cannae. Additionally, we know that these weapons are completely functional in combat; numerous modern western martial arts and HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) groups practice with the weapon, and using German sources (more on that below) have recreated fighting techniques to figure out how they would have been used in combat situations. Just google "HEMA Flail", there are a ton of YouTube videos showing HEMA members practicing, and some of them are pretty good! We also know that trench weapons were made during the First World War in the shape of flails and the like. We have multiple examples that were used by storm troopers and trench raiders during the war that have survived. 

German WWI Trench Flail, Ca. 1917

The rebound of the weapon is noted, but this was also unlikely to be an issue; as shown chained items were used commonly in agriculture without serious risk of injury. He notes that the chains would be liable to break in battle, which sounds like a good argument, until you consider that literally the most common weapon in human history is this:

Japanese Yari, a type of Spear

And guess what? Spear shafts, broke, a lot. Men carried more than one weapon into battle. So I am not convinced that breakage is an argument against the flail. 

So to the meat of his argument. The fact that most flails in museums today are reproductions (he uses the loaded word "fake", which in the museum world carries its own definition and usually refers to an item made specifically to trick people into thinking they're real). So what? One of my favorite pieces at the art museum in Cincinnati, Ohio is this: 

The item in the foreground is a a crossbow which was produced as a show or exhibition piece. Many art museums have similar pieces. Does this mean that crossbows weren't real? Just because museum items weren't combat effective doesn't mean that they were never used. Combat items were used, broken, and discarded or recycled. Logically most of what would survive would have been artistic or ceremonial pieces. If you played baseball as a kid, you probably didn't keep most of the balls you played with, but you MIGHT still have that game-winning ball around, right? Same thing here. Even weapons which were historically very common exist today only rarely. Take the Roman Gladius; only a few hundred examples have ever been found (in all the ruins of Pompeii, only four were discovered) despite the fact that, at one time or another, they would have been produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands. If time has been that unkind to steel and iron weapons, imagine what happened to weapons primarily made of wood? No medieval English or Welsh Longbows have ever been discovered, and we only even have a couple hundred from the Renaissance when they ceased to be a common war weapon. We do have surviving examples though, but I'll get to that in a minute.

The article then uses similar poor reasoning by pointing out that the few artistic representations of flails from the period have other fantastical elements, but again, this is ridiculous. Each of the representations shown also show chainmail, spears, swords, etc. Did these weapons never exist? He closes out the article by stating that the weapons were either rare or non-existent, and then talks about why they are so persistent in pop culture, but I'm not here to discuss the latter point. 

So what evidence do we have that flails were used as combat weapons? Plenty!

The first piece of evidence is literary. Flails are commonly attested to in German Fechtbuch or "fighting books." These books were produced during the German Renaissance, and were essentially fighting manuals that were widely circulated throughout Europe. These were not, for the most part, written by amatuers. Many were produced by men who made their lives as fencing masters; they would travel throughout Europe serving as mercenaries or training the nobility in the medieval European martial arts for war and things like trials by combat. 

Text on the military use of the flail on folio 210 r of Paulus Hector Mair's Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica, written in the 1540s in Augsburg, Germany. 

The use of flails, folio 60rv, from Hans Talhoffer's untitled manual.

These manual's are awesome by the way. Original images of the folios can be found here and here. The site, which has been put together by a group of people interested in medieval martial arts, has numerous other fechtbuch examples, and translations are widely available online. 

We do have surviving examples, by the way, They are found in museums throughout Europe, and are far simpler than those shown off at the Met, which, again, were art or ceremonial pieces, not unlike the highly ornate swords carried by some military officers today while in dress uniform. 

Late German Examples, which have been authenticated as originals

We also know that these weapons were in use not just in medieval Europe, but throughout Eurasia and extending their use until a relatively late date. Numerous sources verify that flails were used by peasants during the Hussite Wars of the early 15th Century, as an example.

And they weren't just seen in Europe, oh no! In Japan, a type of flail known as the Chigiriki was used. In addition to examples from the Edo and Early Meiji periods which survive, their use continues to be taught by several Japanese martial arts schools such as the Araki-ryu school, which has existed continuously since the end of the Japanese warring states period and is at least several hundred years old. 

Chigiriki

Similar weapons were also use in China and Korea. In China they used one of my favorite weapons ever, simply for the pure factor of its ridiculousness. It was similar in many ways to a flail, but nothing I can say will do it justice so I will let the video speak for itself. I give you, the Chinese liúxīng chuí, or "Meteor Hammer". 

Examples have also been found in India. They were sometimes used by as late as the 19th Century, both as ceremonial weapons, weapons in the use of Indian martial arts styles, and even in the field against British soldiers. 

A selection of weapons from Lahore, India at the Royal Armouries, Leeds

And this brings me to my last point. Many kinds of pre-modern weapons were developed independently across Europe and Asia (and many other parts of the world), assuming that various cultures and localities had both the need and the resources to produce them. Most pre-modern cultures had some version of the spear, the sword, the axe, the mace or club, the bow, etc. If chain weapons were being used in East and South Asia, their use in Europe, while not confirmed, seems much more realistic. Just because a weapon was rare, doesn't mean that it didn't exist at all. 

If there is a topic you'd like me to dig into, please let me know!