![]() The more interesting possibility is that they were figments of an active artistic imagination, and that the examples we have are artistic or ornamental. The few that we have dated to that period are authentic, but they are rare in collections because they represent a dead end. The first is that the military flail was a very late-medieval technological experiment that never really took off due to its inherent flaws. These weapons are also neither described in medieval literature or chronicles, nor are they listed in armoury catalogues. The artist certainly had quite an imagination. Dupras, says, takes its form from a horsewhip (a “goad”) instead of a military weapon.īellifortis of Konrad Kyeser, MS.1360, 10r Nickolas Dupras, an expert in medieval arms and armour. I looked at the Met’s flails with the help of Dr. To their credit, due to the questions over their provenance the Met no longer displays their flails in the museum. But history museums have been far slower, generally quietly correcting their catalogues rather than taking this particular bull by its horns. The art world has acknowledged ( and even occasionally celebrated) the fakes in their museum collections for decades now. And, the possibility that fakes can exist in museum collection sets many curators’ teeth on edge. I call this a hypothesis because I have not (and likely will never) examine every single one. My working hypothesis is that all the flails at the Met, and those in similar collections occasionally found elsewhere in the world, are, as Warner asserted so bluntly, fakes. “But wait,” you may ask, “what about those flails at the Met that you just mentioned?” This is where the story gets interesting. Also, the chain is a weak point that could break or be broken by your enemy, or find itself wrapped around their sword, or the handle of a larger weapon. Any follow-through with a flail would just make the potentially disastrous rebound hit you even harder. However, the mace, being rigid, allows the fighter to follow through the swing with their whole body. God help you if you miss, and hit yourself or the thing flies out of your hand.Īnd in terms of physics, the swing certainly gives the metal ball a higher speed than the head of, say, a similar mace. If it were to rebound, say off a shield or even a successful strike, it would be likely to hit you. In a tightly packed formation, a swinging weapon would be as likely to brain your fellow soldiers as it would your enemies. ![]() The chain and swinging ball make this theoretical weapon extremely difficult to control. The element that makes a flail unique-its chain-is the biggest drawback. Philip Warner, writing in 1968 in his Sieges of the Middle Ages was more blunt, calling all existing examples of this weapon “fakes.”įirstly, as a weapon of war, the flail is not a good design. It was likely that a weapon like this was used but was not common.” “This ball-and-chain weapon has attracted a great deal of comment from modern historians, some claiming that it existed, while others dismissing it as a fantasy. Military Historians Kelly DeVries and Robert Douglas Smith demur on the question in their book Medieval Military Technology: They have appeared in a range of medieval movies and books, and they are held in the collections of museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.ĭespite the weapon’s popularity in pop cultural depictions of the Middle Ages, the flail was almost certainly an invention of the imaginations of later people.īut, of course, it’s much harder to prove a negative- that something did not exist – than something did. Varieties of the one-handed version have multiple chains or spiked heads. This is not to be confused with a two-handed variant, often also called a flail, which derives from the threshing implement of the same name. A one-handed military flail (modern reproduction)Ī military flail is a medieval weapon consisting of a short handle attached to a chain, at the end of which is a metal ball.
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