Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "Modern History TV" channel.

I'm American, so maybe it's a different frame of reference, but aside from that one downed tree, that bit of woodland looks a lot less dense and a lot more manicured than the woods I'm used to. The trees are very widely spaced apart and there seems to be very little undergrowth. I've spent time in the woods from New Hampshire to Tennessee, and it's all more dense than that. But I imagine that in an era where military tactics largely involved fighting in formation with spears, or with archers shooting volleys of arrows, those woods could create an issue - for the archers especially. Generally, you don't want stuff getting between your projectile and its target, it just slows the projectile down and/or knocks it off course.
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The sound of black powder firearms, in my experience, is not as loud as modern ones. The fact that they were inside amplified it.
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I was going to point out the thing about the redtail. I see them all the time in the Eastern US. They are magnificent birds. And I saw a Harris hawk in that idiotic Last Kingdom show. Yeah, didn't know Southwestern American hawks were running around Anglo-Saxon England. Then again, that show got just about everything else wrong, too...
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I read that same poem, translated differently, and it immediately sprang to mind when I saw this video
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@husarodelrey2159 If you have any interest and/or knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history, yeah, it's that bad. Besides the ridiculous weapons/armor/costumes, they make Alfred the Great into a giant pussy. I only made it through a couple of episodes before quitting in disgust. It's at least as bad as that asinine Vikings show.
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@larryslemp9698 Literally everything in those shows are wrong. From the idiotic costumes to the thoroughly debunked "shieldmaiden" nonsense to the idea that late 8th century Scandinavia was feudal to the attitudes about slavery and religion....aside from the ships, which were well done, everything else is very clearly based on stereotype instead of reality and is often just made up out of left field.
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Some years ago, I read a book called "How the Irish Saved Civilization", that was mostly about Irish monks preserving Christianity and literacy in the British Isles during and immediately after the Anglo-Saxon invasion and conquest. The one thing I really remember about it was that in some book that was meticulously copied by some monk, presumably Irish or of Irish extraction, there was a little poem written in the margins about how the monk hunts words while his cat, Pangor Ban, hunts mice
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@larryslemp9698 Because it's a fantasy show that claims to be a history show.
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@RaizanMedia He treats his slave as an equal, which is ridiculous. As for religion, he talks about someone getting executed and going to Valhalla, which is just a misunderstanding of what Valhalla is, and then there were these weird priests that honestly I don't remember much about because I only saw a few episodes a very long time ago, but I remembered that it was one of those "this is insulting to my intelligence" things where they made it clear that no research was done whatsoever.
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A collaboration between a serious historian and Joerg Sprave, the crazy German genius who might just be a Bond villain? Oh fuck yeah, sign me up. Show me its features.
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@husarodelrey2159 I didn't realize that there were books it was based on though. Based on what I saw of the show, I wouldn't want to read them. But it could just be a very poor adaptation.
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Ha, same thing happens today. Just mention the word "forward assist" in the right circles, and you'll have an argument on your hands (for the record, they're good).
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Makes sense that they'd have less cavities. Aren't cavities often caused by excessive sugar consumption? Medieval people ate a lot less sugar than we do.
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I've had cats my whole life, and never had a problem with mice or rats
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@ragnkja Makes sense I suppose. It may be expensive, but you get a lot more use out of it than a candle which lasts a couple hours.
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I wonder how much this stuff would apply at full speed in an actual fight. The closest relevant experience I have is in the Marine Corps, where the martial arts program teaches you a bunch of moves that can be diagrammed out in manuals, but then as soon as you get in an actual fight, even for training purposes, most of the diagrams go out the window - some of the fundamentals you learn may still apply, but the more elaborate the moves, the less likely they are to work at full speed when the other guy wants to get you and avoid getting hit himself. Unfortunately, I see no safe and ethical way to determine this, and these manuals, as imperfect as they are, appear to be the best we've got.
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@husarodelrey2159 I may have to check them out. If you're interested in historical fiction about that era, I'd recommend The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson. I don't generally read a lot of fiction, but I've read that book about once a year over the past 20 years or so.
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19 miles a day on horseback is nothing. I've done 25 miles in one day, on foot, carrying heavy weapons and gear, because sometimes the Marine Corps can be miserable. But that's doable, if not fun, on foot - and on horseback it ought to be a breeze.
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This doesn't show much per se, but it does somewhat point out how the English system of measurements is far more rational than the metric system. An inch in the length of a knuckle. A foot is self-explanatory. An ell is the length between the tip of a man's fingers and his elbow. A yard is the length of a belt. And so on, English measurements are based in reality, as opposed to the arbitrary metric system.
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@nutyyyy Interesting that they sound louder when they're loaded than with blanks. With modern firearms, I've noticed the opposite. That being said, having shot on ranges next to people shooting black powder muzzleloaders, modern firearms are significantly louder. I imagine it has to do with the much more rapid gas expansion from smokeless powder, but physics isn't my strong suit.
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Weren't lances more or less single use? After the initial shock of a cavalry charge, it seems to me that a lance would immediately lose its usefulness and be discarded if it wasn't broken or stuck into someone.
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The difference was that these people trained and conditioned for it their entire lives. Training and conditioning are extremely important. I was in the US Marine Corps. I was extremely well trained and extremely well conditioned. I went to war in Iraq, which is disgustingly hot during the summer - well over 120 on most days. While the armor I wore there was neither metal nor fully encasing as 15th century medieval armor was, it was still heavy and didn't breathe at all. That was about 14 years ago. If you put me in the same environment in the same equipment now, over a decade after having left the Corps, I'd probably drop dead. But at the time, I could bear it, because I was trained and conditioned to do so. It was always miserable, it never got anywhere approaching comfortable, and the helmet that I wore there, which I still have, has salt stains on the liner from the sweat. There are other tricks as well, besides just conditioning and training. A good one having something wet wrapped around your neck - this cools the carotid arteries and thus the blood flowing into the brain, and can make a very big difference. I wouldn't be surprised if people back in the middle ages figured this out as well, and it seems to me that it would be easy enough to do even in armor (the flak jackets we wore had a high armored collar, and this didn't hinder it). Of course, drinking lots and lots of water is also key.
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@ModernKnight I imagine that staying near water sources was key. I'm not a historian by any means, but I understand that Saladin's victory at the Horns of Hattin was at least partially attributable to the Crusader army not staying near a water source and being very low on water. Also, I don't exactly know when the campaigning season was in the middle ages. The only two battles I can think of the dates of offhand are Hastings and Agincourt, both of which took place in October when heat wouldn't have been as much of an issue. A fall campaigning season, especially if you have professional armies/mercenaries who don't need to go back to their farms might make more sense than the height of summer. Another interesting thing to mention would be the relative rarity of pitched battles in the middle ages, with siege warfare being more common. It seems to me that the problems of fighting in full armor in heat would be mitigated by sieges as opposed to open battle.
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Wasn't the idea not to kill the other guy but to capture and ransom him? Especially if he's the type of guy who can afford decorated armor.
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The only thing I use Saran wrap for is for cat food. My cats won't eat a whole can, so I wrap it up and put it in the fridge. Since the medieval world also lacked canned cat food and refrigerators, I think I'd have survived without Saran wrap. Also, wasn't beeswax highly expensive? Could your average person afford beeswax for something like that?
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Hey, having a cup of tea afterwards wouldn't be period appropriate.
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@SonofSethoitae Yeah, but that isn't tea. He's English, you know what he's talking about when he says tea. He doesn't mean chamomile. Steeping plants in water is a technique that's probably older than civilization. It's how you make beer, too. But the tea plant, the one that life in Britain apparently revolves around, wasn't introduced until much later.
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@SonofSethoitae ...which in and of itself is a form of condescending pedantry.
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The whole "beer was safer than water because it was boiled" thing is also false for another reason: most medieval beer wasn't boiled. Most of the reason that we boil most beers these days is to take advantage of the alpha acids in hops, which were not a particularly common beer ingredient at the time. Boiling also has a couple other advantages, like concentration and caramelization, but isn't at all necessary to create an excellent beer. I've drank and made many no-boil beers that I quite enjoyed. Now, today, when making a no boil beer, we pasteurize it by raising the temperature of the wort to 180° and holding it for 10-15 minutes, but during the medieval period, this would not have been done. This is not to say that no medieval beer was boiled, some certainly was, but the vast majority of beers consumed by the vast majority of people would not have been.
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@EvidensInsania I'm not so much concerned with that as with the efficacy of this kind of stuff when the other guy is fighting back instead of just allowing you to demonstrate moves.
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Special forces do not use crossbows today. They use suppressors and subsonic ammunition if the need for quiet arises - though this does more to preserve their own hearing and facilitate easier communication between team members than it does to hide their presence from the enemy. In reality, if you're under attack by the SEALs or SAS or whatever, you're going to figure it out rather quickly one way or another, and they know that, and so they're gonna come in armed with something like suppressed HK416s that are accurate, reliable, and have 30 round magazines instead of a bulky crossbow that takes up space and is essentially useless after a single shot.
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That isn't a red dot. A red dot is something entirely different, it's a one power optic where the reticle is a red dot (or something similar) that is projected on glass - you put the dot on what you want to hit and shoot. Think Aimpoint and (the far superior) EOTech. A laser projects the dot onto the target. It's an entirely different, and far less reliable, sighting system.
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Modern tank armor isn't sloped so much for deflection (though that is an added bonus, especially for certain types of warhead fuses) as for weight savings. The same piece of armor is thicker when at an angle, there is more material that a weapon must penetrate when the plate is at an angle than if it was just upright at 90 degrees. With sloped armor, you can thus get the same desired thickness while reducing the weight of actual material that needs to be welded onto the tank, giving you the best of both worlds.
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That plate is TINY. If that's what the British Army is taking to war, someone needs to get on the Ministry of Defense, because that is not acceptable armor. It ought to be big enough to cover most if not all of the vitals, not just the heart. And indoor shooting ranges suck. Shoot outdoors, the experience is better in every way. And no, that isn't an AR15. That is a very sad invention of necessity, because British gun laws are draconian and absurd. It looks vaguely like an AR, but the British government has arbitrarily declared that its subjects may not own an actual AR, because they fear a populace of free, armed citizens. It's very sad that this is the case anywhere, and especially so in Britain, the nation where the notion of human rights was born.
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I think I'll stick with my modern rifles.
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