Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[John Conyard]

With respect there is a substantial part of the population that would discount British cavalry using the contos or recurve bow. Germanic pagan Swanton class B 1 spearheads with a square profiles may have been used by some Roman cavalrymen. But it is no super weapon.

Using Jarman's translation of Y Gododdin, Mersey did an analysis of the text and military word usage.

So for example shields are mention 24 times, and broken shields 12 times. Armour is mentioned on 12 occassions, mail on 4 occassions, a curiass once, and there are no mentions of helmets. Nor are bows or arrows mentioned. Horses get 36 mentions, but a saddle is mentioned only once.

So we are back to an heoroic age of cavalrymen riding small horses/ponnies, often with no saddles, with spears, javelins and the occassional sword. No helmets, but the use of mail and perhaps other types of armour.

Vegetius gives us measurements for the spiculum. A long metal component 9 Roman inches long (200mm) is attached to a shaft 5.5 Roman feet (1628mm) in length. In archaeology the size of iron head varies. My reconstruction of the South Shields find weighs 665g. Beneath the barbed head, lies a thin shank. The weight of the weapon, and the narrow cross section of the head, insures it can piece shields, armour and flesh. Once the head cuts through a shield, the thin shank slides through the wood penetrating up to the wooden shaft. On contact with a hard surface such as the ground the shaft often bends. After the spiculum comes the verutum, or light javelin. This is an inexpensive weapon designed to saturate the target area. It is a very simple weapon, made from a single triangle of iron formed around a wooden shaft. It is likely that both weapons were not given a hardened cutting edge. A wrought iron cutting edge can be as sharp as that of hardened steel, but will not hold its edge as well. But since these weapons were disposable they only had to hold their edge for a short time. It is very easy to straighten and even reshape wrought iron when javelin heads get damaged. A file and sharpening stone would be important implements to carry. Vegetius describes these weapons as having an iron head 5 Roman inches (114mm) long, with a shaft of 3.5 Roman inches (1030mm) in length. Such examples vary in weight from 325 -350g. Of course these are Roman weapons.