There is of course the issue with using balded weapons and the person is most immune to them . They get about 3 inchs away from you and if your using a knifie they just grabe it . Blades that don;t cut you are fairly pointless . So indeed help him but be prepared to take lumps yourself ;-) .

It's fine during the day, but Soundgardening at night is not conducive to sleep.

No, no, no. Pee bleaches fabrics. How do you think the Romans got their togas so white?

I'm gonna wear my......

"He said it is falsely believed the plague, which still exists in parts of Africa and Asia, is highly infectious and so spread like wild fire during the dark ages." - says the alleged tree scientist with zero experience or credentials in epidemiology with a comet fetish.

I couldn't resist

Keep in mind though. Swords were very effective against unarmored foes, especially in the hands of a well-trained swordsman.

Yeah, that theory I just wrote out was one I read in a book whose name and title totally elude me now. (But I can link to this site which has nothing to do with the book I'm thinking of. It was old book published, I think, in the 1930s.) I'm guessing as a complete nonexpert here—

Ted's Superclub? I guess we know where Ted Raimi will make his appearance now...

It is remarkable that the complex infantry tactics the Romans invented to defeat the Hellenic phalanxes were, in turn, those that didn't work very well against heavy cavalry at the end of the Roman period. This set the stage for the rise of the knight after the stirrup was introduced.*

Actually it depends on the armor, weapon, and martial school/style of the individual. For an admittedly terrible example, if you were to actually apply fencing to lethal combat, you would want your weapon arm to be armored, since that side of your body will face your opponent and it would be unnatural to use your off…

This seems like a simple matter of economics too. Metal was expensive to produce and the skill to forge a sword was very relevant to it's effectiveness as a weapon.

I've heard that one advantage of chainmail was that while it couldn't stop blunt force, it was excellent at stopping cuts. And they knew enough about setting bones that they weren't often a deadly issue, while cuts would frequently get infected.

And it was suicide for horses to charge a pike phalanx. Horse kabab city! Which was one of the reasons why pike formations were so effective for the Swiss. Between the longbow and the revival of close formations of polearm infantry, the days of the knight were drawing to a close.

Medieval history MA here. There aren't very many that I know of, actually! It's hard because you have to remember that all of our written sources come from a very limited slice of the population, and most of them had no interest in writing about the everyday life of your average peasant.

It's not fantasy but one series that does a good job on medieval life is the "Cadfael" books by Ellis Peters, later made into a great adaptation by BBC/PBS Mystery

The biggest possible screen. IMAX, I'm hoping.

No need. A fine summation. :)

A fine analysis, but recall that some of the blow's marks were on vertebrae — he was hit from behind.