Fantasy Romance
Prince William was less skilled with swords than he was with lances, but he still selected a sword.
“Choose a lance. I want it to be a fair fight.”
“But I am taller, with longer reach-”
“So are those I will face on the battlefield. Take the lance.”
He set aside his misgivings. He’d beat her with the lance first, then practice his sword work with her.
“I did not mean to startle you,” Prince William said.
She glanced at the sun. “The fault is mine. I have exceeded my time.”
“Exceeded your time…but surely you could practice with me?”
A whisper of a frown furrowed her brow. Then she nodded once.
Everyone else had fled the training area except Prince William’s guards and a small boy dressed in too-big hand-me-downs.
His dark head was bent in concentration as he flew through a series of katas that should have been far too advanced for his age.
Prince William approached, and faster than a bolting horse, the boy spun around and knocked the lance from William’s hands.
William stared in awe, first at his empty hands, then at the child in front of him.
She was a girl.
Prince William sucked in a breath as he entered the training room and hefted his lance.
He was already strong, despite his youth. He would take after his father, the Great Unifier, in that.
His smile dimmed as he thought of how many had died during the wars. While their had been minor skirmishes and uprisings since, peace ruled most of Arendur.
Peace he had to be strong enough to maintain.
He tightened his grip on his lance.
I talked about armor here, but there’s also a lot of misconceptions about swords. Especially if you play RPGs or watch the History Channel.
Many of us have played an RPG (role-playing game) in our time, whether in video game form or tabletop. This means we’ve seen the stats on weapons and had to make sure our warrior or paladin was strong enough to wield them. While strength was important, the weights in these games and quoted on the History Channel may have been there more for game balance than representing fact.
Truth: According to the Wallace Collection Museum in London that has dozens of actual swords from the Middle Ages, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any that weighed more than four pounds. Most weighed less than three. Even the large “hand-and-a-half” swords rarely weighed more than 4.5 pounds. Large parade swords only weighed up to eight or nine pounds, but their blunt edges should be a clear sign they weren’t meant for combat.
All of these swords would be easily handled by a man who’d been training with them since the age of seven.
Some of this misconception may come from producing replica swords which are not made the same way they were in the middle ages or with the same materials. Still, it wouldn’t have taken more than a trip to a museum to prove this.
In a fencing booklet from 1746, the author talked about how heavy and unwieldy earlier swords were and stated they were designed for brute force. I can’t exclusively blame the Victorians for this one, though in the 1870s, a historian described earlier weapons as ponderous and requiring both hands.
Truth: The weapons of the Middle Ages were light, strong, and well-designed. They were agile weapons designed to kill, and they did a fine job of it. They were not clumsy or heavy. They were not “clubs with edges”. Of course they weren’t. Men had been fighting with swords for thousands of years. Improvements were made along the way. Materials got better, and so did forging techniques. Guns would eventually change warfare, but not for a long time, and when it comes to survival, humans are remarkably inventive.
Again, not sure where this came from, unless a scholar was holding a 500 year-old sword that had grown brittle with time. Swords did not regularly break in battle. Seriously. If they did, that army would’ve lost, and you can guarantee the victor wouldn’t have adopted their shoddy forging techniques.
When you step back and look at this logically, of course it makes sense that knights and soldiers of the Middle Ages had finely-crafted blades that were light, sturdy and agile. War tends to bring about inventiveness as nothing drives innovation like survival. And the funding from kings and emperors didn’t hurt, either.
While video games may show us a visually appealing truth, and RPGs struggle with game balance, the truth about knights, swords and armor doesn’t change. Armor was practical and effective. So were swords. Important things for me as a writer to know, though I wonder if it will be disappointing or unbelievable to see the mundane truth in my work. Something for me to consider.
Any other myths about the European middle ages out there we all take for granted?
Makayla stared down at the fresh graves.
How many innocents would she have to bury? How many men that she’d once called friend?
She gripped the hilt of her sword, and white fire flashed down its blade.
But she still had no answer.