petermorwood: its-spelled-maille: nicer-nowhere: Could you… could you actually fight with you
petermorwood: its-spelled-maille: nicer-nowhere: Could you… could you actually fight with your shield hanging off your shoulder like that, and with both hands free as a result? Realistically, no, you couldn’t, it’s just an easy way to carry the shield. If you look closely, you can see another strap (just below his hand,) which is where he would hold the shield when actually fighting. - mod Armet If period art is an acceptable source, yes you could - though whether this was an artistic convention, or a standard tactic, or for emergency situations, is a question I can’t answer. I’d be VERY interested to hear the opinions of re-enactors who tried doing it for real. Terminology: the long neck-strap is the guige, with the same function as a rifle sling. The shorter straps (plural) were the enarmes, arranged in various ways, and were how the shield was usually held in combat. NB - Saxon and Viking shields (also later bucklers) were held by a handle rather than by straps, with the user’s hand protected by an iron boss. AFAIK no archaeological finds - not that there are many - show rivet-holes indicating where Viking shields might have had shoulder-straps fitted, but there are incidents from sagas describing shields worn back-slung while the warrior fought with both hands on spear or axe. This carry-strap may have been secured to the central hand-grip behind the boss instead. Norman-era kite shields and some later designs also had bosses, but enarmes had come into use (their rivets often represented by dots on the front of the shield, as in the Bayeux Tapestry) and there was no longer a handle behind them. The bosses were still functional as well as decorative: these three have raised buttons or “knops” meant to focus the force of a blow with the shield in the same way as a poke from a sharpened pencil hurts more than a blunt one. Here are several medieval illustrations showing men fighting two-handed with shields slung on the guige rather than gripped by the enarmes. There’s even an example of one-handed swordplay and slung shields. Here’s the more usual way of shields carried in combat using the enarmes… …but the guige was often kept slung even then; this Graham Turner illustration is based on plenty of evidence… So basically “could you actually fight with your shield hanging off your shoulder?” is a question where YMMV. There’s plenty of visual evidence that medieval illustrators thought the answer was “yes”, but what that was based on is another matter. It’s easy to dismiss dragons and giant sword-wielding killer rabbits and knights fighting snails as symbolic or allegoric or just an imaginative monk filling in the margin or a capital letter. Other illuminations are, rightly, seen as proof of “how it was done” - mounting a horse in full armour (pretty much the same as without armour, no crane required) or getting out of a mail hauberk (loosen its neck fastening, bend over and wriggle while gravity does the rest) and so on. That’s why I’d like to hear what re-enactors - like the guy in the OP, for instance - have to say about fighting either one- or two-handed with a back-slung shield. It’s the sort of thing where the lines between HEMA, re-enactment, living history and experimental archaeology get blurred, and the result helps everyone. -- source link