One deeply ahistorical aspect of most films and shows set during the Middle Ages is their extreme sanitization of combat which reduces it to child's play and thus fails to approximate anywhere near reality. To illustrate this we will here take an example from early medieval Kent.
The particular skeleton we are looking at comes from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Eccles. Labelled by Manchester as "P171" and by Wenham as "II", this was a male who at the time of death was aged between 20-25 years old. His manner of death has confidently been ascribed to combat.
Kent, as we will here call him, suffered 30 perimortem injuries to his skeleton, the timing of these known by there being no signs of healing in any of his bones. The above number does not include however many other injuries he sustained which did not come into contact with bone.
These 30 skeletal injuries were inflicted by a minimum of 18 different blows, seemingly inflicted by swords and by at least two enemy combatants. They can be divided into three broad and roughly chronological categories; blows to the arms, blows to the head and blows to the back.
Below we follow Wenham's conjectured reconstruction of our Kent's death which began with a blow to his right radius. This would have severed the flexor muscles which enable one to form a fist and so he would have become incapable of holding his weapon, his right hand now useless.
He then suffered a blow to his left elbow which would have had a similar effect, rendering him incapable of holding his shield, and another around this time to his left ulna which is a common defensive wound that results from an attempt to block an incoming blow with the forearm.
Kent now stood in the midst of battle unable to hold a weapon or shield, his arms hanging limp and drenched in blood. It was at this point, Wenham proposed, that his enemies closed in and began striking him on the head with their swords in a frenzied and extended series of blows.
Injuries 2 and 6 were likely among the first inflicted, after receiving which Kent probably lost consciousness and began falling forward. The killing blow(s) were those delivered to the back of his head which culminated in a partial decapitation and the severing of his brainstem.
However, with this being a frenzied attack occurring within a very short span of time Kent's enemies would not have immediately registered his death and so at least eight more blows were delivered along the whole of his back after he had finished falling forward onto his stomach.
No part of this death was sterile or accompanied by but a small, theatrical spurt of blood. The head wounds, Wenham singled out, would have caused "profuse bleeding" and small bits of organic material would have accompanied several swords as they were being retrieved post-stroke.
Now, as should be said not all warriors died from injuries this numerous. Another combat death at Eccles, "J0114"/"I" suffered just one injury, a single blow which nearly halved his skull. At the same time, others are known to have suffered more perimortem injuries than our Kent.
But, we need not look solely at archaeology to see the true brutality of warfare at this time. In The Battle of Maldon and the Carmen de Hastingae we read of the deaths of Beorhtnoth of Essex and Harold Godwinson respectively, both men being hacked apart and thoroughly mutilated.
The reality of death in medieval combat ought to be widely known, not for sadism but as an antidote to certain modern attitudes which conceive of the Middles Ages as that time when Lord Knobhead grew fat on cheese and wine whilst the peasants broke their sorry backs for a carrot.
A cynical attitude which sees past warrior-aristocrats as underserving of what luxuries they enjoyed is easy to hold when one's concept of their raison d'Γͺtre is informed by the simplified & sterilized depictions of modern media; almost nonchalant, unskilled, open and accessible.
Plentiful food and fine clothes, lands and titles of honor were bought at the price of abandoning all hope for a long life, so few lived to see 30 winters, and having to time and again witness horrors which lay beyond our comprehension - horrors which no cynic today could endure.
In speaking so of the horrors of war it ought not be thought that this detracts from past heroism. If anything it bolsters it, magnifies it, and commands from the modern reader with true knowledge a solemn respect for each and every man who mustered on through the heat of battle.
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