Quote Originally Posted by fusilier View Post
Galloglaich -- I agree with you on Osprey books, but it was the only book at hand that addressed the subject of pavises.
Well, fair enough but it's rather thin soup. It's also (as much as I like that particular one) a fairly old Osprey book.

What are you basing your assertion on? The fact that there are some survival examples from roughly that time period? Some period drawings? Are those surviving examples statistically representational? Are the contemporary drawings even accepted to be accurate?
I'm basing it on a lot of research on the Swiss, detailed accounts of the battles, reading may books on Medieval warfare, many hours of discussions with other well informed people about Medieval warfare both in person and on HEMA forums and on websites like Myarmoury which specifically deal with kit, and from personally visiting places like Grandson castle, Bernisches Historisches Museum in Bern, the Landesmuseum in Zurich, and other smaller sites (little castles and Churches) where they have a lot of the weapons and battlefield loot from Switzerland's military heyday, which was all 14th-16th Century pretty much.

And the fact that there are 'some survival examples' from not only the same time period, but that they are from same specific series of (late 15th Century) battles you referred to (in the case of three of the images I posted) which I happened to know were at that museum because I'd been there a long time ago.

I see no reason to believe either -- period pictures could be based upon older works of art, and idealized reconstructions, and museums are often crammed full of ceremonial arms and armor that were never used in battle. That's often the reason the items have survived.
Well do a little reading on this particular museum. It is a collection of artifacts recovered from the battles with Charles the Bold in the Burgundian wars, mostly the battle of Grandson in 1476 and the battle of Nancy. They have all his banners, and the pointy shoes of hundreds of his knights, among other things. The museum in Bern had his gold or silver bathtub, which was also captured in the same war.

http://www.myswitzerland.com/en/le-c...-grandson.html

Finally, there's no claim that pavises weren't used at all during the conflict, just not in open warfare. If you want to refute that claim, I would like to see some reliable evidence.
I don't suggest that I can definitely prove it to you here and now, the books I know of which discuss Swiss battlefield organization in that kind of detail aren't available online I don't think (I may check later) and it would take some time to go read through them, find and transcribe relevant passages sufficient to make an airtight case that could convince you.

But I am convinced myself of this and I think I've supplied sufficient counter evidence with some Swiss (and Burgundian) pavises from the period in question. Readers of the thread can make their own decisions, maybe I'm right, maybe you are, maybe we are both wrong. I think the main purpose of this thread is to provide information, which I've tried to do, not to win arguments.

And also on the larger picture - the issue of whether pavises were still widely in use in the 15th Century (and that their use peaked in the 15th). If you look at that excellent Myarmoury thread linked upthread here, you'll note most of the dozens of pavises they depict there are from the 15th or early 16th Century. The reason I believe they were still in use generally in Europe is that the Bohemians who we know used the hell out of 'em, were widely deployed as mercenaries from Northern Poland to southern Hungary. They were the basis of the Hungarian Black Army which I mentioned (and linked to) before, that was one of the biggest military players in Europe at that time.

The real question to me is, why, how did they work. The Bohemian ones used a special construction based on Lithuanian shields, with the central rib and so on, and they all seemed to be made of some kind of composite material of resin, sinew and linen over thick wood (soft fibrous wood, apparently willow in some cases) which may have acted like some kind of modern composite material or it may have just been like the older pavises, in which case you have to wonder how they protected against guns and recurves and heavy crossbows. But one thing I've learned from researching all this stuff, is that these people seem to have known what they were doing more often than not. The image of the ignoramus "Medieval Caveman" that we always see on TV doesn't hold up well in the historical record.

But to me, this is still something of a mystery.

G