now it has in fact deformed a little bit it is flesh side outward
it's just making sure that it's properly wet with glue we're covering it
and then we're on
[Music]
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to be looking at
Shields again now I did this with the lockdown Longbow my my Longbow simulator about two years
ago something like that two and a half years ago and it was interesting because this Shield here
it's made of Poplar it's about 15 millimeters thick it's got canvas and gesso inside and out
it's made basically like a 14th century Shield would have been made but what you need to know is
one of the comments at the original time was about how to make the shield more protective than it
seemed to be and a guy called Stephen Curtin came up in the comments and he told me about a recipe
that was in the Ashmolean Museum that is only only eight miles from where we are now and this
is the recipe it's a mixture of Old English and my Modern English translation take leather that is
half tanned and dry it and shave it on the flesh side and take glue with water and set that glue on
the fire and melt it with the water and then hotly apply it upon the leather on the flesh side of the
leather for and strew upon that a powder of glass and iron filings that has been mixed together
and then lay another piece of the same leather flesh side to flesh side and nail it onto the
shield and let it dry and then neither spear nor edged tool will enter therein - won't go through
how very cool is that so we actually have a recipe thanks to the Ashmolean Stephen Curtin
for how to protect the shield and to stop well it doesn't say arrows
but it says Spears and Edged tools swords axes going through this Shield
hopefully arrows, let's find out maybe not but that is the point of all these videos I
don't know you don't know we don't know don't know what's going to happen let's go find out
why do I want to find out well this is actually really quite important because
if you look again at the comments in these films people are going well your shield is rubbish the
arrows are going clean through and they did. They went through if if you just took a dry Arrow like
this which has no grease or wax upon it it goes to about 10 centimeters I think from memory two
years ago now 10 centimeters well that's enough to go through your arm because there's no other
protection here there's no steel plates there's no mail sewn in behind here you might think that
there should be but there wasn't so that would go straight through your arm 20 centimeters
well that can now start to go into your body and if nothing else 20 centimeters sticking
through the back is a massive encumbrance to where you want to move your Shield you can't
remove them I did another film on that you see me clumsily trying to cut them away with an ax
so the thing is it's not easy to work with a shield which has got great big things sticking out
you you don't want it but yet they did so I'm going to explain this recipe a bit more while
we're starting to heat up our pan here on our lovely barbecue and we're going to get all our
glue and everything up to temperature all right but it's not an episode of cooking with Tod it's
not that but don't forget todcutler.com we do loads of Cleavers cooking knives eating knives
feasting it it's all there it's all available on Todd cutler.com but that's not what this is about
this is about cooking on gas making some glue and protecting our Shield let's break this recipe down
take leather that is half tanned and dry it and shave the flesh side so half tanned leather well
some of you will be familiar with it most of you not on the left hand side we have half tan and you
can see the white core in the middle right hand side we have a regular leather and then you have
the the outer part of it and the flesh side the flesh side is quite literally
the side of the leather that was against the muscle right and the fat and that is
what in modern terms would be called the suede side so if we go back to our recipe
and you take the glue with the water and set it over the fire well
we've got our fire here and the glue well it's an animal glue it is um a horn glue
rabbit skin glue fish glue something like that but it's all basically collagen based
it's jelly in our modern world it's literally the jelly that we eat that is what animal glue is and
so you make your your jelly your animal glue you heat it up in a pan this one is an iron pan you
can see it from the rust and we'll come to that and you get it all hot and you put it up on the
leather on the flesh side so the suede side of the leather and you screw on it the powder of glass so
first of all I am not going to follow that recipe slavishly and there is a reason for this
that half tan leather is well it's difficult to deal with now if I just paint that glue on the
flesh side of here it won't penetrate the Rawhide I can promise you of that it'll take days and
days to soften that Rawhide down doing that so it won't actually adhere and be tight onto the shield
because it has its natural warps and movements so I'm going to get this properly wet so I'm going to
soak it in our glue mixture now there's another reason for that now I've done tests with it and
you can go online you can look up" cuir bouilli" and then you you see people doing it with wax or
pouring on water or oil and all sorts of things personally I think that's all Guff I think it was
done with glue and there is a very real reason for that if you're familiar with how fiberglass
is made you have these glass fibers they're not intrinsically; they're good in tension but they're
not stiff they're not strong you pack that fabric you pack it out with polyester resin or epoxy
resin that's brittle it's not strong in its own right either but you combine the two and you end
up with something incredibly tough and moldable and you sit everywhere in the modern world
if you take your collagen fibers that this leather is full of and you pack the gaps
with a brittle glue like a hide glue it basically creates like a leather fiberglass you can mold it
you can shape it it dries it becomes hard as you like brilliant stuff and I did videos on
that as well where we're looking at a hardened armor look at this that is a piece of leather
okay leather and jelly with a three ply just see what we do
and that one maybe about six millimeters through so I'm gonna wet this material down and get it
thoroughly wet and that's going to take all day now we're just going to put our gelatin in just
ordinary cooking gelatin nothing special not actually the jelly that you uh the dessert jelly (jello)
because that's got a lot of sugar in it it's mostly sugar in fact this stuff either pork or
beef gelatin put it in and now you need to get it hot bit hotter than your hand will stand but
not really hot and the thing is you don't want it really hot because otherwise it starts to break
down the material in the glue so I've just left this material now this glue for a little while
but you can see that there's a bit of steam coming off here and I think this is what the whole thing
about cuir bouilli it means boiled leather is all about is the people who drew the pictures
it's peasants (monks more likely) doing this work they're not going to go and talk to them all they see
is a big Boiling Pot or a big steaming pot and there's a bit of steam coming off here even on a
hot day you can see it maybe not on camera and I think that they just looked at it and went steam
coming off a big pot they're boiling the lever but actually the boiling of the leather it just
destroys the structure of the leather this way you make the the glue absolutely as liquid as
it'll ever be soaks into the leather when the leather cools and dries you end up with this
glue collagen leather matrix and it's tough as you like brilliant stuff again I mean I'll just
show a clip here this is genuinely just a piece of leather and I've used it to cut wood look at this
so it's chipped it sure it's chipped it but that's a fence post and this is leather I'm
going to leave this glue now to dissolve a little bit and then we're going to put the leather in it
but we're going to come to that for in a while but the next one is powdered glass I have a feeling
that I'm going to regret using powder glass but it specifically says it so I've made myself a mortar
steel not brass I don't suppose that matters I'm going to crush the glass well to a powder that's
all it says it doesn't give any indication of how big that should be small bottle s got my mortise
here we come can't help thinking a bit of health and safety might be in order
well I think I may have fallen at the first hill that is incredibly tough and there we have it so
not that powdered I'm also going to put the very noisy extractor fan on because I'm not
feeling very good about this really um anyway technique changed we'll get there in the end
getting better I guess I'm a specific really so I've smashed my glass up and I'm going to sieve
that in a minute but in the meantime now our glue is up to temperature so I'm going to start to get
this leather in now obviously it's a little bit bigger than the pan hopefully with a bit of you
can hear it now that's that is what half Tan's about it's amazing stuff so hopefully that's
all going to soften down and actually well fit in the pan sooner or later there we go so it's going
to take even at this temperature it's going to take I don't know 10-15 minutes I would thought
before I can even fold it back in it's not getting passer into a pan anyway we'll deal with that in a
bit so we're going to sift the glass now but I'm going to do that uh with my mask back on
all right it's pretty so it's a mixture of slightly larger chunks and powder pretty
much as I would expect it to come out of a mortise I'm just gonna go wash my hands now
so it's very specific here that it is iron filings and glass powder so they've really
tried to achieve something very specific with this recipe and it is a composite armor and it is many
layers so if we think about what it's going to be like if we take our shield by the time it'll be
finished you have got on the outside you've got well somewhere between a soft and a hard leather
with with the glue impregnation then you've got Rawhide then you've got the leather layer again
then you have the glass glue and iron composite layer then you've got the softer leather then
you've got the Rawhide then you've got the softer leather again then you've got 15 mm Poplar and
you've got a layer for what it's worth of canvas and gesso on the inside that is a lot of layers
with different properties this arrow, spear, axe, has got to get through I am fascinated to find out if
it works and what the hell they were getting at so I'm going to work a little bit quickly now and
so I've got Jenny here who's going to help out basically just handling things as we go through
now I'm going to take the first bit of leather out and we're going to nail it onto our Shield
now it has in fact deformed a little bit because I got it too hot that's
exactly the problem with boiling leather so we're going to see if we can take that out
so this flash side oh slimy stuff it is flesh side outward because that is the side
that we are going to stick our powder of iron and glass onto let's do the middle
of that yeah
so I'm just tacking this down at the moment and then once this is all sort of done
and in place uh let's spin that for around ah then okay I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to I've
messed up I've messed up I'm gonna have to put a cut in that to get it down back in a minute
so this is really annoying because actually it's exactly this that I didn't want to do but
I'm gonna have to put a little Dart in there that's really annoying anyway
although I suppose this is exactly the sort of problems that they would have faced but
they would have had some little boy there sitting there stirring it instead of me
who is actually going off to do some functional work anyway let's get that
so we will have to bear that in mind if we get any strikes on exactly that area there
just going to try and pin it down as best I can
so we have our leather down onto the shield now and as you can tell that was hard enough
actually even though it's softened off it's been in there for about an hour an hour and
a half so now we're going to uh smear it a glue and then we're going to stir it with
our powder as per the recipe so this is cooling down now and actually that means
that all the jelly is sort of stiffening up you can warm it over a fire a little bit
and that will warm it again but anyway now we're just making sure that it's properly wet with glue
so this is a little bit stronger than what I've soaked it in
so this is more akin to what you'd use on furniture or something like that and then
we're covering it with our mixture I don't know how to thick to do it so I suppose it's probably a
bit like you know when you're a kid doing glitter you put a load on then you shake it off and what's
off is off oh if you're British I'm just going to say Blue Peter at you you'll know exactly
what I mean right well actually that's Worthy I'll show into camera look at that for a mess
so we've got the top half of the shield which is covered in our first layer of leather and then a
layer of uh this glass and iron well mixture our next piece of leather just going to move
that well out of the way and this one we're going to nail all around the perimeter so this piece of
leather now is flat now remember according to the recipe it is flesh side inward again
so I'm just going to make sure we've got nice good gloopy glue on it thick pasty glue
and then we're on so oh I'm already getting cut right then let's go
oh God this is just one big mess I can tell you if this is actually what they did I would not have
wanted to be a professional Shield maker because you would have a million glass cuts
about to abandon the gloves can't do it everything's just gone too sticky
this is what I do for you
so I've nailed all the way around the outside but the thing is this is a sort of a dry powder
mix that's gone in and there says glue there and everything I don't know how it's going to
stand up to being jiggled about you know riding on a horse the recipe doesn't say
either but what I'm going to do is I'm gonna put in a few more Nails just to help pin it all down
and that is Jenny um Excuse me while I go and wash my hands so we've finished this stage of
our making so we have a shield which is canvas backed 15 millimeter Poplar in this case could
be lime wood both good traditional Woods for Shields but they're tough and they're
light not Oak not Ash and that means of course historically without any other armoring on it
arrows can go through I've shown that I've sewed that before with the lockdown Longbow
certainly with like Viking Shields and stuff like that they didn't do this necessarily but
again Shields are not they are not impenetrable things they help you they don't solve all your
problems this according to our 13th 14th century recipe from the Ashmolean Museum does solve all
your problems that is a big boast no spear no edged at all we'll go through this apparently
well you know what the lockdown Longbow is coming back in the 160 pound variety and the 120 pound
variety and we're going to see if it can send Longbow arrows through this but that'll be a
few weeks away yet because we've got to cover it in canvas you know I've got to get it all dressed
up I've got to get it finished as a shield but just make sure you don't miss it so sign up for
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and buy amazing stuff you will love it because it's everything that you are interested in it is
history and it is science and it is tools anyway I'll see you again another time cheers [Music]