(TFT) Re: TFT Digest V3 #581

[Mark Tapley <mtapley@swri.edu>]

At 20:45 -0500 2/26/04, Charles Gadda wrote:
> History is replete with examples of soldiers discarding burdensome and even
> useful/needed equipment, to say nothing of stuff that served no practical
> purpose, so why not ditch the pole axe if it can't do the job? Something
> just doesn't add up here.

The soldiers might have been forced to. It wasn't exactly an 
all-volunteer force. There's a description at

http://www.longbow-archers.com/historycrecy.htm

of the battle of Crecy, where Genoese crossbow mercenaries abandoned 
their weapons, which had been shown to be ineffective against the 
english crossbows in that situation, and then were ridden down and 
killed by their French employers.

I suspect that equipment, in well-organized armies, was pretty 
standardized, but with no real guarantee that the man defining the 
standard was correct.
--
					- Mark
			210-522-6025, page 888-733-0967
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