How was real melee like?

[Joker86]

Hi!

My question is rather simple: how was real melee like?

Of course it heavily depends on the time period and so on, but I don't think this should stop us from trying to get a picture.

What I am interested in mainly is the cohesion while fighting. You surely all know the Bravehart battle scenes, where both armies rush full speed into each other, and then there is a huge clusterfuck and enemies coming from all sides.

Or is it more like the battle in the movie Troy, where they wait in front of their citiy walls, first repell them and then drive the Greek back? In that scene you can clearly see how they are holding some sort of line.

Of course certain tactics like Phalanx or shield wall automatically imply a certain level of cohesion. But still I'd like to know how it was percisely. Did the Normans beat on the Saxon shield wall constantly like mad men, or were they like in some distance with their own shield wall, and rather cautiously attacking with spears and so on, waiting for one of the Saxons to make a mistake and stab him behind his shield? I bet keeping distance could have been problematic with all the other guys in the back pushing forward. But did they push forward? Have people been so eager on fighting that they knowingly caused trouble for their fellows at the front by pushing them into the enemy?

I know from several reports that tactics in medieval times were basically about placing your troops at the right spot and then hoping they would wait with their charge for your command. But once the attack was released you could only wait for the outcome, without further possibilities of infulencing it.

But since many fighters tended to join medieval battles in some kind of "lances", where a knight had his squires around him (I know often parts of the lances were assigned to different units, e.g. pages joining the light cavalry and so on), I suppose at least those small groups of about 3 to 10 men kept some kind of cohesion. Once the enemy was repelled a bit they for sure regrouped, listening to the leader or his commanding "officer". Did those people at least look for after the course of the battle, and deciding where to engage next, or did they just charge headlong the nearest enemies?

You see, those are a lot of different questions with even more answers. Now does somebody of you know some reports or researches about melee, which can clarify the matter for a certain period? E.g. did the Normans support the man next to them, or was everybody just beating the part of the Saxon shield wall in front of him?

I am also interested in other details e.g. how much did your fellows care when you got hit and went down? Have people made special efforts to support their buddies, like on those illustrations when a Landsknecht was jumping into the pikes, grabbing as many of them as he could and lifting them, so his fellows could charge under them? Or similar to the battle of Rocroi scene at the end of Alatriste, where fighters "dive" under the pikes of the enemies, cutting and stabbing the defenseless pikemen, have there been Normans going down and trying to cut the feet of the Saxons, relying on their Norman fellows to protect them from blows to the back of their head?

[Kalam]

The following has no real specific academic back up whatsoever. Just some conjecture on my part.

I believe that in the Dark Ages, most fighting was kind of like, you know, how street fights are today. With weapons and the intent to kill, with a few Kings or Warlords here and there that could afford more disciplined armies. Rome and the other Empires seemed to have the cohesion and discipline for formations.

From reading Froissart and others, it seems like they just lumped fighters together according to class and role, and threw them at the battle accordingly. A lot of these accounts aren't by people who fought, however, and we all know how, to any amateur or layman, the intricacies of any profession are mostly lost. I mean...to Americans, soccer just looks like some guys chasing a ball. To everyone else, American football just looks like some guys chasing a ball.

By the time pike formations came around, though, we've got some serious traditions that started and haven't gone (which annoys me to no end) away. Modern marching drills and the like, I believe, come from organizing pikemen and later firing lines. I'm inclined to believe that two-handers and others were used as shock troops to disrupt pike lines, but who knows?

tl;dr

I too am curious to hear from someone who knows what she's talking  about.

[Malaclypse]

My guess would be terrifying.

[Zlisch_The_Butcher]

Joker why don't you like read a book or something written by someone from back then in an army?

[Smoothrich]

Running away in fear with thousands of fellow farmer redneck peasants as rich drunk racist frenchmans in full armor on horseback slash life long disfiguring scars in your face

[Joseph Porta]

I think it depends on what protection the fighters facing eachother where using.
How I imagine it would have been Figting as infantry
My guess is that they where rather fast paced, one good slash/stab and your opponent would lose a lot of his agileness and reaction, so maybe the time untill the first good hit could take a while but when the opponent is damaged he would certainly be struck down quickly.
When using heavy armor it is different i think, it either lasts long or ends very quick with a lucky KO of some sort, i also think knights with heavy plate armor would fight more recklessly(skilled & fierce but also more reckless)because pf their massive protection.

[Ulter]

  First of all, very few infantrymen would have anything more in terms of armour than a helmet an an aketon. So such a fight would certainly be deadly for the participants. It would be very very loud - hundreds of men screaming, shouting, crying. Certainly confusing, especially that sometimes the armies looked very similar (obviously there were no uniforms in medieval times ). Such battles would be blunt and dirty - no fancy fighting techniques, it was all about hitting  the enemy as hard as you could.
  Whether formations were used... it depends on the fighters. Trained mercenaries or men-at-arms would obviously be more organised that your typical levy, which could probably do little more than stay togather in a group.
Remmember that due to all the noise it was almost impossible to command during the battle. Your voice would just be lost in hundreds of screams, so most of the organising was done beforehand.

[Jarold]

I feel like the only real tactics were to either hold or charge, and sometimes flank with cavalry.

[Prinz_Karl]

  First of all, very few infantrymen would have anything more in terms of armour than a helmet an an aketon. So such a fight would certainly be deadly for the participants. It would be very very loud - hundreds of men screaming, shouting, crying. Certainly confusing, especially that sometimes the armies looked very similar (obviously there were no uniforms in medieval times ). Such battles would be blunt and dirty - no fancy fighting techniques, it was all about hitting  the enemy as hard as you could.
  Whether formations were used... it depends on the fighters. Trained mercenaries or men-at-arms would obviously be more organised that your typical levy, which could probably do little more than stay togather in a group.
Remmember that due to all the noise it was almost impossible to command during the battle. Your voice would just be lost in hundreds of screams, so most of the organising was done beforehand.

Note that plate armor wasn't just used by knights, normal infantry wore plate armour too. Also, what battles are you talking about especially? There's also many uneven battles, with heavy losses on one side only. Also I don't agree to your last point, I think they had better ways to communicate than one guy shouting to 100 guys fighting. Certainly there was some kind of trompete or drums and there also were kinds of "Adjudanten" who assigned orders to fighting parts of troops.


Generally melee fighting was as diverse as weapons of different times you could say I think, so that you have to specialize on e.g pike fighting where as considerable note gaps were between participants. In earlier stages with peasants recruited as fighters who brought their own weapons you could imagine how 1 vs 1 fights could have looked like or how peasants were sloughters by closed pike formations.

An important point are formations though that shouldn't break within the battles which would lead to disorganisation and quick quashing. An attacking army wouldn't run disorganized at the enemie but make a slow advance if they are in a closed formation. Heavy cavalry could often break these formations so that they were vulnerable to infantry attacks.
Also: "Combat was not constant, the two sides parting to rest and reorganise. This could happen several times during a combat.".

[Joker86]

Joker why don't you like read a book or something written by someone from back then in an army?

People who were in the armies at those times rarely wrote books. They actually rarely wrote at all, because usually they were not capable of.

And those people who wrote about battles, tended to glorify them, and they surely did not put any emphasis into the point of view of the ordinary infantryman and how he experienced the battle. It's about the cruel, disgusting details, and I bet nobody was interested in how precisely people hacked and stabbed each other. But this is what interests me, so I am asking. I don't really expect to find some historic ressources about that matter, at least not before the late middle ages/renaissance. But perhaps there were some researches and so on, or archeologic findings, which I don't know of.

And finally, it could help to simply imagine how it could have been, and trying to figure it out. Like "What would YOU do, if you were in the first line of a battle"?

[Christo]

"What would YOU do, if you were in the first line of a battle"?

**** myself

Probably.

It sounds really bad because you can't go back, there is a meat wall in front, and behind you as well.

At least the Romans used some rotation in their formations, if you survived the melee clash for long enough, you got swapped out before you got too tired.

How much time was it, 15-25 minutes? I can't remember.

[Joker86]

How much time was it, 15-25 minutes? I can't remember.

Wasn't it like 5 minutes?

5 minutes of fighting for your life can be enough to get pretty tired, and it makes more sense to swap more frequently to stay rested. But I could be wrong, though.

[Christo]

Yeah I really don't know if it was 5,10,15 or more minutes, just vaguely remember the time.

[Osiris]

I would suggest reading some of bernard cornwells books. The shieldwall fighting and medieval battles seem pretty realistic and brutal.

[Joker86]

I would suggest reading some of bernard cornwells books. The shieldwall fighting and medieval battles seem pretty realistic and brutal.

I did. (Azincourt, it was). Still I'd like some more reliable sources than the novels of an author who is rather bad at creating interesting characters. (He is nonetheless awesome in describing fights!)