Here’s What Movies and Television Shows Get Wrong about Medieval Swordfights

By this point, most of my readers are probably aware that movies and television shows aren’t a very good place to get your historical information from. These works are made purely for entertainment purposes by people who generally aren’t historical experts. Consequently, they are inevitably full of inaccuracies. Even films that are supposedly based on historical events often greatly distort the history to suit their own ends. (Think, for instance, of the movie 300, which I debunked in this article from November 2019.)

In this article, I want to debunk a few common inaccuracies I have noticed seem to recur in swordfight scenes from films and television shows set in medievalesque worlds. Cinematic fight scenes are always extremely unrealistic and governed solely by the “Rule of Cool” rather than by what is actually realistically possible in a combat situation. Here are a few major inaccuracies I have noticed:

You can’t cut through plate armor.

Armor is routinely portrayed in movies and television shows as far less effective than it was in historical reality. In battle scenes in the movies, you often see people just slice through chainmail armor or even plate armor like it is nothing but butter. In the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, I noticed several scenes where this seemed to happen. Watching these scenes gives the impression that armor is basically useless.

It is obvious why movies and television shows portray people slicing through armor. Quite simply, it is because people like watching enemies get butchered. The problem is that, in reality, metal armor is actually extremely difficult to penetrate—and I mean extremely difficult to penetrate. Regardless of whether it’s plate armor or chainmail armor, there’s virtually no chance of someone actually cutting through it.

Quite frankly, there is no sword in existence that can realistically penetrate plate armor. If you swing a sword at someone in solid plate armor, the most you’ll do is dent it and even that will only happen if you happen to be extremely strong and wielding an extremely large sword.

If you want to kill someone wearing plate armor, you will have to find a gap in their armor or a place where they do not have any armor at all. Meanwhile, while you are trying to find a gap in their armor, they will be trying to kill you. A knight in full plate armor would therefore be extremely difficult to kill in hand-to-hand combat.

Even chainmail armor is actually vastly more effective than movies and television shows make it out to be. If you want to injure someone wearing chainmail, you can’t just swing a sword at them. Once again, you have to find a gap in their armor or a place where they don’t have armor.

The bottom line here is that, believe it or not, warriors in the pre-modern world wore armor for a very good reason. Armor wasn’t just a fashion statement. If armor was anywhere near as completely ineffective against swords as it is often portrayed in modern fiction, people wouldn’t have worn it.

ABOVE: Photograph of an Italian suit of armor dating to c. 1450. You can’t just slice through plate armor. Killing a person wearing a suit of armor like this one would have been extremely difficult.

You can’t just swing a sword and send heads flying clean off.

Another bizarre inaccuracy in film’s portrayal of swordfight injuries is that, for some reason, people and monsters in the movies do not seem to have any bones in their necks. In movies and television shows, you often see a warrior swing his sword and send heads just flying clean off. For instance, in season one, episode three of the American fantasy drama series The Shannara Chronicles, there is a scene where the character Alannon swings his sword and sends a Fury’s head flying clean off with a single blow.

This is not how beheading actually works, though. If you just swing an ordinary sword straight at someone’s neck horizontally while they are standing upright, the cervical vertebrae in their neck are almost certainly going to stop the sword. You’ll still probably kill them, but their head won’t just go flying clean off. Instead, you’ll end up with an only partially severed head.

When people do beheadings in real life, they don’t just swing an ordinary sword at a person standing upright. Instead, first of all, they normally use an extremely large sword or axe that is heavier than the typical sword you would use in combat. Then, before they do the beheading, they make the person bend over. Then they swing the sword or axe down on the person’s neck so that the weight of gravity will carry it down harder, hopefully giving them enough force to cut through the vertebrae.

Even then, though, beheadings aren’t always clean and, historically, it sometimes took multiple swings to take the head off all the way. Needless to say, beheadings were not something you could really do in combat; they worked fine as a form of execution, but taking off your opponent’s head in a swordfight just wasn’t really very feasible.

ABOVE: Early fifteenth-century manuscript illustration from a copy of Froissart’s Chronicles depicting a medieval beheading. Notice the executioner is using an extremely large, heavy sword, the person being executed is bent over, and the executioner is swinging the sword down, so the force of gravity will carry it.

You stab someone with the blade horizontal, not vertical.

Another thing is you often see people in the movies and in television get stabbed the wrong way. You often see people in the movies get stabbed in the chest with a knife or sword with the blade pointed vertically, but you can’t actually stab someone that way—or at least, if you do, you probably won’t get the blade in very far.

The problem is, if you just plunge the knife in with the blade oriented vertically, it will most likely be blocked by the rib cage. If you want to stab someone in the chest with the intent to kill them, you stab them with the blade horizontal so that it will go between the ribs. How do I know this? Well, my father explained it to me when I was working on a novel that had people getting stabbed in it. I am not sure where he learned it.

ABOVE: Illustration of a human rib cage

Swordfights weren’t quite so common as they are often portrayed.

As I discuss in much greater detail in this article I published in December 2019, the pre-modern world was significantly more violent and more dangerous than the world we live in today in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it wasn’t nearly as violent and dangerous as the worlds portrayed in many modern books, films, and television shows. Works of modern fantasy in particular have a strong tendency to exaggerate how common violence was in the pre-modern world.

In modern fictional portrayals of medievalesque worlds, it seems impossible to go from one town to another without encountering bandits, monsters, or other enemies that need to be fought off. Obviously, most people know that trolls and goblins didn’t really exist during the Middle Ages, but many people have gotten the impression that there must have been bandits lurking around absolutely everywhere, waiting for people to ambush and that traveling must have always been extremely dangerous.

It is true that bandits did exist in western Europe during the Middle Ages, but they weren’t lurking around everywhere like they are in modern fictional portrayals and people didn’t normally encounter them when traveling from one village to the next. In fact, it was actually quite common for people in pre-modern times to travel without being ambushed by brigands. Being attacked while traveling was something that happened occasionally; it was certainly not the norm.

The reason why occasions requiring the use of swords are so common in works of modern fiction is because having people travel from one place to another without getting attacked is seen by modern audiences as boring. Thus, storytellers always feel the need to add in some action to keep people paying attention.

ABOVE: Sixteenth-century English illustration of the legendary outlaw Robin Hood from a printed edition of the Geste of Robyn Hode. Real outlaws existed during the Middle Ages, but people were not bound to encounter them when traveling from one place to another.

Conclusion

It turns out that metal armor is actually highly effective, that you can’t just send heads flying off with a single swing of an ordinary sword, that stabbing someone requires putting the blade in horizontally between their ribs, and that it was actually quite common for people to travel during the Middle Ages without being ambushed by bandits.

A lot of these are common sense things that I imagine many of my readers may have already guessed. What you may not have guessed, though, is that that popular internet factoid about medieval staircases being designed to give right-handed defenders more space to draw and swing their swords is almost certainly false.