Steel and Skill: Medieval Arms and Armour

The training, the fight books and the weapons behind knighthood: what a young squire had to learn and how long it took. Finishes with supervised hands-on handling and Q&A. Ideal for schools, families and general audiences.

From the sickle-sword and the battle axe to the composite bow and the chariot, this talk explores how ancient Egyptians fought. It draws on tomb paintings, surviving weapons and battle accounts such as Kadesh, and looks at the wrestling and stick fighting shown on tomb walls at Beni Hasan, a tradition that still survives in Egyptian tahtib today.

Buckles, arrowheads, chape fragments and sword furniture: how to recognise military finds, date them and understand the people who dropped them. Built for metal detecting clubs and archaeology societies.

The sword didn’t vanish with the machine gun. The Japanese gunto, the Chinese dadao and the klewang all saw use in the Second World War. This talk looks at who carried them, how they were used and why they lasted so long.

How Rome’s soldiers used the spear, and what the written sources, archaeology and practical reconstruction tell us about its place on the battlefield.