Your Odds of Surviving a Medieval Battle

Surviving a medieval battle came down to a mixture of luck, positioning, and — sometimes — surprisingly effective medical care afterwards. And the bodies excavated from battlefield graves tell a less hopeless story than you might expect.

Massed archery and, later, cannon fire worked as an early form of area weapon, filling the air with thousands of arrows or with inaccurate but terrifying blasts of fire and shot. As a result, who lived and who died often had less to do with individual skill than with being in the wrong place at the wrong moment, and high birth was no protection. An English earl was killed in France in 1453 after his horse was struck and fell on him, pinning him to the ground. A Scottish king died in 1460 when a cannon exploded beside him as he watched it being fired. And at Bosworth in 1485, the duke leading part of Richard III’s army was brought down early in the battle, a loss that may well have helped turn the day in Henry Tudor’s favour.

For those who survived their initial wounds, however, archaeology tells a more encouraging story. A mass grave from a particularly bloody Yorkshire battle in 1461 contained around fifty skeletons. One of them bore the marks of a severe blade wound to the jaw, received in an earlier fight, which had healed cleanly with no sign of infection. Someone had evidently cleaned the wound and removed the damaged tooth, and this ordinary soldier had recovered well enough to fight again — and, presumably, to die — in a later battle alongside his comrades. It is clear evidence that competent, effective battlefield surgery was not reserved for the privileged few.

Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.