How Long Did a Medieval Battle Actually Last?
Vlad — Medieval History
265,932 views
The Battle of Towton, Palm Sunday 1461 — a snowstorm, twenty thousand men, and a mass grave that builders found under a house 535 years later. Scientists counted the wounds on every skeleton, and one thing refused to add up: why was each man struck so many times? That question cracks open the single biggest myth about medieval warfare — including the cavalry charge everyone thinks they've seen a hundred times.
Horses will not run into a solid obstacle they can see. They slow, they veer, they stop. Cavalry never won battles by smashing into intact infantry formations — it won by hitting men who were already running. Which means the devastating charge in every film requires a condition no film ever shows.
So what were medieval armies actually doing? Pushing. Two formations closing at a walk, dressing their ranks, leaning into each other, the front rank jabbing, taking a blow, stepping back into the press to be replaced. A grinding shoving match, not a churn of individual duels. And this explains something historians noticed long ago that almost nobody outside the field has heard: in most medieval battles, the winning side barely lost anyone.
This history documentary puts a clock on it. The Towton mass grave — 113 separate injuries across 27 skulls, and Towton 25, a man in his late thirties who took eight wounds to the head, five from the front that wouldn't have killed him, one from behind that put him down, and the rest delivered while he was on the ground. The Visby graves on Gotland, 1361, where 1,800 farmers died and were buried still wearing their armour because stripping the bodies wasn't worth the time. Mohács in 1526, where one army lost up to 24,000 men and the other lost 1,500.
Then the durations themselves. Crécy: the French didn't reach the field until afternoon and it was finished by midnight. Poitiers: about six hours. Ravenna: eight. Hastings was the outlier — one full day, mid-morning to dusk. Tens of thousands of men would walk toward each other, and before dinner the question of who ruled a kingdom was permanently settled.
And the strangest part comes at the end. As weapons got more lethal, battles got longer, not shorter. Leipzig, 1813: four days, half a million men. By the twentieth century there was no longer a day when fighting wasn't happening somewhere. The Hundred Years War contained perhaps a week of actual mass combat. The modern world compresses its wars into four years and fills nearly every day.
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00:00 — How Long Did a Medieval Battle Last?
00:31 — The Cavalry Charge That Never Happened
02:31 — The Towton Mass Grave
04:51 — Nobody Dies Until Somebody Runs
07:30 — Putting a Clock On It
09:12 — The Siege Nobody Films
10:41 — A Decade of War, a Week of Fighting
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#MedievalHistory #MilitaryHistory #MiddleAges
20 Comments
The Normans heavy horse charges were often against formations.
Most of these battles consisted primarily of harassment and maneuver with actually heavy fighting occurring over just a couple of days.
WWI battles did not rage at a constant pace for months. You would have weeks of waiting followed by a couple of days or sometimes a week of heavy fighting before the heavy fighting went dormant again.
Now there may be a battle along the line every day- but it would be relegated to individual sectors in a day by day basis- not along the whole front
Wild stuff.
How Long Did a Medieval Battle Actually Last?
Vlad — Medieval History
265,932 views
The Battle of Towton, Palm Sunday 1461 — a snowstorm, twenty thousand men, and a mass grave that builders found under a house 535 years later. Scientists counted the wounds on every skeleton, and one thing refused to add up: why was each man struck so many times? That question cracks open the single biggest myth about medieval warfare — including the cavalry charge everyone thinks they've seen a hundred times.
Horses will not run into a solid obstacle they can see. They slow, they veer, they stop. Cavalry never won battles by smashing into intact infantry formations — it won by hitting men who were already running. Which means the devastating charge in every film requires a condition no film ever shows.
So what were medieval armies actually doing? Pushing. Two formations closing at a walk, dressing their ranks, leaning into each other, the front rank jabbing, taking a blow, stepping back into the press to be replaced. A grinding shoving match, not a churn of individual duels. And this explains something historians noticed long ago that almost nobody outside the field has heard: in most medieval battles, the winning side barely lost anyone.
This history documentary puts a clock on it. The Towton mass grave — 113 separate injuries across 27 skulls, and Towton 25, a man in his late thirties who took eight wounds to the head, five from the front that wouldn't have killed him, one from behind that put him down, and the rest delivered while he was on the ground. The Visby graves on Gotland, 1361, where 1,800 farmers died and were buried still wearing their armour because stripping the bodies wasn't worth the time. Mohács in 1526, where one army lost up to 24,000 men and the other lost 1,500.
Then the durations themselves. Crécy: the French didn't reach the field until afternoon and it was finished by midnight. Poitiers: about six hours. Ravenna: eight. Hastings was the outlier — one full day, mid-morning to dusk. Tens of thousands of men would walk toward each other, and before dinner the question of who ruled a kingdom was permanently settled.
And the strangest part comes at the end. As weapons got more lethal, battles got longer, not shorter. Leipzig, 1813: four days, half a million men. By the twentieth century there was no longer a day when fighting wasn't happening somewhere. The Hundred Years War contained perhaps a week of actual mass combat. The modern world compresses its wars into four years and fills nearly every day.
_______
00:00 — How Long Did a Medieval Battle Last?
00:31 — The Cavalry Charge That Never Happened
02:31 — The Towton Mass Grave
04:51 — Nobody Dies Until Somebody Runs
07:30 — Putting a Clock On It
09:12 — The Siege Nobody Films
10:41 — A Decade of War, a Week of Fighting
------------
#MedievalHistory #MilitaryHistory #MiddleAges
Yes, the visuals are AI-generated, but nothing here is one-click. Every scene is built by hand, using references from the actual period — armor, architecture, clothing — and assembled frame by frame.
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