I gotta go with nunchuks. Anything you sling around on a chain seems silly to me. It seems like nunchuks are only good weapons against the unarmed. Anyone else has more range, usually something sharp in play and there isn’t a limp chain in the middle reducing the force of your strikes.
The users probably said skill issue but it never looked like a good idea to me
Yeah but consider that they were commonly used on horseback. They didn’t even need to swing it that hard to wipe out someone on foot. It’s like a mega clothesline.
I think there’s debate about whether a ball on chain flail was ever actually designed used as a serious weapon in the middle ages. We know straight length weapons like morningstars, war hammers and maces were and peasants used threshing flails in revolts.
But there’s not many archaeological examples of non ceremonial or farming flails. Like a flail designed for fighting. There’s drawing in marginalia but they also draw dick trees and rabbits fighting snails.
Most evidence we have is mounted knights would use lances first, as they were longest but also easily lost or broken, then swords as they still had decent reach if you’re riding by someone, and maces if you got scrunched together against other cavalry, for short range and armour piercing.
Glad you posted those so I didn’t have to make sure I wasn’t wrong and get into a research hole
For what it’s worth, if you are fighting knight vs knight, you aren’t too worried about hitting yourself with that ball&chain on the back swing etc, cuz you got good armor.
So I bet some people used it in duels and for one on one combat, but I doubt it was much of a war weapon, simply because if you are fighting next to your friends, you’d like to not hit them on accident with your weapon.
I thought the misconception was that the chains were exceptionally long. Like even the length of the chain in the picture is kind of excessive. Also that the balls were particularly heavy. Then again I learned this almost 20 years ago, maybe it was a theory that was crumbling as I learned it.
Edit for my own childish amusement: “Pain is stored in the balls.”
A quick dive back into the research says it’s still debated but generally the rough consensus is peasants having flails would have been super common, as they were a threshing tools. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia they were somewhat present as weapons, in Western and Central Europe they would have been pretty rare (and high to late medieval period) but not unheard of. They would have been the Nunchaku of their era. Like a French knight might think it an odd choice if a peer wielded one.
This article is interesting https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9252/4/1/9
I didn’t know that. I had heard that it was mostly used as bludgeoning weapon. It always seemed like something unsafe to use that could come back at you in unexpected ways when I imagine someone using it but I guess armor must help even if it did?