Instruments of Death

With families at war with each other and a monarchy fighting to survive, conflict in 17th century England reflected the times - brutal and unforgiving. With the decisive battle of Naseby as its backdrop, this first episode in the series demonstrates some of the deadly new weapons of the age including first hand tests with real flintlock muskets and mortar bombs, while Karl Ude-Martinez is shown how the wounds they inflicted were treated.

Towton was the single bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil - it's believed that 28, 000 men were hacked to death in a single day. The Lancastrian and Yorkist armies who stood toe-to-toe in pitched battle that day were armed with deadly Longbows and Crossbows, Falchion Swords and Pole Axes; we'll see the weapons and the damage they did here, along with a new weapon that appeared on battlefield at that time - the hand cannon. We'll also hear about the rudimentary battlefield medicine of the day.

1066 is perhaps the most famous date in British history and Hastings the most famous battle. The winner-takes-all clash between the warriors of William Duke of Normandy and King Harold's Saxon army is a bloody tale of Danish battle axes, Saxon shields and Norman lances. How effective was chain mail against blows from swords and daggers? We'll find out in this episode, with real life experiments using weapons of the age, which is presented by Karl from the battlefield itself.

The Roman Army was the best equipped, best trained and most fearsome fighting machine of the age. When the united tribes of ancient Britain rose in revolt under the charismatic Iceni Queen Boudicca, it was fully put to the test before achieving final bloody victory at Watling Street in AD61. In this episode, Karl Ude-Martinez gets to use a Gladius sword and a Pilum spear, to test Roman armour and to hear how tactics were developed to inflict the worst possible wounds on the enemy.

This episode features a real first - an examination of the recently discovered remains of what is believed to be an English redcoat, with the musket ball that felled him still lodged in his ribs. Karl presents this episode from the field of Waterloo - the battle that decided the fate of an entire continent and saw the final defeat of the despotic Emperor Napoleon. This was the age of the British Redcoat army, so brilliantly commanded by The Duke Wellington. We'll watch as Karl shoulders the famous Brown Bess musket, sees the effects of the cannon and the grenade and gets some idea of what it was like to face a Napoleonic cavalry charge.

"Two years in the making, ten minutes in the destroying" was famously said about the Pals and Chums battalions that went into battle on the first day of the ill-fated Somme campaign on July 1st, 1916. That day alone saw 60, 000 British soldiers become casualties and the Somme has come to epitomise the waste, horror, and futility of the Great War. Karl visits the scene of the battle in France, demonstrates the machine gun, the Lee Enfield rifle, and looks at the terrible effects of poison gas.