Far as I know, flails as depicted weren’t really used in war. They may have showed up in tournament fighting, but not war. The flails that did get used in real battlefields were pole weapons. Long shaft like five feet or so, very short chain that’s essentially just a hinge, then a sort of long head something like 18" that may have had spikes or bumps.

Talhoffer wrote a manual for them, calling it a peasant flail. It has a lot of wonky binds that I would conjecture probably didn’t get a huge amount of use outside duels. In war, it was probably mostly overhead bonk attacks. Fighting against these things in a duel is a real bitch though. A skilled user can shower you in weird bullshit that’s hard to predict or handle and can’t really be done with anything else. There’s a ready stance where you hold it head-down and lean on it.

Here’s a video by historic arms manufacturer Todd Todeschini and historic martial arts teacher Matt Easton on chain flails:

https://youtu.be/Dc2wBq8JL_Y

I think the chain should be the length of half the width of your opponents shield, or thereabouts. That’s just me guessing and I’m no nerd about medieval warfare.

Flails are apparently kinda shit but prolly work against shields.

I’m going to risk there is none.

Many hand to hand combat weapons were bespoke to the user.

Using an example I’m fairly familiar with:

In Portugal, we have a martial art called jogo do pau. It uses a simple wooden staff. Today’s schools insist the staff has a standard lenght, width and shape.

An old school practitioner I had the pleasure to meet taught me the staff was always made to fit the wielder, not the opposite.

As a general guide line, it should have the lenght of the distance from the wielder’s armpit to the ground but there would be people that prefered longer or shorter staffs. Some people would prefer thinner staffs, nearly cylindrical in shape, others would prefers heavier, thicker, almost eliptical in profile. The amount of customisation and variation capable of being put into the weapon itself was so diverse, it made each staff unique.

I’d risk this same logic would apply to more classic weapons, like the flails you ask about.

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-v-just-flailing-about-flails/](The optimum is no chain at all).

A flail is a really bad weapon. The chain makes it difficult to control, puts you at great risk of hitting yourself, while not giving you any reach advantage. Real flails were medieval agricultural tools that were sometimes used as improvised weapons, but if you had access to an axe or spear, you would use that. If you have a big spiky ball of iron, it’s much more effective to put it at the end of a rigid wooden staff and whack people with it that way; in other words, a mace is strictly better.

That said, real chain-based weapons do have their uses. The lkusarigama is made by attaching a sickle to a wooden handle with a long chain. It is used to entangle and disarm your opponent, at which point you can close in and slash them with the sickle end. Since it involves swinging a sickle on the end of a long chain, it would never be used in pitched battle lest you hit your comrades, and in any case spears are more useful when armies clash. However, kusarigamas were quite handy in one-on-one combat; since they were easy to conceal and could be disguised as agricultural tools, they were primarily used by ninjas and city guards

So to give an answer to your question, if you’re going to use a chain-based weapon, the optimum length is long enough to completely wrap around somebody. And in that situation, you want a fairly light, small business end, not a big metal ball.

My out of my butt possible explanation to the chain is to preserve the strength of grip because if you’ve ever hit something really hard with a solid object like a bat against another like a pole or rock, or even a bad contact with a baseball the vibrations from the impact can be painful and reduce your strength, sometimes causing you to drop the bat. Dudes might’ve had some thick gloves though to probably stop that though.

Also another butt idea, it may also preserve the condition of shaft overall because it wouldn’t be experiencing a lot of impact pressure either, only from blocking I guess and the general wear and tear of the attachment of the chain to shaft thing and the tug of swinging that bitch around.

I could also see it as an over the shield lever point where the shaft strikes the top of your opponent’s guard and the ball and chain fall down upon them.

Thanks for coming to my butt talk.

(I edited a spelling mistake. If anyone cares about edit stuff.)

Not an expert, but logically the shorter chain makes it easier to handle and relatively more precise.
A longer chain however, allows for a greater swing, resulting in a much heavier impact.
That however can also be achieved using a heavier ball on the flail. But that makes it heavier to lift and carry.
Using multiple balls however seem counterproductive, as it will make the flail harder to use compared to the impact you can achieve.
I suppose the idea is to make it harder to defend against, but if the defender has a shield, I think multiple balls are utterly inefficient.

So as far as I can tell there is no single optimal balance. It depends on the persons strength and agility, and I suppose it also depends on what type of enemy it should be used against. For a heavily armored opponent, a longer chain will be better to smash hard against the heavy armor, and the armor will make the opponent relatively slower to avoid attacks.

In short I think the bottom left or the one above seems best all round, if you want something more precise, other weapons will probably be preferable.
The best would probably be the bottom right, but with one of the balls and chains from the top left.

An advantage with the chain is to avoid a hard hit straining your hand and wrist. And that part can also be achieved with a short chain. But the chain also has the function that it can pass a defense that would block a cane. If you block the chain, the chain will bend and allow the ball to continue a short distance further. With a shorter chain the flail is easier to defend against.

This is the kind of question I subscribed for

Are those called flails? I’ve always assumed if a word is the same in french and german, it must be the same in English. I thought they would be called morgenstern or maybe morning star.

Flails are weapons for demonstration, not real fighting. Use a mace or poleaxe instead.

You want the chain to be just long enough for the spike ball to swing back and smash your hand

Imo bottom right gives ypu the most control to bashing damage ratio

Having played with my friend’s nunchucks in high school, I suggest long enough for the pointy bits NOT to reach your own forehead.

Depends on the task, I’d say. Are you trying to execute a combatant in the arena? Or are you trying to self flagellate?

In my (non expert) opinion, the chain should be shorter than the distance of the handle to the end of the stick. Otherwise you risk pulping your knuckles with a stray flail head.