Shield wall

The Shield Wall or Shield Castle is an infantry defensive formation. The shield castle is a compact version of the shield wall.

A second, primarily practiced by the Angles Shield Wall variant was as follows: During the first row stood and joined their broad shields to form a dense wall, kneeling behind them a second row warrior. These in turn were equipped with long pikes or spears, and put out as soon as the shield wall had been attacked in the legs of the opponent.

As a third variant Shield Wall the right side of each plate covered the left side of the shield right neighbor in the front row. Thus met the enemy, mostly right-handed, on a doubled layer plates. The men wore in the second row ( throwing ) spears, which they received a clash between two shield walls in the enemy ranks, making gaps in the other Wall arisen. Once a shield wall broke apart, the opponents were ruthlessly persecuted and attacked with javelins. This variant of the shield Walles was mostly used by the Saxons, Bretons and Normans in the fifth to eleventh century.

The actual battle line of the shield Walls was, if possible, supported from behind by throwing spears and bow. This combination with ranged weapons was lack of quantity and quality rather to distract the enemy and less for actual combat.

A weaker, but also more flexible variant turned to the Saxons in the Early Middle Ages: In the event of an attack the warriors with their shields formed a circle and took their heads or possibly present ranged in the middle. A great advantage of this formation was that you could not fall in the back the warriors, as they were protected in any direction. Since the shields were not connected to each other, the formation did not offer much protection against attacks though, but could be resolved quickly if necessary, so that the warriors could move quickly to counterattack. The protection against cavalry was not particularly good, and if the enemy soldiers could penetrate the shield wall, the defeat was very likely. Therefore, this tactic was not used long.

Today, this defensive formation is used by police in street battles that form a shield wall if they are pelted with objects during operations.

Shield castle is an old name of the sign - on Shield formation for defense or attack of federated soldiers.