Dr. Bret Devereaux

Serried here means close order.

That does not necessarily mean shoulder to shoulder, as is often assumed.

Part of the shoulder to shoulder assumption here is from...

gunpowder warfare, where the concern was in a musket formation, you wanted as much firepower per unit of width as possible.

And so you really did pack the guy shoulder to shoulder.

But if you're fighting with spears and swords, you need enough space to move your body, move your hands, and so on and so forth.

And so the normal spacing for kind of a shield wall, you probably want to think somewhere between...

70 to maybe 90 centimeters per person in terms of total total width maybe even a little bit more than that the the key for the shield wall is not necessarily that your shields are all touching although they may be but that because you have a big shield that covers your body and there's a guy to your right and a guy to your left nobody can go around you

And so the protection of your flanks is not necessarily immediate and physical, although again it can be, but as much that the space around you is occupied in the sense that an enemy who tries to move through the interval between you and your mate to your right is going to get stabbed.

Yeah.

And so that's what protects your flanks.

And then your big dumb shield is protecting your front.

And so that's kind of what you want to think.

The other thing that Hollywood loves to do with shield walls is stack them vertically.

Yeah.

Like have the second ranks, like put their shields over.

No chance.

That is not a fighting formation.

The Romans do something sort of kind of like that with the testudo where they make like a little box of shields.

That is a siege warfare formation.