Modern farmers cultivate the land, and many places have achieved full mechanization. In ancient times, due to the limitations of the level of scientific and technological development, the peasants were certainly not blessed to enjoy these fruits. However, the ancients were also very clever, not blindly only knowing to use the "hoe day when noon, sweat drops under the soil" style of stupid methods, but also invented and created in addition to a lot of worry-free agricultural tools. What is surprising is that some agricultural tools have even developed "cross-border", becoming the leader in the weapons industry and playing an important role in the historical process. A kind of agricultural tool of the Tang Dynasty once became the "artifact" of the Song Dynasty.
In the early days of the Northern Song Dynasty, in Guangyuan Prefecture, on the border between Guangxi and Jiaotong, there was a powerful local separatist force: the Nong family. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the power of the Nong family was passed to the nong zhi masters. Nong Zhigao was bold, shrewd and cunning, ambitious and hegemonic, and maneuvered between the Song Dynasty and Jiaotong, in a vain attempt to establish his own independent kingdom in the Guangyuan Prefecture area.
In the eighth year of the Reign of Emperor Renzong of Song, Nong Zhigao broke with Jiaotong and a fierce military conflict occurred. In order to seek patronage and foreign aid to avoid being annexed by the toes, Nong Zhigao fell to the side of the Song Dynasty and repeatedly asked the Song Dynasty for annexation. However, the conservative and cowardly Song Dynasty monarchs, fearing that they would cause war because they took in Nong Zhigao, refused Nong Zhigao's request many times.
Nong Zhigao was extremely dissatisfied with the Song Dynasty from then on, and in the contact with the Song Dynasty, he also gradually realized that the Song Dynasty was not as powerful as imagined, and it seemed to be powerful on the outside, but in fact, because of the long period of time, Wen Tian Wu frolicked, the weapons were wasted, and he was a paper tiger with strong external strengths. Therefore, in the fourth year (1052) of Emperor Renzong of Song, Nong Zhigao brazenly raised an army to attack the Northern Song Dynasty, which was called "The Rebellion of Nong Zhigao".
Nong Zhigao was a little bold and skilled in the use of soldiers, and in the initial war, Nong Zhigao was like a bamboo all the way and had the upper hand. The Song Dynasty border defense army was not prepared, "Lingnan Prefecture and County were unprepared, once the soldiers were in a hurry, they did not know what to do, and the defenders would abandon the city and escape", and even suffered defeats, lost the city and lost land, and suffered heavy losses, and the entire southeastern half of the country was shaken.
Seeing a series of emergency documents flying like snowflakes, Song Renzong vaguely felt the seriousness of the problem. Therefore, he sent Di Qing, the first-class general at that time, to take command of the Privy Councillor, to destroy Nong Zhigao. Di Qing had experienced hundreds of battles in his life and was an all-rounder in literature and martial arts, but after he led his soldiers to the battlefield in the starry night, he knew that Nong Zhigao was really difficult to deal with.
The fighting style of Nong Zhigao's troops was very different from that of the Central Plains Army, and their main combat weapons were only two types: javelins and rattan cards. When the two sides fought at a distance, the Song army shot arrows at them, and they densely listed the rattan cards, and the arrows could not hurt them at all. When they counterattacked, they would throw the javelins in their hands to the Song army camp, and the sharp and swift javelins fell from the sky, often killing people with one shot, and even a shot through two or three was not uncommon.
When the two sides fought in close combat, in the face of song sabers and guns, Nong Zhigao's army held a rattan card in his left hand and rotated like a fly to protect his body, and held a gun in his right hand to stab, often able to inflict heavy casualties on the Song army. In the face of the unique tactics of Nong Zhigao's army, Di Qing racked his brains and finally found a sharp weapon to crack Nong Zhigao's rattan javelin army: iron flails.
The so-called iron flail is a kind of Qimen weapon that is not very commonly used, and it actually belongs to a kind of double-knuckle stick. The main body of the iron flail is a five-foot-long thick wooden stick, wrapped in iron at both ends, and one with an iron chain of about thirty centimeters long. At the other end of the chain, a short stick wrapped in iron and inlaid with wolf's tooth nails is attached. The biggest feature of the iron flail is that it will "turn", hit the opponent hard when attacking, and the other party can only block the long stick whether it is covered by rattan cards or weapons, and the short stick on the other end of the chain will change direction due to inertia, hitting the opponent's head or other parts of the body, which is the best choice to resist nong Zhigao's rattan army.
The Zeng Gong Ji records that "Di Qing had already sent two thousand horse troops out of the rear of the enemy and attacked back and forth. The thief's sign army clashed with the horse army, and the sergeant attacked it with iron flails from his horse, and they were all invincible." Nong's high-ranking rattan javelin army could not resist this kind of bending iron flail, and it suffered a big defeat and loss, and from then on it collapsed for thousands of miles, and finally it was suppressed. The Iron Flail became famous in world war and was regarded as the "artifact" of the Song Dynasty.
The original use of this iron flail was a literal farm tool. The Tang Dynasty's Tongdian clearly records that the initial function of the iron flail was "peasants beating grass with it", and farmers used it to beat wheat and rice for threshing. Because it has the characteristic of "turning", it is valued by the army and became famous in the Song Dynasty's counterinsurgency war.
References: History of the Song Dynasty, Zeng GongJi, General Classics