Warriors course progress report

At last I've found a suitable Arthurian text for my course book, a week before I have to send it to the book store for photocopying (not that I'm holding it up as a model of Arthurian scholarship, but it's a nice piece, and a model for the kind of essays I could ask my students to write).

I've also been trying to think of things I could do with The Battle of Maldon beyond asking students which translation they prefer. I'm toying with an idea from a BBC documentary I watched back in England, where they train random members of the public to make a shield wall. Now what would be fun, since I have two sections for this course, would be to train one class to make a shield wall and the other to break a shield wall. The problem is that I need:

(a) around fifteen shields (maybe I could get my students to steal all the dustbin lids on campus);
(b) a way to simulate the kind of attacks that are used to break a shield wall without risking breaking any bones.

In case anyone's interested, the normal procedure is (in order)

1. arrows;
2. javelins;
3. throwing axes;
4. two-handed axes.

For variety, you can send in a few berserkers.

Wow, I've just got another idea for a lesson - have my students eat fly agaric, rip off their clothes and try to kill anything within reach!