ALL Medieval & Renaissance POLEARMS or Staff Weapons CATEGORIZED

let's look at every single medieval pole arm ever used hi there i'm mati son of scholar gladiatoria and my specialism is antique weapons historical warfare and things like this and i teach historical european martial arts as well so in my channel i have often talked about lots of different medieval poll arms which are featured in well archaeologically surviving examples you'll find them in museums and castles and places like that but equally they're featured in medieval art and in fact some of the more unusual ones uh we don't have any surviving examples of but we see them in medieval arts so we sort of know about them and sometimes they're written about in historical texts as well and described and named so what we're going to attempt to do in this video is run through every historical pole arm that we know about or at least most of them main ones i might miss a few of the really weird exception ones the ones we don't know names of i'll mention a few weird ones at the end but we're going to certainly try and hit all of the main ones i hope i won't miss any now before i go on i just want to quickly mention that this video is sponsored by one dream who were formerly known as the great courses plus an absolutely insanely massive resource for learning if you want to learn online from the comfort of your own home on your pc or your tablet or your mobile phone you can listen to lectures by top lecturers about all sorts of subjects but we're going to hear a little bit more about that further on in the video so medieval poll arms now before i start running you through the list and i'm going to try and be as concise as possible regular views on my channel will know that's a struggle for me but i'm going to try and be concise as possible i have to mention namings so the fact is we're going to talk about lots of names many many names here that probably you won't have heard of even people who think they know about medieval warfare and weapons may not have heard some of these names in fact i'm sure not all of you will have heard all of these names some of them i hadn't even heard before until recently but names are complicated when we're talking about medieval weapons because what those people over there called a thing those people over there might have had a different name for it and indeed complicating things even further those people might have had a name for that object at that date but 20 years later or 100 years later they may have had a different name for it conversely at the same time we sometimes find that the same weapon can be known by different names or sometimes the same name can apply to different weapons so naming of medieval and renaissance weapons in fact across a lot of historical periods is very very problematic i might touch on that briefly for some of these specific weapons as we go through and also just to briefly define what do i mean by pole arms or pole weapons well we're not going to talk about quarter staffs so much because they're not really featured very much in warfare although they're undoubtedly a weapon of civilian self-defense but essentially we're talking about weapons that are on some form of long shaft or stick or half whatever you want to call it a pole okay so we're not talking about shorter things like swords and short maces and stuff like this we're talking about long things that are usually almost as tall as a person or in some cases much much taller than a person so these are known as pole arms or pole weapons so first up the one of the most important weapons throughout history across the world whether you go from australia to north america to europe to anywhere else even though we're only looking at medieval european weapons here is the spear and obviously we have to talk about the spear first now the spear comes in many many different forms and i i could make a whole dedicated video just talking about spear types god if we looked at different places around the world we could have a whole series of videos possibly even a whole channel so we're just simply going to classify the simple spear here sometimes you can have heads that are longer or shorter or broader or narrower you can have different cross sections everything ranging from flattened diamond section to almost a flat section lozen section all the way through to almost square sections so sometimes you have a mid-rib sometimes you have a leaf-like blade very thin edges on it sometimes it's pretty much a thrust only weapon sometimes it has a little bit of cutting potential to it but fundamentally spears um of various designs of head and we'll look at more specifically odd spears in a minute have been around since antiquity and certainly were around throughout the middle ages and a very very important weapon now apart from the exact design of the head if we talk about simple spears here not others not spears that might have their own specific name which as i say we're going to look at in a second then indeed um length of pole plays a very big part in how that spears used so for example we know that in the 14th and 15th century there was a relatively brief vogue for what's called the short spear and the short spear in this case was even perhaps shorter than a person so i'm six foot one so it might be six foot or it might be anywhere between five and six foot and the reason this was particularly popular at that time as it was used by fully armored knights in very close formation melees so where you couldn't wield a longer weapon so a spear was still a very useful thing in many cases better than a sword but you didn't want a very long spear because in these crushers and in these melees and then armored fighting which comes very close to wrestling a distance a shorter spear is more useful but at the other end of the spectrum you've got the pike now i'm sure many of you will have been expecting me to list the pike as a separate weapon but i don't really see it as a separate weapon a pike really is nothing but a very long spear how long well 16 foot 18 foot sometimes even 20 foot long sorry for those of you who use the metric system but i still think in imperial i'm afraid but we're talking about very very long spears now clearly when something's that long it's usually intended to be used in formations in a very specific way and that is a great topic for a future video the use of pike blocks which is something that started to come around in the 14th century used famously by the swiss but also used by the scots in the form of the chiltron and to some degree the northern welsh as well so it's something that appears in various places we could say convergent evolution in the 14th century in various parts of europe of course the pike block was around in ancient times as well in forms of the greek phalanx and such like so pike was not a new idea but it was something that was revived in the late medieval period and indeed it it carried on right the way through into the age of um pike and shot hence the name where you would have right so on to the next weapon so the next weapons we're going to look at are essentially derivatives of the spear now you could say that everything on a pole is a derivative of spear yes that's kind of true but these are the closest relatives okay the closest relatives um or descendants should we say of the spear now many of you may have seen a specific type of spear known as the boar spear which has a crossbar just under the head and this is to prevent the boar from running too far up the shaft and attacking the person using the spear now undoubtedly bore spears were used in war but they are primarily a hunting type of spear but they do have there is a warlike spear a marshall version of the spell i won't say version but there's a martial spear which is sometimes mistaken for a bore spear and that is the famous winged spear now one of the reasons that i'm listing this one first is because it's one of the earliest um offshoots we say of the spear so these first appear in the early medieval period around the eighth ninth century are the earliest examples that i know certainly by the 10th century it's actually quite common but here we're talking about before the norman conquest before the time of the normans we're talking about the viking era even as far back as into the um sort of later anglo-saxon and frankish eras which is crosses over into the viking era of course um so the winged spear now the important thing to note about the winged spear is that the wings or lugs sticking out of the side actually come out of the socket okay now there are other weapons we're going to look at in a little bit where the projections which come in various shapes rather than coming out of the socket they come out of the base of the blade or they come out of an area between the blade and the socket but more about that as we go along so the winged spear could be used one-handed or two-handed it's shown in art used both it first appears in this kind of period probably ninth century would say it starts to be quite common and it carries on through so a lot of people think of this as a viking era weapon but in fact it carries on all the way through the 15th 16th century okay and you could say that ultimately it has its final descendant in the sponton of the gunpowder era which we won't deal with here because that's really a kind of later weapon but this type of winged spear is shown in fencing treatises from the early 15th century and there are surviving examples that we know date to the 16th century as well so the wing spear hugely successful it does arguably have some cutting capacity um having a longer blade than a typical spear and these wings characteristic wings at the side clearly it was successful clearly it was popular it was because it was around for um over 500 years it was in use so a very successful design just a little point of interest but this type of wing spit is sometimes known as a bohemian ear spoon that's right you heard me right folks a bohemian ear spoon bohemia is what's now we could say czech republic and why it was called that i don't know lost the mists of time i haven't researched that exact term so i don't know exactly where it comes from i don't know how historically accurate it is but you do see this term bandied around occasionally now just briefly before i go on i want to talk to you about our very kind sponsors for this video who are wandering so if you're wondering who one dream are well you've heard me talk about the great courses plus before and so the great courses plus is essentially rebranded as one dream and is now bringing you broader and more content than ever before you get all of the great content that you had with the great courses plus plus a lot more with one dream one dream is where you can find the answer to everything you've ever wondered about and some things that you've never imagined you would wonder about their carefully created collection of 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social class today is really quite different to how social class was viewed in the high medi medieval period high middle ages particularly how you've got the three estates in the medieval period so you've got the clergy you've got the nobility and then you've got the the people um most of whom of course were agricultural though not all um and how these were the defining features for which class you are in which of those three estates you were part of so it wasn't purely based on how rich you were which is i think how a lot of the modern world views class today i'd honestly never actually thought about social class defined in those contrasting ways between the medieval world and the modern world mind blown so if you ever thought about trying the great courses plus now wondriam before now's a great opportunity to give it a try because i can offer you a free trial it's an absolutely free trial there's nothing to lose and if you want to show your support for my channel as one of my subscribers here then go and check it out now which you can do at one dream dot com slash scholar gladiatoria which you can either type into your browser or indeed you can click the link in my description below and you can bring in your free trial right now so go and check that out thanks for sticking with me now let's get back to the main content of this video now next up is a related type of sphere but really kind of later in period so we're looking at primarily mostly 15th 16th century here and this is a weapon which is in italy known as the spieder which is a derivative word of spear but it's word associated with a particular type of spear that has a longer blade and is fairly broad now in fact this may have a relation to what is early if we go all the way back to things like the icelandic sagas something known as a hewing spear or cutting spear in other words it's a spear but it has some ability to cut as well so it has a longer broader blade almost like a short sword um on the end of the socket and this is we would call it espieda now this is also related to a type of spear that you're probably waiting for me to mention and that is the partisan now the partisan is an interesting one because the partisan and the speeder seem to be very very closely related and in fact some sources might refer to a spieder as a partisan and some curators might do for example the defining feature of the partisan for me is really the little winged lugs at the base of the blade now you might be thinking well isn't that the same as a winged spear first of all they seem to have evolved separately even if there was some interrelation between them it seems that the spieder and the winged spear were different things and the partisan was a development of the spieder now the partisan is particularly associated with certain southern european countries particularly italy it has to be said but the important part to note is that these little lugs are at the base of the blade whereas the winged spear the lugs are on the socket which is quite a big constructional difference you might think that's a minor difference but if you're actually making these objects then the physical act of making those of attaching lugs to a socket are very different to forging out lugs at the base of the blade very different manufacturing process additionally the partisan has a few other features which are if not universal to the partisan because there are there are variations there are slightly different designs of partisan but there are certain types of parasan which have a very strong mid-rib that is up the center of the blade there is in sometimes it's hollow it's an extension of the socket sometimes it's solid but it's a very definitive and noted mid-rib on some of these partisans which again functionally makes it different to make makes it slightly different to use for the most part it's going to make it slightly less effective at cutting but it will make it more effective at thrusting and give it a more rigid blade for piercing tougher targets so it is a subtly different weapon and actually when you look at the details there are more differences than you might have expected now next up are a group of weapons which actually turn up quite often in museum collections they're quite known in some major collections like the wallace collection and such like royal armories and so on and it's quite difficult to know how to define those they seem to be related to the partisan possibly they might also be related to the winged spear it might be that they're a sort of offshoot on the family tree shall we say and they go by various names which actually complicate our interpretation so i'm going to throw two common names that you might find in books one is corsec spelt in various ways incidentally there's more germanic words spelling it the more french way of spelling it and the other one is runker and in fact i'll throw a third one at you as well which is spietem now corsec spietam and runker there have been some works which have tried to identify a specific design with each of these specific names i'm not fully convinced based on what i've seen yet that the names weren't used interchangeably to mean any of these but the basic characteristics here are projecting spikes wings should we say that can either be curving upwards a bit like a trident or they can be curving outwards and downwards now the uh the general rule seems to be that a corset generally seems to go downwards whereas certainly in italian a runka seems to go upwards that may or may not be correct again terminology very very difficult in this time but all you need to know i think is that these terms spetum runker corsec and there's some other terms as well i've got a few in front of me down here uh faloni is another one and there's the term brandy stocker so these are italian words but there are german words as well as i say corset or corsaca can be spelt in different places according to the dialect and the language but all of these names refer to these weapons which seem to be possibly related to the part and i would say probably related to the partisan and path partially or proper possibly related to the winged spear now an interesting detail about them is these projections that go up usually seem to be joined at the base of the blade like a partisan whereas the ones that come outwards and downwards seem predominantly be attached to the top of the socket or a neck area between the blade and the socket which might suggest that the points going upwards might be related to partisans and the points going downwards may be related to winged spheres but that's all conjecture and it's an incredibly complicated topic because we don't have a huge data set to go from and the sources that we work from can be quite confusing to say the least i will also briefly mention another weapon you might come across the name of if you're looking at weapon books which is long debuff which is essentially it seems to be a type of partisan which has a little narrowed point so it's trying to combine a bit more cutting potential in the main part of the blade with a more acute thrusting point so long debuff is something you might find in some books but it seems to be a derivative an offshoot a specialized version of the partisan now obviously i should also mention specialized mounted or throwing pole weapons but for the most part those are outside the scope of this video so i could mention different types of lance i could mention different types of javelin and dart but i'm not going to cover those in this video this is really more looking at the pole arms that are used in handheld combat on foot okay and certainly for the most part alliance is essentially a type of spear but there are specialized types of lances from all over europe in fact and some lances which are specific to specific areas of europe particularly spain for example has zones and throwing darts as well which are peculiar to certain areas particularly popular in the iberian peninsula and ireland for example but the final type of main hand-hand combat pole arm used by infantry that i'm going to talk about is the alsbias our auspice i'm terrible at pronouncing this german word i'm afraid but it is essentially a long usually square section spike mounted to a sturdy shaft usually with a disc guard at the junction between the shaft and the blade in other words mounted on the socket now this is a very specialized weapon and it fulfills some of the purposes of a pike it can certainly be used anti-cavalry but additionally it being a square blade as well as being an anti-horse weapon is seems to be quite focused and quite specialized potentially towards anti-armor as well so although it's out outside the scope of this video a lot of you will know about the rondell dagger and various types of specialized thrusting spiked weapons for the age of plate armor where your where your spike is either designed to go through mail if you're someone's just wearing a coat of mail or it's designed to go through something like a jack padded armor or indeed it's intended to go through gaps between plates of plate armor or in an extreme example we do know occasionally weapons did go through a natural plate of plate armor not something that would happen usually but it could happen we do know some plates of original plate armor including ones found archaeologically that do have square holes through them so there are certain types of weapon which maybe can just go directly through the plate so the outspace please forgive my pronunciation is i suppose almost the final evolution of a spear concept in the age of armor in there is just a thrusting weapon with a pole but it's got an added handguard and it's got a very specialized type of blade for penetrating quite specific targets so now we're done with the direct spear derivatives we're now going to look at another very simple weapon that's been around since the most ancient of times pretty much as old as the spear you could probably say actually if we go into prehistory and that's the axe so derivatives of the axe now this is obviously in its most basic stage if we're talking about the medieval period you've got the simple hand axe and that is a shafted weapon but bear in mind for this video we're looking at long pole weapons okay so what we'd conventionally call a pole arm so we're not talking about the type of simple hand axe that you might wear at your side we're talking about something that is almost as tall as a person and i suppose we could say that certainly in medieval europe the earliest long-shafted type of acts is what's commonly called in modern media the danax although it should more correctly perhaps be called a great axe by um english-speaking people there are other names for it in other languages incidentally it was used by various people most famously the scandinavians aka vikings but it was of course also used by the english famously um and is shown in quite large numbers on the bayer tapestry being used at the battle of hastings in 1066. so large two-handed axes are probably we could say that the earliest big long shafted axe derivative but quite soon after the norman era we start to see the axe gain additions to it because presumably they thought well look we can stick an axe on the long hole why don't we stick some other things on there as well and the first things they thought of were essentially hammers and spikes so most of these weapons are involve an axe blade although not always we'll talk about that in a minute an axe blade with either hammers or spikes so the first most obvious example to mention is the halberd now for those of you who don't know a halberd usually involves at least at the very least an axe cutting blade and a top spike so you're combining the aforementioned two main groups that we've looked at you're combining spears and axes because you think from a tactical point of view you think well we really want our guys to have the chopping power of axes and the thrusting power of spears and the reach of spears you've invented the halberd and there you go so quite simply if you had any sort of spike on the top of something with an axe you've got the predecessors or the ancestors essentially of the halberd now the halberd is a actually a surprisingly complex and varied and complicated weapon this is the best book i have ever seen which covers the evolution development and varieties different forms of the halberd this book is absolutely excellent on halberds and pays a lot of attention and time to them including showing how they're constructed and there were various different construction methods but you've got an integrated socket you've got a blade and then you've got a top spike of sorts now what's interesting about the halberd is as i say there were different forms of halberd in different areas at different times if we go to switzerland for example one of the earliest areas to make extensive use of the halberd then we can see that the typical halberd of the late 14th century is quite different looking to the typical halberd swiss albert of the late 15th century so in 100 years they essentially went through a few different transformations i won't say it was a continual evolution so much as it was steps so they went from let's call it type a to type b to type c and what you sometimes find is in the time of type c there were still type a's around but nevertheless the fashionable ones and the newest ones are the type c's so um by the end of its uh kind of medieval incarnation or late uh shall we say early renaissance incarnation because we do have later types of harvard that were carried as a badge of office by sergeants even into the 18th century but by the end of the medieval era and into the early renaissance you typically have a top spike of various forms you have an axe blade and you have a back spike now the axe blade is clearly very effective against flesh and even padded armor the back spike is very effective against everything but particularly it's best to deal with armor hitting armor and the top spike of course is useful for anything that a spear is useful for so it will pierce anything that it comes into contact with if you do it hard enough and of course it's the longest reaching part of the weapon so this is a choppy piercing stabbing weapon hugely popular hugely effective and used all over europe it was particularly popular it has to be says said in the shall we call them the german-speaking land so particularly in what was the holy roman empire but there were interestingly italian forms of um halberd now it wasn't the most popular weapon in italy in fact there were other forms of poland which were more popular in italy and we'll look at those in a little bit but there were italian forms of halberd and they look very distinctive and different to the should we say swiss forms of halberd so you've got german austrian swiss types that are all related more closely italian types quite different you do get halberds in england and france and spain and everywhere else as well but they tend to either be imports so they'll either be a german style or an italian style from somewhere else or they follow one of those basic shapes now there are other weapons which are approximately similar in function to a halberd although they're not always used in the same way and they do have subtle differences so perhaps one of the most famous of those that many of you may have heard of is a badish now a badish has relatives that could be called a geesam okay so gisam and badish seem to be related weapons and in fact it could be that in some cases if a source refers to a a geese arm it could be that the weapon they're describing is what we might also call abardish so i think in again we get into the problem of terminology here but i think gee sam and body can be thrown into roughly the same uh category for the purposes of this now there are some differences here not you know these are predominantly a large axe blade usually mounted at two points on the shaft they're not always on a particularly long pole sometimes they're on a pole which is well below a person's height even when with the blade added on the top and the top part of the axe blade forms the spike now that's the defining feature here is these weapons not always but usually the top of the axe blade forms the thrusting spike so it's not a separate spike from the axe blade and again there are types of halberd particularly in the early development of halberds which are also like this as well so it's quite a complex relationship between these two things and it's if you think about it like a family tree and at some point this this in some point in the history this branch splits off into two different ways and you end up with a badish here and a different type of halberd up there and this kind of stuff in some cases it can also be convergent evolution it's not necessarily always a direct tree sometimes it can be little separate trees that happen to end up in the same result another weapon which is worth mentioning is the lockharba axe now i think most people myself included think of the loch harbour acts as a post-medieval weapon because the lockhart axe was still being used in the 18th century was being used during the jacobite rebellion rebellions of the 18th century for example so the lockhart axe is perhaps most famously associated with scottish jacobite uprisings in scotland against government or crown control but the ancestors the precursors to the loch arbour acts seem to first appear in the 15th century and the defining feature of the loch arbour acts is it's a bit like an early halberd or even a bit like a badish or gisan but it has the addition of a hook so rather than having a top spike on the top of the pole it has a hook up there and of course the hook can be used for pulling people off horses pulling people over pulling shields aside targets pulling other people's pole arms all sorts of possible things even just grabbing a person's clothing and pulling them about so having a hook as we find on several pole arms is a is a really useful and important thing so you've got an axe for chopping you've got some degree of thrusting capacity and you've got a hook as well so overall it's actually quite similar to a halberd but the subtleties make the differences and why we apply different names to them as well and they tend to be regional tendencies so for the last weapon up in the axe category it's actually a weapon that crosses and this is why i put it last it crosses between this category and the next category which is going to be hammers and that is a weapon known as the polax now the polax is probably a really famous weapon and most people think they know something about poll axes and you know many people do in fairness but one of the things which gets overlooked with poll axes is that a polax doesn't need to have an axe so whether we look at italian french english various other language sources we find that the same word is used for this category of weapon so before i go into those words and the specifics let's just talk about what is this category of weapon well it tends to be a weapon that is about a man's height or a bit shorter can sometimes be a bit more but it's not usually as long as a halberd for example a halberd is usually about seven or eight feet long whereas a pollax is usually about the same height as a person generally speaking you have a pointy bit at the top very often a pointy bit at the bottom okay of your shaft usually the shaft is um armored in some way so usually it has what we call languettes and that is plates or bars of metal that of steel usually down the side to prevent it from from being snapped so easily or indeed cut through by other weapons additionally then it has a head now the head is the complicated part that's why i left that till last so the head indeed might involve an axe so very commonly we might have an axe on one side and a spike on the other or it might be an axe on one side or a hammer on the other or it might be a hammer on one side and a spike on the other so and it can be other things as well sometimes we do find really odd things sometimes you find two hammers and this kind of stuff but generally speaking the most common ones are axe and spike or axe and hammer or hammer and spike but all of these weapons are called a polax now the language so if we look at french for example there's a famous treatise for how to use these from burgundy called le joue de la hash no hash if we translate it it gives us the word hatchet in english incidentally it means axe okay if we go to italy the master fiore de libery called it an atsa atsa is related to the words acha which is ax okay so he called it an axe as well and then indeed if we look in england we call it a polax in contemporary sources and indeed to be pollaxed is a term it's you can use it as a as a verb so to [ __ ] someone which means to strike them down by hitting them really hard in the head now the origin of this word seems to be certainly in english the pole refers to a head okay now some people have argued that could refer to the fact that it's got an elaborate head to the weapon i think it's actually because we know that cattle for example were usually killed with an axe so before the polax was even invented the conventional way to kill a cow for slaughtering to eat its meat was to tie it to a stake and hit it really hard in the head with a hammer okay and sometimes very often in fact you would get an axe with a hammer on the back and i think that this is probably a poll ax it's a it's like a headman's axe but it's probably for the most part for hitting cattle in the head with um so anyway that's the rough etymology of the term there might be some debate to be had about that but fundamentally this type of weapon with those variety of um features to it is known as a pollax or a hash or an atsa or various things in different languages that are universal terms and it can have an axe blade or it can have a hammer blade so that takes us onto the next section which is hammers so fundamentally i think most people have heard of warhammer it's not just a game that you can play it is also a type of weapon now usually uh we get short horsemen's hammers so a lot of people when you refer to a warhammer they'll think about the sort of thing like gimli the dwarf might wield or gingery from game of thrones something quite short okay but there were long versions so quite simply if you imagine that on a long pole then we get into the realm of pole arms again so there were pole arm length versions of warhammers as most people would conventionally think of them and one term that uh often gets mentioned is lucerne hammer now obviously that implies a swiss origin and indeed these weapons may have been popular in switzerland um i'm not actually sure how strong the evidence is to support that the swiss were most famous in fact for halberds and pikes and later on for firearms but nevertheless they are sometimes known as lucerne hammers and what is a lucerne hammer fundamentally it's a form of polax okay so what's the difference between if someone says what's the difference between a polax and a looser and hammer not an awful lot really um a a lucerne hammer is a particularly skinny sort of um pronged hammer head rather than a conventional kind of blocky hammerhead so it's a particular design of hammerhead backed with a spike and then again you've got a spike at the top and a spike at the bottom so fundamentally it's very very closely related to the pollux and in other terms it shares the basic characteristics of the polax it's a similar length it has a spike at the top it often has a spike at the bottom and it often has some form of iron or steel reinforcement for the shaft to make it quite a bulky but a very strong and robust weapon for fighting in armor and the final type of pole arm hammer that i'm going to mention actually often gets overlooked because it's not at all a glamorous weapon but it's certainly something that was definitely used and despite the fact it doesn't get mentioned much in sources or any sorts of modern books you see it in medieval art not infrequently and that is a type of mallet now this type of weapon probably went by various names and i'm not going to get into that now because it's a topic that i need to do more research on so i don't want to say things which i think are likely to be wrong not to say that i'm never wrong but i try not to be so this is a type we'll call it a mallet okay now these can be made of various things sometimes they have a wooden head that is um added to so it there are mentions in some sources of leaden mallets so it could be a wooden head that has lead put cast into it or could have lead shod could have a lead wrapped around it it can be iron wrapped around wood or indeed it could be a fully iron or steel head or some other type of metals latin or you know brass equivalent copper alloy so fundamentally it is a bludgeoning but mallet-like or hammer-like head on the end of a long pole and these usually have a point at the top that's the reason of having them on long poles you're combining some of the benefits of a mallet which has a lot of percussive force with a spear so yes you can fend off cavalry with it but yes if you come up against the knight you can hit him really really strong in the helmet and he'll go down anyway there has incidentally been quite a lot of modern sources which have talked about the possibility that english archers carried mallets and there's some debate about this so i'm not going to state that as a fact because again more research needs to be done on that topic but just so that you know sometimes these um kind of scaled up and kind of leaden mallets are associated with english archers but whether they actually had them or not i have to say i'm quite dubious about so next up is a super important category of weapons that i'm gonna i could talk a lot about but i'm going to run through really really quickly and say that they are bills okay now on their most fundamental level the bill is related to the bill hook for anyone who doesn't know a bill hook is an agricultural tool used for lopping branches off trees pollarding trees and things like this so it's very clear i think that in the early days in its first appearances and we have to go back quite early it has to be said to the early medieval period for the first appearances of military bills it does appear that the earliest military bills were simply bills that have been stuck in a long pole um and in fact some agricultural bills are already on a long pole and they were taken to war because if you can chop branches off a tree with it but then you can hit people in the head with it it's as simple as that much the same as axes and other types of weapons we'll get to into your course um so the bill was then evolved and developed in different places in different ways with the result that by the 15th century we could possibly say by the late 14th but definitely by the 15th century there are regional specific styles of bill so what does the bill involve fundamentally it's usually a main hook okay so the thing which defines the bill is a hook with a cutting section on the inside so a little bit similar to a halberd whereas a halberd blade looks more like an axe or a hatchet or a cleaver the um bill actually hasn't a more sickle like inwards curve some of them are less curved some of them are more curved some of them are more hook-like some of them are more cleaver-like there's variation so you've got that plus you've got a spike on the top plus you've usually got some form of hook or spike on the back although not always and additionally the top spike is not always in line with the pole sometimes it is offset by the 15th century one of the most common forms or popular forms widely known forms of bill is the italian bill which could be uh more correctly termed the wrong corner but it was in period sources sometimes called the ronker sometimes the wrong coin but essentially it's the most common type of bill that you will find in museums today or indeed if you just go and google and search for for bill poll arm the most common style that will come up is the italian bell because they've survived the best they were kept in in arsenal's or a kind of militia storage arsenals for keeping weapons they went into museums some of them were very ornate and very nicely made so they were looked after and kept however you do absolutely find bills from other areas you find bills some bills from the holy roman empire but fundamentally the bill and the halberd clearly did a very similar job so what's clear is that generally speaking in the holy roman empire that is germany bohemia austria they preferred the halberd and in italy and england they preferred the bill okay now i mentioned the italian bill being the most common and popular but the english bill was also very popular weapon at the time it just hasn't survived so well however a lot of remnants of them have survived from the famous shipwreck the mary rose which is a tudor henry viii's flagship that sunk in 1545 and in fact a great number of shafts of the actual shafts themselves from bells have survived and remnants of the heads as well and archaeologically we could see the shape of the heads from the remains the archaeological remains so we know from that and surviving examples there's one good surviving example in the royal armories in leeds in england and we know that the english bill is a very different shape from the italian bell so their point of minor interest but they fulfill similar um they hit similar points you've essentially got a curved inner curve chopping bill blade you've got a point at the top and you've got a point at the back but hugely popular and important weapons they fulfill much the same role as the halberd it's just that some areas preferred halberds some areas preferred bills now the final group of mainstream pole arms in other words the ones we actually see quite a lot in art and quite a lot survive in collections is glaives now glaive is a problematic term um i've termed this group glaives because i think in the english-speaking world certainly in the uk and america canada australia most of us know what we mean by a glaive and it's a bit like a sword on a stick so if you imagine some type of fairly long cutting blade that you would find like on a sword but mounted with a socket to a long pole arm shaft this is fundamentally what we mean by glaive and for example if we're talking about a japanese naganatha we might refer to that as a japanese glaive if we're talking about a certain types of dao in china which are on a long pole which some dao are then we would refer to those as chinese glaives so fundamentally when something's like a sword on a stick we basically call that a glaive however the term is problematic and the reason is that the word glaive itself has at various times particularly in france been used to refer to a short sword now this obviously causes confusion if you're talking to a french person because you refer to a glaive meaning a pole arm and they think you mean a short sword funnily enough we have the same confusion with the word dao in chinese historical sources because one type of dao can mean a sword a dow can be a short one-handed sword or a dow can be a big two-handed sword or a dao can be a type of pole arm fundamentally a doubt in chinese traditional chinese weapon terminology just means it's single-edged so if it's got a blade that's somewhat like some type of falchion or saber they'll call it a dao regardless of whether it's a polar sword so glaive is a problematic term but you will understand when i talk more about these specific examples here and the ones you see on screen what i mean by glaive now by far what most of the examples of what we would call a glaive should be called i believe from historical terms of the time is either a vouch or a cous now these again can be spelt in different ways in different places and at different times um there is is also a french term as well which is kuto de bresch which i'm not going to go into you'll find much like the long debuff you'll find that the french terms are often quite colorful and descriptive so we won't go into those now now funnily enough coos and vous may also be a french origin kus might actually be of german origin i'm not sure um but these refer to a certain type of glaive that's very common in medieval and early renaissance europe and fundamentally it's a bit like a giant carving knife on a stick now there are variations of these some of these have a back spike some of these have spikes at the base of the socket and some of these have reinforced tips and different styles of tip and many of these have langets that is reinforcement down the shaft and it should be said that's quite common actually with all of the pole arms that we've spoken about here with the exception of spears spears have to be light to be effective but most of the cutting arms that we've looked at here can have langettes and some of them also can have a guard now what's interesting is that the little guard that you often find on this guard that you find on things like an alch piece and also on many poll axes can also be seen in medieval art particularly 15th century art associated with weapons that we would call glaives or perhaps virgil coos so indeed there seems to be some association between a polax like shaft but then a different blade in this case being more glaive-like blade as an alternative to the polax and it has to be said these weapons as a whole uh these various forms of version and um and coos and what we would call glaive seemed to have been particularly associated with france and in fact the bodyguard of the kings of france who were the guarde cosse and they're french they were traditionally equipped both with bows and glaives so the glaive is in many ways seen as a very iconic french pole arm in a similar way to how the halberd is seen as a quite an iconic german or germanic pole arm and the bill and the partisan are seen as very iconic italian um pole arms incidentally all of these pole arms could be found in all of those places it was just that there was a preference a cultural preference for certain of them so the glaive a particularly french weapon now there is i'm going to have to read this one there is a german term which is associated with a type of glaive which is a tram trabantencus which you'll notice the end bit of that is kus again and there is also the guard cous now guard cous just means the coos of the guard so these were often guards weapons and what's interesting is just like the bodyguards of the kings of france we find similar things in other areas i believe in vienna where you actually have a personal bodyguard that have these weapons why were they associated particularly with bodyguards and kind of state procession type things we don't really know it could have been as simple as the fact that they're quite easy to decorate or it could have been that they are effective against people who are not wearing armor so they're an effective pole arm for crowd control or body guarding we don't really know there's many theories but fundamentally they're often associated with bodyguards these glaives so next up the category which is not a small category it has to be said probably not as big as the ones we've looked at so far and also it's a category which doesn't get as much attention as it should do but for anyone who studies period sources particularly art you will see these weapons turn up time and time and time again in the background usually one over here one over there in occasional pages so they're omnipresent but they're not very common and that is forms of club or mace but in a polearm version so most people think that they're familiar with certain types of mace and spiked club which we'll look at the names at in a minute but there are long polar versions of them and the funny thing is that unlike modern um fantasy reconstructions or novels or role-playing games or video games or movies often these weapons are represented in their short form because people want to hold them in their hand and use them like a sword but if we actually look at medieval art they actually appear far more frequently in a pole arm length so usually as tall as a person or taller now the most famous example of this is seems to be known in the time for understandable reasons as a morgenstern now a morgenstern literally means morning star okay it's german and this type of weapon does appear quite a bit in german or holy roman empire art but it has to be said it also appears in french english italian all sorts so it seems to have been a weapon that was common all over europe for a very good reason it was cheap now what do i mean by that well quite simply anyone could make one anyone with access certainly to a basic blacksmith or frankly even to some modern hardware from a local diy or hardware store so if you've got access to some spikes and some wood you can make one so it's a long pole essentially a blob of wood on the end to give it some mass and then usually a band of iron around with some spikes in it and a spike at the top very important if you've got a long pole you want a spike at the top for being able to thrust and keep away cavalry but the spikes around are obviously used for bludgeoning anyone who's too close to you or indeed horses making horses go away or just you know just generally causing mayhem now it's not the strongest weapon around it's not even the most effective weapon when you're hitting things because those spikes often are not going to hit at a straight angle so they're more liable to break or bend but it's cheap to make and it's it does it will do the job it will do the basic job so the morgenstern or morningstar is quite simply a super simple weapon and in fact when you think about it for those of you who know about world war one trench raiding if you look at the types of trench clubs that they used to make in world war one it's a morgenstern okay now um the morgenstern did come in more elaborate forms and there was one funnily enough there was one particularly english style that was made there was one that belonged to henry viii with guns incorporated into it which i'm not going to include here as a category but there were high status ones just to show that even a king had one made as a novelty um and in fact there was an english style that actually looked the head looks more like a mace head like a flanged mace head and there is some indication that these were sometimes known as holy water sprinklers that's right folks a holy water sprinkler uh which is you know it's a very it's a very interesting image in your head presumably spring sprinkling blood everywhere as you smash it around onto people's heads during a melee but um fundamentally and there was this relationship between using maces and the clergy allegedly because the clergy weren't allowed to spill blood so didn't use edged weapons they used bludgeoning weapons but i can tell you from being hit on the head there's plenty of blood when you hit someone on the head but um the holy water sprinkler there you go what a fantastic name but this type of weapon as i've said they turn up in period up right the way across the medieval period even into the era when there were plentiful halberds and bills and partisans around there were still these spike clubs presumably when you need to make up the numbers you need to make up some extra weapons or perhaps just for a variety to look intimidating and make it more difficult to predict how to fight a given enemy if they've got a variety of polars it makes them perhaps more difficult to deal with perhaps the morgenstern is more effective against certain types of clothing or armor than conventional weapons like glaives and partisans who knows experimentation required but nevertheless it's a weapon that's omnipresent and was always around all over europe and really doesn't get as much attention or love as it should do now a very close but famous specialized weapon which is very closely related to this you could even say it's the same weapon almost is the golden dag which means good day so it's funny that you've got the morning star the morgenstern and the goodendag the good day it almost makes you wonder if actually linguistically they're the exact same weapon and i suspect that's the case one was an answer to the other but basically the golden dag was the famous almost national weapon of the fleming of the flemish flanders during the 14th century so during the 14th century the the common soldiery of flanders decided to develop a specific anti-cavalry weapon or just anti-knight weapon actually use it against anyone where they're on the horse on foot and it's essentially a very large stout stick of quarter staff length that gets wider towards one end is iron shod and has a spike at the end so essentially you've got a very powerful bludgeoning club but it's also got a spike so you can use it as a spear so you can still have your your pipe your early form of a pike block basically to fend off cavalry you can still fight against people using spears or lances with it but when you get into the melee you've got a very powerful striking weapon which will overcome armor by virtue of how powerful it hits now a complete list of pole arms used in this period wouldn't completely be complete without mentioning flails that's right and i came across an awesome german expression actually in this book again here which i'd never heard before which is a ketten morgenstern which is interesting so it's a morgenstern but with ketone now i haven't looked up what ketone means so german viewers please comment uh underneath i imagine it means articulated or chain or something like that but essentially it's a flail okay and flails in this period they weren't used um hugely certainly they seem to be one of the most one of the more uncommon pole arms but they did exist and they were used unlike again in movies they weren't usually sword length weapons they were usually long pole arm length weapons perhaps they were most famously used by the hussites the hussites used them particularly from war wagons but they did just generally use them they were famous for using them but additionally they were also used by other people particularly within the holy roman empire i suspect once the hussites made them famous they probably got a bit of media attention of the for the time and uh for example emperor maximilian is shown using them and they're also shown in um paulus hector mayer's fencing treaties as well so they appear in treatises they were clearly used by noblemen for fun for spy sparring and fighting and armor tournament fights and they were used in war as well and essentially they're like an articulated morgenstern they're an articulated club they can come in various forms they can either be basically a long pole with a short heavy pole attached to it which has spikes or weight added to it like iron iron shod or they can have a short length of chain and have a spiked ball at the end so that's almost like the typical morgan stern but just detaching the head and attaching a short articulation in there so clearly a related weapon to the morgenstern but just with that added articulation for fun so those are the main categories of medieval and early renaissance poll arms i think i've pretty much covered everything i'm purely to finish off going to mention two categories which i haven't mentioned so far one are agricultural tools that are used in war and sometimes they made specialized military versions of they are principally either the scythe and sometimes you see things described as a war scythe but they seem to be pretty much a scythe blade instead of mounted sideways to the pole mounted in line with the pole and this fulfills a very similar end result to something similar to a bill similar to a glaive so a war side there you go it's kind of a repurposed uh or in some cases specially made side for war the other example is a fork and forks used for bailing hay clearly can be used as a weapon and clearly a lot of militia or kind of levied troops drafted troops essentially would have used whatever they had to hand if they didn't own a spear they'd use a fork you can still stab someone with it and in some cases we do occasionally say militarized versions of forks presumably because someone thought it looked cool and it would certainly do the job so they were clearly specifically made as weapons but still look somewhat like an agricultural fork but usually better made and bit more robust and very occasionally we see a crossover where um i have seen one of these where a halberd had a fork for the for the point so instead of one single point it actually had a fork at the top so it was kind of like a halberd fork so sometimes people made up wacky combinations just because they felt like it and very finally there are some pole arms that just don't have any names we don't know how to describe them so if we look at the makievsky bible for example we see a couple of things in there that we could roughly describe as large cleavers now whether we call them pole arms or not i'm not really sure that they're long enough to qualify as pole arms one of them looks like a shortened glaive one of them looks like a big chopper like a meat cleaver we don't really know what these are we don't really know what they were called but they do appear in medieval art not just in that source but in other sources as well and then finally you get things which you could broadly term one of the categories that we've just looked at but they don't really fit into that category they're just a thing of their own like this example that i'm showing now which i would loosely term a poll ax but as you can see it's not really a polax it's got a cross guard it's got a fairly short shaft but it does have points at top and bottom like a polax it does have a sort of elongated axe blade it's an odd thing i think it's basically someone's weird and wacky cross between some form of bill and a poll axe but very cool looking result anyway i hope this has been uh super useful for you and interesting um and i've been meaning to do this for a while actually and it's no small undertaking to try and get all medieval and renaissance poll arms into one video and i'm sure certain that i have overlooked uh some by all means mention underneath this video anything you think i've skipped over anything weird and wonderful that you've seen great examples either surviving or in art maybe i can make a future video about that thanks for watching thanks again to our sponsors and i'll see you back on the channel again really soon cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 182,401

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Id: rdslWL_A7D4

Length: 59min 2sec (3542 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021