The Defensive Armour and the Weapons and Engines of War of Mediæval Times, and of the "Renaissance."

by R. Coltman Clephan

THE BATTLE-AXE AND POLE-AXE.

The battle-axe or francisca was a leading weapon of the Franks during the Merovingian period, and it was then often used as a missile. The francisca of Childeric (457–481) was found in his tomb at Tournay, and is now in the Louvre. Procopius refers to the francisca of the sixth century as having a broad blade, sometimes double-edged, with a short haft. Roughly, the battle-axe is short in the handle, while the pole-axe, as its name implies, is long in the shaft. The former is a knightly weapon, while the latter was wielded by footmen only.

The battle-axe was greatly used by the Normans of the twelfth century. It is a weapon of the Bayeux tapestry; indeed, William the Conqueror was armed with it at Hastings—the form of the blade resembled that of an ordinary hatchet, with a curved blade.

The Anglo-Saxons used an axe, narrow-bladed and single-edged, from four to five feet long in the shaft, with great success in the battle. They first darted their javelins, and then attacked the foe with the deadly battle-axe.

The blade assumes later a great variety of forms—cleaver, cusped, etc., and the top was sometimes garnished with a hook or spear.

The pole-axe was a favourite weapon of the fifteenth century, and one of the varieties of the period combines a hatchet, a pike, and a serrated hammer: this weapon is first cousin to the halbard, and often classified as such.

The Jeddart staff is a long-shafted axe with a half-circular blade and a side spike. It is more a halbard than an axe.

The Lochaber axe, used with such telling effect at the battle of Culloden, is long-shafted; the blade and setting closely resemble that of a voulge, with its hook at the head of the staff. This hook, however, is generally absent in the voulge used in the field, and this is sometimes the case with the Jeddart staff also. There are two fine specimens of the Lochaber axe in the collection in the Castle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.[44]

The pole-axe, called the bardiche, is a Russian and Scandinavian weapon with a long, narrow, crescent-formed blade attached to the top of a pole by a ringed haft, while the lower end of the blade is fastened on to the pole farther down.

The addition of a wheel-lock pistol was a feature of the pole-axe early in the reign of James I. The battle-axe, according to George Silver in his Paradoxes of Defence, was at the end of the sixteenth century from five to six feet long.