[67] A revival of the old Roman system of fortification.
[68] As, for example, did Edward III before Calais. He fortified all approaches passable for a relieving army, and waited quietly in his lines.
[69] This was borrowed either from the Byzantine or the Saracen: it is quite distinct from the rude club occasionally found in the West at an earlier date, as, for example, in the hands of Bishop Odo at Hastings.
[70] See, for example, the case cited in Von Elgger’s Kriegswesen der Schweizerischen Eidgenossen, where a patrician of Constance having refused to accept a Bernese plappert (small coin) in payment of a wager, and having scornfully called the bear represented on it a cow, the Confederates took the matter up as a national insult, and ravaged the territory of Constance without any declaration of war.
[71] At Novara, for instance, they put to death after the battle several hundred German prisoners.
[72] See Montluc’s Commentaries.
[73] At Morat the contingent of Bern alone brought with them (besides the great standard of the canton) the flags of twenty-four towns and districts (Thun, Aarau, Lenzburg, Interlaken, Burgdorf, the Haslithal, the Emmenthal, etc. etc.) and of eight craft-guilds and six other associations.
[74] The halberd only differed from the English ‘brown-bill’ in having a spike.
[75] The ‘Morning-Star’ was a club five feet long, set thickly at its end with iron spikes. It had disappeared by the middle of the 15th century. The ‘Lucern Hammer’ was like a halberd, but had three curved prongs instead of the hatchet-blade: it inflicted a horrible jagged wound.
[76] Macchiavelli, Art of War, tr. Farneworth, p. 32.