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.
THE GOEDENDAG.
The late Mr. John Hewitt, in one of his contributions to the History of Mediæval Weapons and Military Appliances in Europe, refers to the goedendag as being a foot soldier’s weapon of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and he gives a drawing of a foot soldier armed with a long-shafted weapon thickening towards the head, which is surmounted by a short iron spear, firmly and thickly socketed on to the extremity.
This figure, with others, is stated by M. Felix de Vigne, in his Recherches Historiques sur les Costumes des Gildes, etc., published in 1846, to have been reproduced on a drawing by himself from a fresco that had long been plastered over on a wall in an old building in Ghent, since pulled down. The soldier wears a bassinet, with camail of banded-mail overlying the surcoat, and the general aspect of the figure is that of an armed member of one of the Flemish guilds of the beginning of the fourteenth century or thereabouts. M. de Vigne claims to have established the form of the true goedendag in the weapon carried by the soldier.