[Jean Thibodeau]

Oh, here is a link I found a while back. ( Maybe here on myArmoury or from some searching the net: Don't remember which. )

Poleaxe fighting: http://www.the-exiles.org/Article%20Le%20Jue%...Lesson.htm

[Gordon Frye]

[Elling Polden]

[George Hill]

[Jean Thibodeau]

My only point is that polearms in the hands of lightly armour or unarmoured fighters have a weapon in their hands that has the capability to take out a well armoured foe as opposed to being no threat at all.

I'm not minimizing the value of armour.

I could make the comparison of having on the one hand heavily armoured battleships and on the other large unarmoured cruisers but equipped with 16" guns equal to the battleships: On a one to one basis the cruiser can hurt or even sink the battleship with multiple hits but the cruiser has very low survivability if hit by even one shell from the battle ship.

The only chance the cruiser has is more speed, hopefully a superior gun crew ( Accuracy ) and maybe getting in the first salvo on target ? It can also run away! This was tried with bad results when the people using battlecruisers tried to use them like battleships in WWI and WWII : The HOOD was sunk by the Bismarck by one salvo if I remember correctly and at the battle of Jutland in WWI the battle cruisers on both sides took a bad mauling. Not a fault of the design but the mistake of using them in a way not intended. ( In any case, this is a bit of a digression, sorry. )

Getting back to our polearmed armed soldier he is in a much better situation than if armed with light weapons that the armoured knight s' armour could just laugh off.

If we combined arms: Polearms, pikes, longbows, archebuse ( Armour piercing capable ) the situation get very complicated and unsupported knights become obsolete. The heavily armoured can still have be an asset in combination with the other arms at least until the power and number of muskets capable of easily piercing armour becomes the dominant weapon. At some point it's not that armour would be useless but buying 100 muskets will get you more BANG for your money. ( PUN intended )

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

It depends on the exact period and army in question, but pikemen were quite often armoured (sometimes even rather heavily armoured).

[George Hill]

Back to the original subject, what are our chances of getting one of the sword gods like Johnsson to do the same level of balance measurements on a large variety of polearms?

[Jean Thibodeau]

George;

Well that would be good as conclusions based on bad reproductions would be like drawing conclusions about swords using the worse of the cheap wallhangers out there.

Although a good A & A polearm should be much closer to what the originals are like.

If the interest in polearms gets " HOTTER " we might get some motivated serious study.

It would be good if Peter notices this topic and has some preliminary data to share or Craig at A & A: HINT HINT HINT HINT ( Or anybody else with real expertise. )

A bit more facts and a little less speculation ( From me in part ) based only on unsupported guesswork !

Although the site I mentioned before " Le Jue de La Hache " does seems based on original documents.
( Note that there is a typo in their title JUE means JUICE JEU means PLAY or GAME: So the title translated in English
" The juice of the axe " should be " The Game of the axe ". )
http://www.the-exiles.org/Article%20Le%20Jue%...Lesson.htm

[Jeff Johnson]

[Gordon Frye]

[Sean Flynt]

I'm sympathetic to your frustration about lack of detailed stats.

As to weight: As far as I can tell, polearms tend to weigh slightly more than swords (slight, in this instance, meaning 2-3 pounds). If that sounds a bit vague (given that I didn't indicate which swords I'm using as the reference,) then that suggests the problem we face when talking in general terms about weapons that varied in size by many feet and had greatly varying heads. It seems to me that 4-5 lbs is reasonable for something like a simple glaive, bill or halberd. More complex or longer, heavier. Less complex (a spear, for example) or shorter, lighter. According to my spring-type postal scale (which tends to read slightly too high), my DIY glaive (with langets and rivets) is 4 lbs and my boar spear is 2.75 lbs. So, although my weights may be slightly off on the high end, note that I used poplar rather than ash, which might have a slight effect on weight. I wouldn't be surprised if these weapons are slightly lighter than their historical counterparts, on average, but still within the historically reasonable range of weight for their given type. As you know, the weight doesn't tell the whole story, though. Perceived weight is a function of weight distribution, and weight distribution is dramatically effected by the length, design and purpose of the head, presence and type of langets or other defenses (tacks, iron bands, rondels, etc.) and presence of butt reinforcement (cap, cone, spike, etc.) So....

Balance: This question is a bit trickier to address because although polearms do have points of balance (of course), one of their great features is that they can be gripped at any point between head and butt (no snickering, please) depending on the immediate strategic need. If the weapon seems a bit top-heavy, you'll need to grip it further up the staff for fine work (precise thrusting, for example). On the other hand, you can add to the power of a chopping blow by slipping a hand down the haft during the swing (imagine chopping wood). If it's a light spear, you can gain tremendous reach by gripping the haft in the lower quarter, but if you grip it closer to the middle you can easily and quickly lead with the butt, parry a blow, etc. It's exciting, not to mention illuminating, to handle even a cheap polearm (or simple hardwood dowell) and see how easy it is to modify weight distribution to maximum effect.

[George Hill]

[Allen W]

I've held several original halberds and seen a great many polearms in Austrian museums. The weights are all over the place ranging from very light to cumbersome. This isn't just a matter of blade profile as head thicknesses range from sheet metal to roughly 1/4" through the flats.These variences occur within type and presumably within period. So far every major brand repro I have held (A&A's Glaive, English Bill, Italian Bill, Lochaber Axe, Pole Axe, and Bec de Corbin; and nearly every piece MRL has ever carried as well as a custom Schmidburger saber halberd and Hanwei's naginata) has fallen within the range of originals that I have held.

[Jean Thibodeau]

George:

Quote:
" That said I am not especially familiar with them yet, but I do seem to recall reading my copy of Spada, and one of the author's quoting Silver as saying that you should grip the pole with your forward hand at it's point of balance. "

As I mentioned in an earlier post my A & A Poleaxe balances an inch or two below the circular guard giving you a couple of feet of weapon in front of your lead hand, which seems to conform with what you wrote.

A shod butt or but spike weighted to bring the balance point at least a couple of feet behind the point is what I am hoping for my custom A & A Langue de Boeuf: I did mention to Craig on the phone that the weight of whatever ends up on the but might be 1/4 to 1/3 the weight of the blade end. ( Left the exact balancing for him to fine tune. )

I personally want to avoid an excessively top heavy feel while maintaining enough mass in the head for powerful cuts.

For me historical accuracy comes second to just trying for the best weapon qualities Craig can come up with: Naturally we usually assume that a historically correct weapon would have qualities based on real fighting experience and we must be careful to not think that we can design better weapons out of our imagination. Although, not every historical weapon will be the best possible design! There is junk today and some historical weapons may have been junk then.

[Martin Wallgren]

[Sean Flynt]

I suspect that the MRL glaive head may be pretty close to the historic weight. The basic dimensions are right and it features distal taper and tapers from back to edge as well, so isn't just stamped out of flat stock and given a strong bevel like some modern repros. Langet thickness is tougher to judge, but the MRL's do look to be of reasonable thickness. I will note that it makes a HUGE difference in handling to inset the langets and give the haft a more rectangular cross section. It also makes a big difference to hack off the langets and move them into the proper historical position (required for inletting).

I always try my heads by first just sticking them on top of the haft–no shaping of the haft, rivetting, etc.–and the difference in feel between that and the finished piece is amazing. Even with a relatively inexpensive head, the closer you get to authentic mounting the closer you get to authentic handling. I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that doing something like this yourself, matching the proportions and weight distribution to your own height and strength, will give you a better-handling weapon than getting a high-end reproduction off-the-shelf. Look at the weapons in the Graz armoury. Even within in a given polearm type, there are long ones, short ones and medium-size ones and almost all of the stacked halberds are unshod. The tapestry depicting the battle of Pavia shows the butts of some halberd hafts hacked into crude points and others left flat. I'm getting the impression that infantry polearm hafts were made to a more-or-less standard length, then "tweaked" by individual soldiers. Museums may not be the best place to get accurate ideas about polearm hafts because it seems that a great many polearms were rehafted by collectors in the 19th century and later. Notice that the table of weapon weights and lengths cited above includes a number of weapons with replacement hafts. I think you have to pretty much just discard the overall stats for those weapons. I suspect that the Graz armoury, with so much of its original polearm inventory intact (around 5,000 polearms, if I'm undertstanding the German correctly) is a more trustworthy source for such info.

My Albion Kern axe is nowhere near the length of the mounted version once sold by Albion. They had that on a very long (7'?) ash haft. I got that massive head and mounted it on a 6' haft, then started handling it and shortening the haft at the butt-end until the weapon became manageable in both cut and thrust, but not so short that it lost power. I ended up taking off well over a foot of haft, and although somebody else might find the weapon cumbersome, I think it handles like a dream. It also happens to closely match, in length, the weapon shown in the Dürer sketch, although the head of that weapon is different enough that I think it would have weighed significantly less than the Albion version. The Albion Kern axe is a dead-ringer for the one shown in Celtic Warriors, though. Same proportions, etc.

[Jeff Johnson]

[Jean Thibodeau]

Sean;

I have a LARGE type M 12" edged Albion Danish axe that I mounted on a 5' waxwood shaft. I also glued cord around the shaft: No idea if this was ever done historically but it should keep things together even if the shaft split length-wise.

Well, the point of this post is that I added a counter weight ( Steel tube from plumbing supply ...... Purists can cringe now ).
With the counterweight the handling seems much more manageable. This may never have been done with axes but other polearms may have used a shod butt or butt spike to tune the balance / handling.

I obviously can't use it one handed but I can HOLD it close to the middle of the shaft without too much trouble.

With one hand a couple of feet from the head and the other widely spaced handling seems a lot easier than without the extra weight at the butt.
The butt end can be moved very fast for defensive moves.( No sparring just impressions from dry handling. )

[Sean Flynt]

Your counterweight idea makes perfect sense, and we do know that some butts were shod. Since some of the more elaborate polaxes feature butt spikes, I wonder if those weapons in particular were "tuned" in this manner.

[Benjamin H. Abbott]