[George Hill]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

Sadly I do not have a copy of Spada. I'll have to get one sometime. I know the staff illustrations in Paul Wagner's book show the back hand rather far from the butt. My reading of Silver suggests that this isn't correct.

It is a tricky issue, though, as with any staff weapon quickly moving the hands and changing the length of the weapon is key.

Btw, I read a bit of Swetnam last night and saw that he suggested a foot and a half between front hand and back hand. If I add this to the height of my outstretched arm I get a nice staff length of close to nine feet.

[Elling Polden]

Full length polearms (8-9 ft+) are by nature unbalanced. A stick with a heavy thing in one end, and nothing in the other will have a center of balance about 75% up the pole, or more.
Further more, you do not want to hold a polearm at the center of balace. The main point of the polarm is its length; holding a 9ft glaive or bill at the Cop would be a waste of 5 feet of pole. Even worse, the left over pole makes a a 9ft weapon in a shortened down grip clumsy at best.

Now, of course, most polearms are made for military use, rather than dueling. In a group fight, the unbalanced nature of your polearm is of less significance, since you will either be using it to stab, or raising it high to make a blow, hopefully against someone that isn''t looking at you....

[Jean Thibodeau]

Elling;

You bring up an interesting point about the forward balance of many types of polearms and that you wouldn't have the forward hand at the point of balance as that would leave you with not enough weapon length in front and a lot of wasted pole length behind your rear hand.

Having a balance point a little more towards the centre of the shaft might still improve handling " speed / recovery " compared to a similar weapon balanced more forward.

With my poleaxe that is a bit under 5' total length having my hand behind the forward guard still leaves me with a couple of feet of weapon in front of my leading hand. But this poleaxe would be a very close quarter weapon were the head, the butt and any parts in between might be used for offence or defence. I would say that in this case the point of balance give you one third of the weapon in front, one third between your hands and one third behind with the option of shifting the hand positions so as to give maximum reach and still be controllable. ( May be repeating some of what I wrote before. )

A much longer 8' to 9' Bill with a 30" head would be much more forward balanced and I don't know if any of these were even balanced by the weight of a butt spike or counter weight. I hope somebody with an A & A Italian Bill can give us his impressions of it as it should be at least roughly comparable to an original.

Also the variety of polearms is so vast and the quality so wide that the handling qualities could be all over the map from excellent to awful: Competent armourer made polearms to peasant blacksmith improvised

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

Shod staves (like Silver's short staff) were actually often bottom heavy, with heavier butt shodding than tip shodding. But yes, most polearms were top heavy. My A&A English Bill balances about a third of the way down from the point. Holding right there looks a lot like the guard pictured in di Grassi, so gripping polearm far up might not always be a bad idea. Especially as some halberd heads supposedly weighed around four pounds...