English Bill
The English bill was the characteristic pole arm of the English foot soldier from the fourteenth century to the late sixteenth: a hooked, heavy blade descended from the farmer's billhook, mounted on a shaft of about six to eight feet and usually fitted with a spike at the top and another on the back. The 'brown bill' of the retainers who fought the Wars of the Roses, it won its most famous victory at Flodden in 1513, when English billmen cut apart a Scottish army armed with long continental pikes.
Also known as Bill, brown bill, English bill, bill-hook, black bill
Origins
The bill began as a tool. The billhook — a heavy, forward-curving blade used for hedging, pruning and clearing brush — was in every English farmyard, and men called out to fight in the fourteenth century brought it with them. Armorers soon turned the tool into a weapon by lengthening the shaft, adding a spike to the top for thrusting and another to the back of the blade for piercing armor, and forging the head for war rather than hedging. By the fifteenth century the war bill was the standard arm of English infantry who were not archers, and inventories and muster rolls list "bills" alongside bows as the two weapons of the English foot soldier.
Design & Construction
A war bill has a broad, single-edged blade with a hooked or forward-curving point, a straight top spike, and one or more spikes or lugs on the back. The whole head is usually a foot and a half to two feet long, fixed by a socket and long langets to a shaft of ash or oak, giving an overall length of about six to eight feet. The hook could catch a horseman's rein or a man's leg or neck and pull him over; the edge could cut; the top spike could thrust; and the back spike could punch through mail or into the joints of plate. The common name "brown bill" probably came from the brown paint or varnish applied against rust, as opposed to the polished "white" arms of the wealthy.
Combat Use
The bill was the weapon of the retainers, tenants and militia who made up the bulk of English armies in the Wars of the Roses, fighting alongside the archers with the English Longbow and the dismounted men-at-arms with the Poleaxe. Its greatest day came at Flodden on 9 September 1513. The Scottish army of James IV had been trained in the continental pike tactics used by the Swiss, but when its columns came down a slope onto boggy ground their order broke, and the English billmen, with a shorter and handier weapon, hacked the pike shafts aside and cut into the men behind them. James IV was killed with much of his nobility — one of the worst defeats in Scottish history.
Legacy
The bill remained in English militia armories through the sixteenth century, and Elizabethan musters still counted billmen alongside pikemen and shot, but the pike and the firearm had replaced it in the field army by the end of the century. It is remembered as the most English of weapons: a farm tool made deadly, carried by ordinary men who were not archers and not knights, and never adopted in the same form anywhere else. Surviving bills are fairly plentiful in English collections, the Royal Armouries among them, and the weapon is a staple of Wars of the Roses reenactment.
Sources
Waldman, John. Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Brill, 2005.
Boardman, Andrew W. The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses. Sutton Publishing, 1998.
Oakeshott, Ewart. European Weapons and Armour: From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. Lutterworth Press, 1980.
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