Glaive

Origins

The glaive grew out of the simplest idea in hafted weapons: fix a long cutting blade to a pole. Peasant levies had long done something similar with scythe blades and billhooks, and by the thirteenth century purpose-made war glaives appear in French and Flemish sources and in manuscript illustrations. The word itself is a problem for historians, because medieval writers used "glaive" loosely — sometimes for a lance, sometimes for a spear, sometimes as a poetic word for any weapon — and only later collectors fixed it to the single-edged, knife-bladed pole arm described here. Its close relatives are the fauchard, with a more curved, sickle-like blade, and the couse, a slender late form carried by guards.

Design & Construction

A glaive blade is typically eighteen inches to two feet long, single-edged, and broad near the point, where most of the cutting force falls. It is fixed to a wooden shaft of ash or a similar hardwood by a socket, reinforced by long iron langets running down the pole so that an enemy's sword could not simply lop the head off. Many fifteenth-century glaives carry a hook or a short spike on the back of the blade — used to catch a rider's reins, harness or limbs — and some have a small lug at the base of the blade that could parry or bind an opponent's weapon. The balance is well forward, so the glaive cuts with the momentum of a heavy axe while keeping the reach of a spear.

Combat Use

The glaive was an infantry weapon for the close melee that followed a volley or a charge. In the Hundred Years War and the Burgundian wars of the fifteenth century it was carried alongside the Halberd, the Pike and the Poleaxe, its long cutting blade useful against horses and against men in mail or in the joints of plate. The dukes of Burgundy's standing companies of the 1470s included foot soldiers armed with pole arms of this kind, and French royal and noble households kept glaive-armed guards. Against a man in full Gothic Plate Armor, however, the glaive's cut did less than the concentrated blow of a hammer or the thrust of a spike, and during the sixteenth century the pike and the halberd, which combined thrust and cut, displaced it in the field.

Legacy

Long after it left the battlefield the glaive survived as a mark of rank and ceremony. Guards of princely courts in France, the German states and Italy carried richly etched and gilded glaives and couses, often with the owner's arms on the blade, well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of the finest surviving examples are these parade weapons. The word passed into fantasy literature and games, where "glaive" can mean almost anything with a blade, but the historical weapon remains the plain, heavy cutting blade on a pole — the medieval infantryman's answer to the horseman.