Lochaber Axe

Origins

Long-hafted axes had a long history in Scotland. Medieval Scottish infantry used the sparth, a broad axe on a long shaft, and similar weapons were used in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, where the bardiche had a long, crescent-shaped blade. The Lochaber axe appears in Scottish records from the sixteenth century. It takes its name from Lochaber, the district around Fort William and Ben Nevis, although there is no evidence that it was made only there. Scottish laws of the period ordered men of modest means to equip themselves with a spear, a pike or a Lochaber axe for service in the national muster, which shows that it was regarded as a common infantry weapon of the Lowlands as well as the Highlands.

Design & Construction

The Lochaber axe had a long, fairly narrow blade with a straight or slightly curved cutting edge, often 30 to 50 cm long, which ran along the shaft rather than across it. The blade was fixed to the shaft by two sockets or lugs, one near each end, so that it lay close against the wood, much like a bardiche. The top of the blade usually came to a point for thrusting, and many examples have a hook forged at the back of the head or fixed to the top of the shaft. Tradition says the hook was used to pull horsemen from the saddle, or even to help climb walls, but its exact purpose is not certain. Shafts were of ash or other hard wood, and surviving examples vary a good deal in length, commonly somewhere between about 1.5 and 2.5 meters. Most were plain, locally made weapons, and no two surviving heads are quite the same.

Combat Use

The Lochaber axe was a weapon for foot soldiers who could not afford a sword or firearm, or who needed a long weapon to face cavalry. It could cut, thrust and hook, and in close fighting it was used much like the Halberd. By the seventeenth century the musket and the Pike had replaced most such weapons in organized armies, but the Lochaber axe survived in the Highlands and among town watchmen. Its link with the Jacobite Risings is more a matter of tradition than of firm evidence. Accounts of the 1745 rising describe some poorly equipped Jacobite recruits carrying axes, scythe blades fixed on poles and other improvised polearms, and Lochaber axes may have been among them. Whether any were used at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 is not recorded with certainty. The Jacobite front line there was armed mainly with muskets, broadswords and targes, and historians of the battle generally mention polearms only in passing, if at all.

Legacy

The best-documented users of the Lochaber axe were the members of the City Guard of Edinburgh, a paid force that policed the city from the late seventeenth century until it was disbanded in 1817. The guardsmen carried Lochaber axes on duty, and Sir Walter Scott described them and their axes in his novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818), which is set around the Porteous Riots of 1736. That association, together with Scott's Romantic image of the Highlands, fixed the Lochaber axe in the popular picture of old Scotland. Examples survive in the National Museum of Scotland and other collections, and the weapon appears on some Scottish military and civic insignia.