Morning Star

Origins

Studded clubs are as old as warfare, but the weapon called Morgenstern in German appears in written sources from the fourteenth century. Its close relative, the Flemish goedendag — a heavy club with an iron spike at the tip — was carried by the militias of the Flemish towns who destroyed the French knighthood at Courtrai in 1302, the 'Battle of the Golden Spurs.' Similar spiked clubs spread among the militias and peasant levies of the Low Countries, the German lands, and Switzerland, where wealth did not stretch to swords and armor but everyone could afford a length of wood and a smith's time. The name, of uncertain origin, is usually explained as a grim joke about the star-like spikes; the English equivalent, 'holy water sprinkler,' is another.

Design & Construction

A morning star has a ball, cylinder, or pear-shaped head, of wood bound with iron bands or of solid iron, set with long spikes. The spikes were driven or welded in, commonly in rows, and often one longer spike projected from the top for thrusting. One-handed versions for horsemen were around 60 to 80 centimeters long and closely related to the flanged Medieval Mace; infantry versions were long polearms, sometimes two meters or more, wielded two-handed. Swiss and South German militia examples tend to be crude, with a thick wooden head and hand-forged spikes, while surviving cavalry pieces of the sixteenth century can be all-steel and finely made.

The naming confusion deserves to be stated plainly. Modern popular usage, video games, and some sellers apply 'morning star' to a spiked ball on a chain attached to a handle. That weapon is properly a flail, sometimes called a Kettenmorgenstern ('chain morning star') in German, and its historical use in combat is far less well documented than the club's. A morning star in the historical sense has no chain. See Flails for the chained weapon and Maces & Clubs for the family the morning star belongs to.

Combat Use

The morning star combined the concussive weight of a club with the penetrating effect of the spikes, which could punch through mail and padding and snag on the edges of plate. It was a weapon for the press of battle rather than for skill, and it suited militias fighting alongside pikemen and halberdiers, where a man in the second rank could reach over and strike down at a fallen or engaged opponent. Swiss contingents in the Burgundian Wars and German peasants in the uprising of 1524-25 both carried it. On horseback the shorter version served the same purpose as the mace and the War Hammer against armored opponents.

Legacy

As pike-and-shot armies became professional in the sixteenth century, the morning star was pushed out by the halberd and the firearm, though it remained a watchman's weapon and a militia stock item into the seventeenth century, and emergency versions reappeared in peasant revolts even later. It retains a place in the popular imagination out of all proportion to its battlefield role. Original examples, especially the rough Swiss and German militia types, survive in regional armories and museums, and a genuine piece with a period haft is a rarity; many of those on the market are nineteenth-century decorative reproductions.