Pike

Origins

Long spears in deep formations go back to the Macedonian sarissa of Philip II and Alexander, but the medieval pike was reinvented by communities that could not afford knights. Scottish schiltrons — tight rings of spearmen — beat English cavalry at Bannockburn in 1314, and Flemish townsmen did the same at Courtrai in 1302. The decisive developers were the Swiss. At Laupen in 1339 and then, famously, at Grandson, Morat, and Nancy in 1476-77, when they destroyed the army of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Swiss pike columns showed that disciplined infantry could beat the best heavy cavalry in Europe. The emperor Maximilian I created the Landsknechts from 1487 expressly to have a German pike infantry of his own, and the Spanish built theirs into the tercio. By 1500 the pike was the queen of the European battlefield.

Design & Construction

A pike was an ash shaft, tapering toward the head, 16 to 22 feet (about five to six and a half meters) long; Swiss and Landsknecht pikes were usually around 18 feet. The head was small — a leaf or diamond shape of six to ten inches — because the pike killed by penetration and weight of numbers, not by cutting. Long iron strips called langets ran down the shaft from the socket to stop enemies from lopping off the head. The butt might carry an iron shoe for planting in the ground against a charge. A full pike weighed roughly four to six kilograms, and handling one in a crowded block required training: pikemen held it at shoulder height to 'push of pike' against other infantry, or braced it low and angled against horsemen. English Civil War manuals specify an 18-foot pike, and complaints that soldiers cut theirs down on the march are frequent.

Combat Use

The pike block's strength was its hedge of points and its mass. Swiss columns advanced quickly, often at a run, and relied on shock; Landsknecht and Swiss blocks meeting head-on produced the brutal 'bad war' of the Italian Wars, where the front ranks were cut down and the Landsknecht Zweihänder and Halberd men fought in the gaps. As firearms spread, armies combined pikemen with arquebusiers and then musketeers carrying the Matchlock Musket: the shot fired, and the pikes protected them from cavalry while they reloaded. Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish brigades at Breitenfeld in 1631 used a shallower, more flexible version of this 'pike and shot' system in the Thirty Years War, and both sides fielded pike in the English Civil War, though the proportion of muskets rose steadily throughout.

Legacy

The plug bayonet and then the socket bayonet ended the pike: by about 1700 the French, English, and most other armies had abandoned it, since a musket with a bayonet could do both jobs. It lingered in odd corners — sergeants' spontoons, naval boarding pikes, and emergency issues as late as the Irish rising of 1798 and, bizarrely, to the British Home Guard in 1942. Its influence on formation, discipline, and drill was permanent, since the drill that kept a pike block together became the foundation of modern infantry training. Original pikes are rare because the long shafts were reused or burned; surviving heads and langets are more common. See Pikes and Landsknechts.