Poleaxe

Origins

By the late fourteenth century, plate armor had made the fully equipped man-at-arms very hard to hurt with a sword, and in the Hundred Years War English and French knights increasingly dismounted to fight on foot. They needed a weapon that could concentrate force on a small point, lever an opponent off balance and still be used with precision at close quarters. The answer was the poleaxe. The name has nothing to do with a pole: "poll" is the old English word for a head, and a poll-axe was an axe with a heavy head. The weapon took its classic form in the early fifteenth century and remained the preferred arm of the armored knight on foot until the early sixteenth.

Design & Construction

A poleaxe is usually five to six feet long, a little over head height, with a shaft of ash or oak. The head combines two or three striking surfaces: an axe blade or a faceted hammer face on one side, a curved beak or fluke on the other, and a long spike on top for thrusting. Many also have a spike on the butt. Long steel strips called langets run down the shaft from the head so that it cannot be cut through, and a small disc, the rondel, sits below the head to protect the forward hand. The weapon is balanced for control rather than a single heavy blow. The hammer face could dent and stun through a helmet; the beak could hook a leg or a shaft; the top spike could find the gaps at the armpit, visor or groin. Surviving examples show great variety in the head, and many are finely decorated, as befitted a weapon carried by lords.

Combat Use

The poleaxe was a weapon of men-at-arms rather than common soldiers, and its fullest use came in the Wars of the Roses, where English armies of the 1450s to 1480s fought almost entirely on foot and nobles in Gothic Plate Armor met each other with poleaxe in hand at battles such as Towton and Barnet. It was also the standard weapon for formal combat in the lists: foot combats in armor, fought across a barrier or in the open, often specified "the axe" as one of the agreed weapons, and judicial duels were fought with it. The Burgundian treatise Le Jeu de la Hache, written in the fifteenth century, teaches a whole system of blows, thrusts, parries and grapples with the weapon, and the German fencing masters included it in their books alongside the Longsword. Its relatives on the battlefield were the common soldier's bill and the Halberd, and the War Hammer shared its logic in shorter form.

Legacy

As heavy cavalry and massed Pike and shot changed warfare in the sixteenth century, the poleaxe lost its place in battle, though it lingered in tournaments and as a ceremonial arm. It is now one of the most studied weapons in historical European martial arts, where the surviving manuals make it possible to reconstruct its techniques in detail. Original fifteenth-century poleaxes are rare and highly prized; most surviving examples are in major collections such as the Wallace Collection, the Royal Armouries and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.