Quarterstaff

Origins

The staff is the oldest weapon there is, but the quarterstaff is a particular English tradition. The name appears in the sixteenth century, and nobody is sure where it comes from: it may refer to staves cut from quartered timber rather than from a young tree, or to the way the fighter held the weapon, with one hand a quarter of the way from the end and the other at the middle. Staves were carried by every traveller on English roads, and for most ordinary men a good oak or ash staff, cheaper than any sword, was the everyday means of defence. The Masters of Defence, the London fencing guild recognized by Henry VIII, taught the staff along with the sword, and the long and short staff were among the weapons in which a student had to prove himself to earn his degree.

Design & Construction

A quarterstaff was a straight, seasoned pole of oak, ash or hornbeam. George Silver's Paradoxes of Defence of 1599 described two lengths: the short staff, measured to suit the man, of about eight feet, and the long staff of twelve feet or more. Many staves were tipped at both ends with iron ferrules or even short spikes. The fighter held it with both hands, the rear hand near the end and the front hand toward the middle, so that he could strike with either end, thrust, and guard with the center of the shaft. Swetnam's manual of 1617 gave instructions for both the staff and the related forest bill.

Combat Use

The quarterstaff was not a battlefield weapon in the way the bill, Halberd or Pike were. Its world was the road, the fair and the fencing stage. Staff fights were a staple of prize-fighting in Tudor and Stuart London, where masters fought public bouts for money, and George Silver claimed that a man with a short staff could defeat two men armed with sword and dagger. The weapon's most famous fight is fictional: in the ballad Robin Hood and Little John, the outlaw meets the giant on a narrow bridge, loses a staff fight and is knocked into the stream, and Little John joins his band. Yeomen who fought as archers with the English Longbow would also have known the staff from their everyday lives.

Legacy

The staff survived the end of the Masters of Defence as a rural sport and a Victorian gymnastic exercise. Thomas McCarthy's Quarter-Staff: A Practical Manual of 1883 and Allanson-Winn and Phillipps-Wolley's Broad-Sword and Single-Stick of 1890 recorded the Victorian style, and the British army and the Boy Scouts used staff drill for exercise. Modern historical fencers reconstruct Silver's short-staff method from his writing. The staff's cousin in Japan, the Bō Staff, followed a separate tradition that survives in martial arts schools today.