Still a fan of the halberd, as method for footman (enlisted) to bring down horseman (officer) hook to drag them down “off of their high horse” ax to cut the horses legs , and spear point for the kill.
Finally someone gives the glaive attention, its criminally underrated, I think glaive & shield would be a devastating combo, like the Zulu warriors, but better
@@Nioclas64 I have heard Joanna of flanders used a glaive . I think a japanese Naginata is a kind of Glaive often used by Women , is there a relationship beetween womens and glaives ?
The main strenght of the naginata is that is a scythe, where you just change the angle of tang in blade from 90-degrees to 0 degrees. It is a weapon ANY farmer can get.
Hey Matt! 😀 LK Chen just came out with a reproduction 1860 light cavalry saber. I'd be really interested to know what you think about it and how it stacks up to the real thing.
It makes sense that a lot of these scored very close to one another. If one were clearly superior to the others, then presumably we wouldn't see the huge variety in polearms that we did historically. Everyone would have used the same thing. Also: I know you didn't include non-European weapons, but as someone who practised naginata for several years and has some experience with the guandao, I'm Team Glaive!
Good point - Japanese and Chinese forms of glaive would get the same scores as the glaive here. I actually meant to mention them in the glaive section and forgot!
Right. I thought of the naginata and the yari, too; but the Eurocentric terminology of this video is really just a convenience...whatever name you use, the weapon types are largely the same the world over.
@@ericblevins6467 Yeah, I agree that it mostly boils down to local terminology for basically the same thing. For example, every human culture since the palaeolithic has had some kind of spear, and they all presumably had different names for them. That said, there are a few regional weapons that might be unique enough to be considered separate weapons, rather than just regional variants of a universal type. E.g., I'm not sure that the Chinese dagger-axe (ge 戈) has a direct equivalent in most other cultures. I also remember seeing some very unusual (to my eye, at least) Thai polearms that didn't look like anything from regions I'm more familiar with (Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Middle East). The definition of what constitutes a "polearm" is an interesting question in its own right. E.g., Are the goedendag and the nagamaki short polearms, or are they just a weird club and a weird sword? I'm not sure.
Here's the final tally for all the weapons: Single Combat Formation Combat Anti Calvary Anti Armor Total Spear + Shield 10 10 7 3 30 Spear 8 8 9 6 31 Pike 1 9 10 2 22 Partisan 9 8 8 7 32 Glaive 10 7 7 8 32 Halberd 8 8 8 8 32 Polax 10 7 5 10 32 Bill 8 8 8 8 32 Flail 6 6 3 7 22 Great Axe 8 6 2 7 23 Ahlspiess 7 8 9 8 32 Spear+optional shield 10 10 9 6 35 Edit: Sorry this only looks right on desktop. Thanks to Thornescapes for suggesting to add Spear and optional shield, which combines the best scores of both, as a spearman (given a few seconds) could ditch the shield and opt for using the spear two handed instead. Feel free to discuss it in the comments, I'm not 100% on the idea myself, and I'd like to hear some more takes on it.
You are the true hero. Thank you. I would add another category. "Spear + optional shield". If someone has a spear and shield, it's fairly quick and easy to just drop the shield if necessary. It's the same weapon for both, after all. If you use this logic and combine the best scores of "Spear + Shield" and "2H Spear", you end up with 35 points.
@@thornescapes7707 Thanks for the great suggestion, while I really like the idea, I'm questioning whether or not it would be fast enough to unstrap the shield. Yes, it would only take a few seconds, but a few seconds is a lot of time in a fight, so I'm not certain about the idea unless someone were to test it. Plus, if the enemy knew about this shield dropping tactic as a counter to cavalry/heavy armor they could feint a cavalry charge, make everyone drop their shields, and then attack with infantry or missile weapons since picking up and putting on a shield takes considerably longer than dropping it. Imo, it'd be better to just pick one and stick with it. Don't get me wrong, I still like the idea enough to add it into the chart!
@@pieguy5692 A boss gripped shield would only take 1 second. A "strapped" shield would take about 2 seconds. It isn't physically attached. There are also some shields that had a long strap (guige) on them so that you could drop the shield and it wouldn't be on the ground. I'm not certain how common they were, but there is documentation about them. They might have been designed for this purpose, I'm not certain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guige
@@thornescapes7707 yeah, my bad, I've actually made boss gripped shields, I just completely forgot to mention then lol, I was thinking of the shields used in phanalaxes, which are obviously a different story from center grip shields
Gary Gygax would approve. For many people of a certain age, their first introduction to polearms was seeing many varieties listed in Dungeons & Dragons and wondering "WTF are these things?". Man liked his polearms.
@@thunderlaugh9085 Depends on the edition. The current version of D&D does not have many polearms: glaive, haberd, pike, spear, trident. Only the spear can be thrown. The others could be thrown but because they are not designed for throwing the effect is very limited. It's the older versions, specifically Advanced D&D written by Gygax in the mid/late 1980s that has all the polearm varieties: bardiche, bec de corbin, bill-guisarme, fauchard, fauchard-fork, glaive, glaive-guisarme, guisarme, guisarme-voulge, halberrd, lucern hammer, various lances, pike, ranseur, spetum, trident, voulge. What these all were was not explained at the time, leaving the more detail oriented players visiting the library to look them up (I did). The older editions had no specific rule for throwing a weapon that was not designed to be thrown, although they were big on allowing improvised rules. An obvious solution would be to treat them like a spear but limit the range and chance to hit.
My exposure was Diablo II which also had an oddly numerous amount of different polearms. It's also where I learned that they were a distinct thing as barbarians have a "polearm mastery" skill.
And explains the rapid evolution of archery equipment and tactics, and then firearm development, right after the mongols conquered everything from the Pacific ocean to Germany
Cavalry? Cavalry had been around long before the spear and shield started to decline. However we do see two handed polearms like the voulge and early halberd coming into widespread prominence as the front rankers of armies like the Swiss get better protected. My thoughts are that the improved armor meant less vulnerability to missiles and a two handed polearm that can hook can not only hit much harder than any one handed weapon but also hook and rip away at shields and enemy weapons.
Nothing to do with Cavalry, spears were still the most common battlefield weapon for massed formations well after Cavalry started appearing. I think the second part of your statement is the real reason spears started to decline in use. Armour. As armour got heavier and started to cover more of the body the spear was far less capable of punching through that armour. As the common soldier became, through history, that much more heavily armoured then the usefulness of the Spear and shield on the battlefield declined. This of course is referring mostly to Europe, I am not as familiar with armour development in other areas of the world, such as large portions of Africa, as well as most of Asia. So it may well be that spear and shield kept more relevance in some areas for longer because the standard soldier may be less well armoured than the comparable European Infantry, and in other regions may have broadly mirrored the situation in Medieval and Late medieval Europe.
@@alganhar1 I should have noted that spears were still used fairly often by knights on foot, but they had more reinforced hafts and the spearheads developed diamond shaped cross sections so they could strike armor with more effect. In Japan at least, we see a similar trend with some yari blade cross sections becoming triangular or diamond shaped as well, something you wouldn't bother to make unless armor protection warranted it.
I think an interesting follow up would be more of the logistics questions around those same weapons. Like "how easy to make?" "how easy to carry to field?" "how easy to maintain?" would be interesting to see differences (if any). Though I guess many of them would have a lot of "same" answers, would still be interesting conversation on how these things might change given logistics?
That's a great question. Because those "little" details actually end up playing a significant part in the logistics of an army, so the are not really little after all!
I reckon that the poleaxe is practically just a better greataxe that is much more difficult and expensive to make. Similarly, the winged spear, while only slightly more complex, probably wouldn't be seen too much on the battlefield compared to the mass producible spear.
I think the pike is the big stand out there. Everything else is easy for an individual soldier to carry in most places, but lugging around a 16-20 foot pike would be difficult and unwieldy even on an open road or field, and borderline implausible through any rough or forested terrain.
Awesome video descriptive on the use of these lethal weapons! Recall family were visiting the Vatican, and their Swiss Guard had an immense polearm standing next to a giant church door we thought open to tourists! We thought we could traipse inside but that polearm suddenly blocked our entry, whilst a friendly smile emanated from that Swiss Guard. We apologized and his friendly smile didn't disguise the fact that his polearm was quite imposing and real! Lol
I’m down with that. How many kills has a pointy stick had in history and prehistory? Even John Wick with his custom ultra short portable concealed spear… a pencil, a f7+king pencil.
yeah, Matt is a bit tough on the farmer's flail, particularly looking at it out of CONTEXT with regards to mass combat. Hussites beat the crap out of armoured knights when combining the with war wagons.
“Bear in mind the horses usually have lances” I’ve been underestimating the might of historical equines this whole time! Handgonnes were on poles. I think they deserve to make the top 10. They get at least an 11 in range.
Well, considering that handgonnes were missile weapons, rather than thrusting/cutting weapons, they don't really belong in this comparison, despite the poles.😉
I feel like spear and shield is de facto a better choice than 2 handed spear, despite scoring lower, because you always have the option of just dropping your shield if cavalry or armored opponents show up.
I think part of it is that a spear designed primarily for use with two hands is typically going to be longer. Also the specific ones that Matt mentioned (winged/partizan) have been designed with chopping capabilities in mind - something you'd not tend to do for a spear designed primarily for use with a shield.
@@TakunaNuva Not necessarily. The golden age of spears in Europe was the migration era, where they generally used the same type of spear with and without shields. It's more a matter of how you use it, and Thegn Thrand made an excellent series of videos several years back explaining how the "gigging" technique gives the overarm usage much more power and reach than we would expect. Also Matt did separate the winged spears from using a spear 2 handed. ;)
Something I think is often not appreciated is that Mesoamerica (the area where the Aztec, Maya, etc are from) had a great variety of polearms: Granted, there's a broader point to be made about how Mesoamerica in general isn't viewed as part of the broader Ancient and Medieval world despite having complex societies with huge cities, formal governments, and organized militaries during those periods; but like, most people are at least vaguely familiar with their use of the Macuahuitl as a weapon: Their Polearms? Not so much. (There was a large variety of other swords, clubs, maces, types of armor, etc, too, but Polearms is the focus here): Obviously, you had simple spears, just with a obsidian or flint point on the end of a shaft (or poles with a sharpened wood point or a blunt tip, like a quarterstaff, I guess?), but there were more complex constructions too: The Tepoztopilli for example was an Aztec polearm: You had a long shaft, which then ended in a broad, spade or leaf or diamond shaped wooden head (the exact shape and proportions differs depending on the depiction), which, like the Macuahuitl, was lined around the edges with obsidian blades. Hassig, who wrote the gold standard text on Aztec militarism and warfare, seems to think that this would have been less just a thrusting weapon, and rather also used for slashing, comparing it to a halbred. There was also a surviving Tepoztopilli alongside a surviving Macuahuitl (then the only, now there's 1-2 other surviving specimens) housed in the Royal Armorry of Madrid, which we have photos and sketches of (though the pieces sadly were seemingly destroyed in a fire, though the suits of Samurai armor they were pictured along are still around.... Some people have skepticism about the photos of the macuahuitl/tepztopiloi in comparsion to the sketches, since the scales are different), and in those sketches, both weapons are interestingly depicted without gaps between the blades as so often seen in Mesoamerican depictions, which would make sense to form more of a flush cutting edge. The Codex Rios also shows what seems to be an almost "Glaive" version of the Macuahuitl, with the iconic paddle-bat shaped wooden core (albiet not full length) lined with blades on the end of a long shaft (though not as long as Tepoztopilli). As far as i'm aware, this is the only depiction or description of this form of the weapon, and sources variously mislabel it as a Cuauholloli (the Nahuatl/Aztec term for ball headed maces), or as a "two handed Macuahuitl). Down in Oaxaca, surviving Mesoamerican books/manuscipts showing Mixtec and Zapotec armies, rulers, and soldiers, such as the Codex Selden, Zouch-Nuttal, etc, there seems to be weapons similar to this glaive, with a shaft (variously either full length or shorter), which oddly tapers, being thicker the closer to the head you get, with the head then being lined with blades. It's hard to say if the head is spade shaped like the Tepoztopilli, or is more of a club like a macahuitl/the glaive, since the proportions differ significantly even inside the same document, but it seems to be almost between the two, and the head also seems to not be made from the same piece of wood as the shaft, but rather affixed to it or otherwise the weapons being designed to give the impression they are, with the tapered end of the shaft extending past the width of the head Mixtec documents also seem to show spears with a almost triangular, needle like point, which is then lined with serrations of some sort. Maya spears also sometimes have serrated blades, albeit affixed to the upper portion of the pole length, not on the point itself, so are probably decorative: See Yaxchilan lintel 41, for example. In general, it's pretty common for Maya spears wielded by high status soldiers or rulers to have decorative components along the top portion of the pole on their spears: On the Bonampak murals, for example, you see a spear where most of the top third of the spear is in a jaguar pelt "sleeve", with the bottom end of that sleeve being tasseled with quetzal feathers, and the top portion above it directly below the point being inlaid with precious stones. Both Mixtec/Zapotec, Maya polearms (There are also some Maya weapons which seem to be half or full length shafts with huge flanges or spikes protruding from them along the side, in practice probably more like clubs or picks then polearms?), and the Codex Rios glaive also occasionally have balls of feathers or cloth with tassels affixed to them around the top portion behind the point, too: I know this is something you see in some Eastern/Asian polearms, and may serve a similar purpose, but I also wonder if these would have been heraldic to indicate royal dyanysty, the city state, unit division, etc: I know the emblem of some Mixtec royal dynasty affixed to banners and stadards were different arrangments of feather orbs, for example. But this sort of decoration seems largery absent from Tepoztoppili. Some groups had very, very long, 10-12+ foot pikes/lances: Per Bernal DIaz, The Chinantec civilization (one of the cultures in Oaxaca alongside the Mixtec and Zapotec) apparently used lances longer then the Spanish's, with "two fathoms of knives" (or one fathom in another mention) attached (The Maudslay translation here proposes that it was a dual pointed spear with then two lines of blades extending down from the points along each side of the shaft). The Pipil, a Nahua offshoot group way down in El Salvador, had some apparently 20 feet long, and there were also shorter spears. I don't have access to the original accounts describing these, but "Armies of the Aztec and Inca Empires, Other Native Peoples of The Americas, and the Conquistadores (Armies of the Sixteenth Century)" depicts it much like Tepotzopilli, except the head and the blades extend down to almost the top third of the entire shaft length, and notes it was dipped in poison, though the book has some issues so I take it with a grain of salt. Finally, there are some ceramic figures from West Mexico and the Gulf Coast areas in Mexico which show some truly bizarre polearms: Some of the bits on them may merely be decorative tassels, which would make them less odd, but the ceramics seem to show some almost Pole-axe like hatchet, spike, and blunt protrusions around the polearm's head in different directions. I really wish I was able to link images for these and the other things I've mentioned, but sadly youtube tends to get iffy when I do that. But yeah, as you can see, quite a bit of variety here! It makes sense, since the area had organized armies for thousands of years and would have had to develop a great variety of weapons, but it's not something that's often apperciated in broader conversations about polearms, or their different types of clubs, maces, other weapons, etc in those conversations about historical weaponry and armor. Sadly, this is also probably only a small cross section of the true diversity of their arms and armor, considering barely any surviving specimens remain, and we only have scarce descriptions and visual depictions in Spanish accounts or the few surviving Mesoamerican books and accounts that the Spanish didn't destroy. I'm also sure Andean civilizations like the Inca, Moche, Wari, Tiwanku, Chimu, etc had their own large variety of polearms, I know metal halbreds were a thing there, but i'm less familar with that area.
Thanks, Matt! I really enjoyed this vid. It was informative and entertaining. My single point of disagreement is in relation to ranking anti-cavalry weapons. You focused entirely on the moment of first contact between the cavalry and infantry. In that moment you correctly stated that reach was the most critical factor. But of course the engagement didn't end in that single brief moment. After the shock of contact the cavalryman had to regain his composure and control of his mount, back away, turn and then withdraw. In those few moments the bill and halberd could use the feature other weapons you rated identically just don't have; the hook. Cavalrymen could be hooked and pulled off their horse using halberds or bills. The very likely result would be the severe wounding or death of the cavalryman. There's plenty of accounts of exactly this happening, especially in late Medieval battles. Thus I'd give the bill and halberd an extra point in the anti-cavalry category. Please let me know what you think about this. I'd be very interested to hear your opinion. Thanks again!
Another point you touched on is that armies were combined arms affairs. Pikemen were frequently protected by interspersing soldiers with other weapons in their ranks. A great sword-armed man could deal with infiltrators trying to get at the pikemen while also striking at the narrower end of enemy pikeshafts. In an overlapping rank of shield & spear men, soldiers in the second rank with longer two-handed spears could move up to thrust over the top of the shield bind to deliver long range thrusts. Archers put up rows of sharpened spikes to thwart cavalry charges, reaching out with their bills to hook and unhorse any cavalryman that tried to get too close. These are just a few examples. A video where you discussed common weapons combination used in battle formations would be extremely interesting. I hope you'll consider that. Thanks!
I love the spear since it’s the basis of where everything else comes from, be it a halberd or a glaive or a pike or being used with a shield. It is the bare essentials for being effective on the battlefield, one pointy stick and you become a weapon. I also love the look of certain cutting spears like the Yari or some of the ones from the Viking era.
Matt! New fan from East Texas here; caught one of your videos a couple months back and haven’t been anywhere else since, catching up on Medieval history since. Hope this early comment reaches you, thanks for doing what you do… Best wishes, God bless
@@camerongunn7906 lol, way ahead of you bro, maybe I exaggerated a bit on ‘haven’t been anywhere else’ by including Tod in since I found him through Matt as well. His neutral approach to his historical recreation stuff is outstanding; all of his “what if.. ‘ and “nothing says they did, nothing says they didn’t “ way of looking at things… I can latch onto either of these guys episodes for hours
@@thekaxmax Depends. It is always outreached and I wouldn't want to go up against some of the more agile polearms, or something like a Jumonji Yari/Spetum (spear with side blades that can cut you on the way back)
I would guess as follows: 7 for duelling due to comparably heavy weight to reach ratio. Probably beats the flail and pike, but the speed of spear thrusts and the multitude of trapping opportunities with the more complex pole arms are superior IMHO. 6 for massed ranks, due to similar issues like the great axe and flail. 5 against cavalry, you could use them as a makeshift spear albeit very short, similar issues to the great axe. 4 against armour. This is where the great sword falls really short. Less potential for blunt force trauma then even a two handed spear due to the distribution of weight, and less agile than a spear for thrusting. Half-swording to turn it into a short heavy spear would likely be best, though I doubt something like a murder strike would work without seriously damaging the blade due to the weight of the hilt. (Infinitely potent when ending them rightly though.) 22 total So overall, not terrible in any category, but greatswords IMHO shine most as tools of area denial, suited to bodyguards, and seemingly used to counter pike formations, though we can't be sure of the exact use and effectiveness of that due to lack of sources.
the list is meaningless because you don't equip soldiers based on a weapon's average performance but its specialized strength. Then you deploy your army according to their specializations. This average is like rating bows in the middle because their single combat and anti armor are terrible. Yet this is meaningless because neither of these metrics are what bows were used for. It's the same for a pike and other weapons.
I disagree with the conclusion on pikes v.s armour. We have many pikes with heads specifically designed to deal with armour, and the weight of a pike on a 14-15 feet shaft have a good deal of weight behind it and works as a battering ram when moved back and forth. The sarissa have a heavy but-spike which will increase this effect even more. This will increase the kinetic energy on impact quite a lot. We have primary sources on pikes being used against armoured opponents as the primary weapon, as well as sources on them penetrating plate armour, presumably of munition grade quality. Do a test for yourself and you'll see. If what a rondel dagger when used against armour surprised you, a pike definitely will do the same.
I think he may have only been considering it from a single combat perspective. I would also have expected it to score much higher vs armour. Maybe Matt can do some testing in another video?
one thing that might be interesting is to rank how they are for an armored user, since wearing armor can change how aggressive you can be with a weapon
I like how you separated them into those distinct categories, that really makes sense in how they are useful depending on the circumstances. I agree wtih your rankings on the weapons and I think your approach does well to take into account the different variables depending on the use.
Sword and Shield vs Cavalry: You can always drop your shield, and use two hands to brace the spear while you face the charge and then pick up your shield afterwards. But then that is still using two-handed spear really.
Fairly good scoring system for all weapons. Personally I like the spear used with 2 hands but if I had to pick something else it would have to be the pole axe
In "Spears are better than Swords", I think we saw spear and shield perform worse in duels against the swordsmen than spear in two hands. After that video, I actually thought spear and shield was more of a battlefield weapon set, and that two-handed spear was better in single combat. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
As a 5th dan BB in trad jujiustu, I can testify to how good a two handed staff weapon is versus a sword. My sig other tears me a new one every time i pit bokken against their jo. A shield means the staff weapon is one handed, so it just becomes a point, and once you get past that, you're good to go. Two handed? Nope. Get past the point and the haft will get you. Spear and shield is definitely battlefield better though; after all, you need cover from those arrows and sling stones...
I think in my limited experience, I find that the spear in two hands has a shallower learning curve than the sword and shield together. The people I know who are good at that matchup are very good into either two handed spear or sword.
Regarding dueling with partizan & rotella, Achille Marozzo explicitly wrote it was fine & possibly advantageous to ditch the rotella & use the partizan in both hands. That's a point of evidence against the spear & shield being better than spear in two hands, though the rotella is only a medium-sized shield.
spear+shield is better in some matchups while Spear alone is better in others; spear+shield is generally very good against long, two handed polarms because the spear (especially used over the arm) is a superior close-in fighting weapon and can be thrown in an instant to outreach any of them. the reason sword+shield (and to a smaller degree, even just sword on it's own) performs better against spear+shield than it does against 2h spear is that: 1. part of the advantage of being able to throw your weapon is lost when you already outreach your opponent. (even moreso when your enemy has a shield) 2. being better than most polearms for close-in fighting is mostly worthless when going against a weapon that massively outclasses you at that distance anyway. 3. Spear+Shield is significantly harder to get good at than either 2h spear fighting or sword fighting: Being more of a "jack-of-all-trades" weapon set means you need to be far more adaptive in your fighting style (2h spear and swords are both specialised for one engagement distance) and additionally spear+shield is just a bit less intuitive to use.
I like this type of rating over tier lists. It examines each of the weapons in many different cases. In some cases a weapon is supreme, while in other times it does poorly. Then there are the weapons that are just good general purpose.
Thanks for video, Mr. Easton. I believe there must be two mandatory categories: (1) cost of production & maintenance; (2) efforts & time to master particular type of weapon.
Spear and shield had the extra option of leaving the shield hanging on the back and wielding the spear two handed. That would give to it the highest score. As a tie breaker, you could give a versatility bonus by adding to each total the median of the individual scores, that would penalize the specialized weapons that have mostly low scores and a very high score.
I kind of feel that way as well. Also excluded is the spear can be thrown into the horse or horseman, while maybe not always the best idea it is an option none of the others can do well.
I think the greataxe deserves more points in armored fighting than the flail. It's not as good at getting around shields as the flail is, but it's nimbler and it's more capable of hooking. So you can easily pull someone in armor off balance and then deliver a chop. Maybe not a "cleave someone from crown to groin" type of chops like they describe housecarls doing, but enough to give someone a really bad day.
My ideal fantasy setup would be decent armor combined with large shield and spear as the main weapons, a war hammer as a side arm, and a (Rondel) dagger as a backup. Plus maybe a sling for ranged combat - might as well carry one and a bunch of sling bullets since they don't weigh much or take much space.
Ranking videos from a specialist are always fun! It would be even better if we saw the ranking on the screen ie putting pics of the weapons on some kind of matrix or least a spreadsheet with points for specific categories and total. When it comes to talking about numbers it's good to see them on screen as well, for a better grasp.
As usual good video, only way you can argue against your scoring is put it to the test. 👍 Any chance of doing a video looking at the winged hussars, please?
It's always fun seeing these kinds of rankings and seeing that, shock of shocks, the best weapons tend to be the ones that saw the most use historically, as their popularity was largely _because_ of their effectiveness. From the Bronze Age -- probably even earlier -- to the adoption of firearms, pointy stick and handheld cover is hard to beat.
In my brief experience with spear and shield it is to hard to maneuver the spear. This makes it really easy for people to close with me and almost impossible to retract the spear fast enough with one hand to deal with them. Unless dealing with missiles my defense comes from my reach. If I can keep them at distance the shield is useless. If they close then the shield can help but I have no offense at that point so it just makes it take a little longer to kill me. My options at that point are rather to try and disengage or to try and close to a grapple.
I've heard many authors claim that the Macedonian phalanx was actually well protected against arrows, because with that forest of long pikes projecting in front and up above the men, arrows were likely to hit the shafts of the pikes and deflect, losing their momentum and falling down fairly harmlessly. I'd love to see some sort of practical experiment to test that and see if a forest of pikes really does protect against arrows, or if they still fall amongst the men with deadly effect.
@@napsec9807 at very short range where the arrow shots have almost no arc to them the pikes definitely wouldn't offer much protection to the front ranks. There would have been a lot of pike shafts over the heads of the front ranks at increasing angles, though, so if a forest of pikes really does deflect arrows it should be about as effective at protecting the front ranks from arcing arrows as the back ranks.
@@kounurasaka5590 , I definitely like halberds as well. I especially like the looks of the ones from the late 15th/early 16th century, specifically, the ones depicted in the artwork of Albrecht Dürer. I guess we would call those the "Swiss" type.
As for Great-Axe vs cavalry, I think realistically, they would be used as part of a formation with other weapons. Spears and shields would stop the cavalry, then great-axes could advance and deal a much more substantial blow to the horse or rider. Bardiches and Lochaber Axes were used well after shield walls and plate armor went extinct, so they were kept around for something
The great axe looks like it would be capable of jabbing/stabbing. The geometry leaves the top of the edge jutting out in a point. Not as pointy as a spear, but I doubt a perfectly good stabbing point would go unused in a time of need... :)
as far as polarms go, you may as well say it can't stab; any kind of protective gear will be enough to protect against a greataxe thrust, while most of the other weapons in this list can go through anything that isn't plate armor semi-reliably. otherwhise you could say the flail can stab as well; getting a thick wooden pole thrust into your face is no joke even if it's blunt.(that is to say, a well backed thrust with any long, wooden pole can break bones; hits to the face can knock you out, blind you or just downright kill you)
It makes me happy that halberds and bills both got straight eights. Like a Swiss Army knife on a stick. There's no battlefield situation you aren't prepared for. But "jack of all trades, master of none," as they say.
Great video! Granted, I'm a bit biased as a polearm enthusiast (even as a kid when I was doing martial arts, once I was old enough to train with one my favorite weapon was always the staff), but overall I think the scores you've presented here make a lot of sense and are presented in a way that's easy to understand, even as someone who doesn't have as much hands-on experience with hafted weapons as I'd like to. Somehow I'd managed to go about a decade or so (the length of time I've been making any meaningful effort to learn about historical military equipment) without realizing that glaives tend to be a bit more like a lighter and occasionally longer pollaxe than they are like a halberd (though the "occasionally longer" aspect might depend on whether you count what we modern folks call the "Lucerne hammer" as a member of the pollaxe family; actually, I'd be curious to see how you'd rank Lucerne hammers, but I imagine they'd score similarly to the halberd and bill or the traditional form of pollaxe depending on the length of the specific example), which I'm going to chalk up to the editions of D&D I'm familiar with giving glaives similar (if not identical) stats to halberds and glossing over pollaxes entirely (what with D&D being responsible for most of my misconceptions about arms and armor, some of which apparently still persisted in my brain many years later, as evidenced by this particular realization). In the context of editions where they're not statted out, pollaxes would presumably be lumped in with greataxes or some other axe weapon, which isn't entirely accurate, but I suppose it's understandable from the perspective that in the context of the two editions I ever made any effort to learn the rules of - 4e and 5e - a pollaxe would likely be mechanically identical to or at least incredibly similar to one of the existing fantastical "superior" axe-type weapons like the urgrosh or gouge (4e); or near-impossible to differentiate from a greataxe within the limited rules for mundane weapons, unless you went out of your way to give it the "special" property despite other clearly multi-damage-type weapons (like many swords and polearms) not getting that same treatment (5e). Also as a D&D homebrew nerd, it tickles something inside me to see that so many of these weapons got very similar scores (including more than a few with the exact same score), as if someone had balanced them using a point-based system like someone might use while designing playable races/species/ancestries/lineages/[insert your terminology of choice here] or... well, weapons! And then of course the lower-scoring weapons are either more specialized (the pike and flail), an inferior version of a better-scoring weapon (the greataxe compared to the later pollaxe which is basically its upgraded, more-developed descendant), or weren't terribly popular compared to the others (the flail), which is something you often see when evaluating the balance of things in the context of a TTRPG with what's meant to be an objective scoring system. Admittedly I do find it a little odd that across every category you rated the bill identically to the halberd and always wound up saying things like "it's exactly the same as a halberd in this context", in that it makes me wonder why you didn't lump them togetherfor the purposes of this video. I remember thinking to myself at the start of the video when you listed the weapons you'd be covering, "Is the bill really that different from the halberd, functionally?" Obviously they're considered different weapons, but I'd be curious if there's a context where the halberd and bill DO meaningfully differ in utility, since I've always seen them as basically the same thing except one is shaped like an axe and one is shaped like a pruning hook, and this video hasn't really done anything to change that perception (though if I'm mistaken about their degree of similarity, I'd love to find out why!). And going back earlier in the video, I think something worth noting about the spear & shield in the context of massed combat is that not only does the shield protect you from missile weapons, it also usually protects the person to your left to some degree as well, and likewise you're protected a bit by the shield of the person to your right (assuming a unit where everyone is holding their spear in their right hand and a reasonably-sized shield in their left, anyhow, which I'm assuming applies to the vast majority of military units throughout history). Not that you could possibly have ranked it any higher in that category anyway (without pulling a Spinal Tap at least), but I think it's something that contributes to its 10/10 score in the context of massed combat.
This was fun! So, here are your numbers vs. mine Matt. Let's see if the formatting works?! Where I disagreed with you, I have written my assessment in parentheses. Single Combat In formation/massed vs. Cavalry Anti-Armor Total Spear & Shield 10 (9) 10 7 3 30 (29) 2H- Spear 8 8 9 6 31 Pike 1 9 10 2 22 Partisan/Spetum/Winged Spear 9 8 (9) 8 (9) 7 32 (34) Glaive/Gisarme 10 7 7 8 32 Halberd 8 8 8 (9) 8(9) 32 (33) Pole ax 10 (7) 7 (6) 5 10 32 (28) Bill 8 8(9) 8 (9) 8 32 (35) Flail 6 6 3 7 22 Grt Axe 8(7) 6(7) 2 (4) 7 23 (25) Ahl-Spiess 7 8 9 8 32 Spear and shield in single combat are ok as long as your opponent does not have the combination sword & shield or axe and shield, etc. If they do, they can usually get close to you and all they have to do is get past your point once. You will not be able to recover your spear for an accurate stab, before they are in on you. With a shield it is easy to get past the point. You have no buddies to back you up, so in that case you'd be screwed. Those are only a few cases, but they were commonly used cases. You would obviously kick ass vs. anyone without a shield, in this case. The partisan is just as effective in a formation as it is in a single combat. I mean sure you cannot swing the thing, but you do not usually do that anyway and the little projections can be used to "hook" or shove or deflect other weapons, even just with their geometry. I think they are every bit as good as a two handed spear vs. cavalry, they are light and nimble enough to be 'stabby' like a spear, but they have a bit more weight on the point. Again the projections add to the geometric defensive capability of the weapon, making it easy to scoop or shove an enemy spear, lance or other weapon offline. You can't really do that as well with a spear. I think you are a bit partial to poleaxes. In single combat, they do not have the reach that a halberd, spear, glaive or bill would have. That counts for a lot, so I gave the poleaxe a 7 in single combat. I also think you over-valued them in formation combat and dropped them to a 6 there. For me, the pole ax was a specialized weapon used by armored men vs. other armored men and usually in a duel situation or a mêlée in a fairly open formation. In a tight formation, they are far too short to cover your friends and you cannot wind up and wail on someone with them, because you do not have the room to swing the bloody thing effectively. The poleaxe is also quite heavy. Poking with it is not as effective as with a spear, bill, partisan. The Halberd is long and you can hook and pull horsemen off their horses with it. Sure, they will run you through if you try to do that frontally, but I think it is feature that would be valuable in a mêlée with horsemen. The halberd is also long enough to oppose a charge as you said. Plus it can deliver a hell of a chop vs. armor. Arguably more than a bill or glaive, but it is a bit like splitting hairs. I blinged the Halberd up a bit, because of its reach, its nasty chop and its versatility (stab, chop, hook, pick). The Bill is a bit more effective than a halberd in a formation, you can stab & chop with them fairly well and they are a good medium-thing between weight and nimbleness. Whereas swinging a halberd is like swinging an anvil on a stick swinging a bill is like swinging a falchion on a stick. They are easier to use in a formation than a halberd. Also, they have all those hooks for pulling down horsemen, so I bumped them up to a 9 vs. cavalry. They are just more nimble and versatile than a Halberd. The Halberd does pack a wallop though. I think you also are a bit partial to Dane axes. I can understand that me too, but I do not think that they are as good as a 2-handed spear, bill or halberd, because of their short reach. I think they are a bit more nimble than a poleaxe in formations. You can stab with the spike on the poleaxe, but getting stabbed with one wing of the blade on the great axe hurts as well and I think the great axe is only a little less effective than the poleaxe vs. cavalry. I think you went overboard there. We should have added the Goedendag!
When bringing up the subject of winged spears, I feel they'd be a bit more effective against cavalry due to their ability to catch onto targets. Even if a knight is wearing plate, they'd likely end up unseated if they were caught with the langes on either side (if those were larger and hooked, such as those seen on a spetum, corseque, or jumonji yari). I'd also think this would be slightly safer to use against the horse itself for the same reason a boar spear is useful against a boar, it prevents the horse from trampling you after being stabbed through. Though I doubt a man could hold back a horse for very long, it might provide enough time to get out of the way while also killing the horse, a significant victory.
Why do you say that? Surely the purpose of a formation is to present a solid wall of spearheads, and a shorter weapon simply won't reach. Would you put men with short spears or poleaxes in the front rank, and pikemen behind them?
@@jonathanshaltz7750 They do not necessarily need to reach the other side. Halberds and related weapons can hook and bind the opposing line's pikes, disrupting their formation and creating an opening to break through their line. They are also important in that, if and when someone breaches your line, they are advantageous over sidearms for the 'bad war'.
@@jonathanshaltz7750 The problem with such formations is that once the formation breaks, a long spear will be useless. This is also why historically cavalry was actually pretty good against pike formations. They are unable to rotate the formation towards the cavalry, and are left with just a small sidearm to defend themselves.
@@jonathanshaltz7750 Exactly. Heavily armored men with shorter weapons can displace pikes and close in on the enemy pikeman while staying fairly safe because of their armor and the pikemen behind them.
Very very interesting comparison video. One thing not mentioned, is...wait for it....context. the best pole weapon is the one most suited to the time, place, and opponents. Plus, the training of your troops, (the author and renacator Christian Cameron once made the suggestion, that the poorer quality your troops, the longer the weapon you gave them). My opponent is in full plate and on a horse? Halberd please. My opponent is another Greek Hoplite in linothorax and with and aspis? Spear and shield. My opponent is a Norman Miles using his spear overarm? Dane axe. And if he's a great mass of howling nut-jobs? I'd like a pike and five ranks behind me. Context.
Shout out to the ji, first example of halberds in history and good on both chariot, cavalry, infantry personal and formation fighting while being made from pretty much the Bronze Age to the Iron Age truly a jack of all trades
This was fun, always thought spear and shield was most versatile combination. Have heard different things about the willingness or maybe unwillingness of horses, even highly trained "chargers", to face or jump a fence. Steeplechasers come to mind, but have no knowledge of knights' horses or any way of comparing with today.
halberd/bill are a second rank weapon. Spear and shield in the first rank helps protect the second rank, and when the enemy stalls on contacting the first rank, they have the reach to hit hard, or hook an pull to open holes between enemy shields.
@@scholagladiatoria I had 6 months experience 30 years ago with the SCA, was in a shield wall once, and that strategy was employed. It worked well, and I was told that's how it's done. That's scant evidence from Texas, in the wrong century. NOT exactly primary source, more like sailing a balsa raft across the pacific to show that it is plausible. Love your channel.
Might also be worth looking at which polearms are best used by cavalry. Lances were common, but spear and shield were used on horseback, glaives and flails were used on horseback out in Asia.
I by and large agree with your scores and conclusions. I would've given 1 extra to point to the glasses for combat against horses. Assuming you don't get lanced a big choppy blade on a stick is very good for attacking horses, lopping their legs off etc which these types of weapon are often used for.
I use a Dane Ax in my local fighting group and I agree with your assessment. It is not as optimized as a pole ax and not at all for use against horsemen. For single combat against guys in armor it is great.
I suppose you could consider it a glaive or an axe but I've always been fond of the Bardiche, it's unique crescent blade shape functions similarly to a bearded axe in that you can choke up your hand behind the blade, it has a long point to stab with, and its large cutting surface means you are more likely than most axes to land a decent chop. It's essentially a kind of dane axe. They usually weren't too long, but in the historical usage that is for a good reason since they were used in combination with musket and used to rest the musket on for more accurate firing. If it were too long you wouldn't be able to use it in such a way and the heft of the head would be too difficult to maneuver. You can look up the Russian Streltsy infantry to see what I mean, Streltsy were around from the 16th-18th century and created by Ivan the Terrible so you know they must be cool.
In military terms, that is, ignoring the single combat role, things look a little different. great axe 15 flail 16 spear and shield 20 pike 21 glaive 22 pollaxe 22 two-handed spear 23 partisan 23 halberd & bill 24 ahlspiess 25
Great stuff matt, butt i must say that the pike is the most underrated weapon...again! The pike was made for mass combat and it was very effective together with the halberd even against cavalry, infantry and armour. we just have too look into late XV and XVI century military history as for example the swiss and the landsknecht. It´s not fair for the pike to be judge as an individual weapon. keep in mind that the pike is weapon that lasted centuries in the battlefields were all the other weapons gradually disappear, and it´s weapon that´s is always being underrated together with the halberd...uff🙂
Period sources directly contest the notion pikes were an awful weapon for single combat. Antonio Manciolino recommended the 12-14+ft lancia over the 8ft(ish) spiedo: "Longer weapons are to be preferred to shorter ones: therefore, the spear is to be preferred to the spiedo, holding it against the latter not by the butt (dangerous because of the weapon’s length) but at mid-haft and with good advantage. Similarly, it is better to take a partisan rather than a two-handed sword." A longer pike-type weapon would presumably be worse than Manciolino's lancia, but probably not dramatically so. George Silver gave the advantage to lighter 8-9ft hafted weapons like his short staff over anything longer but still gave pikes & other long staff weapons odds over anything shorter. Pikes also saw widespread use fighting in loose formation in 16th-century European warfare; extraordinary pikers often defended the shot (arquebusiers, etc.) & in that role might have to face multiple foes in melee combat with some room to move around. In 16th-century China, soldiers likewise used pikes in small teams as well as in large formations. None of this evidence from fencing manuals as well as military treatises makes much sense if pikes were awful in single combat. Civilians also walked around with 13-14ft pikes on their shoulders in 16th-century England. On to battlefield considerations: Perhaps I'm biased because I focus on the Renaissance, but I can't imagine that any historical soldiers who used spear & shield would have a chance in a direct confrontation with a 16th-century Swiss or Landsknecht infantry formation of pikes, halberds, & perhaps greatswords. I suspect there's a reason spear & shield saw very little use in Western/Central Europe during that period. Sword & shield, by contrast, had modest success, & sometimes targetiers did have darts/javelins/spears (or gunpowder devices) to throw.
Spear and shield against armor: converge and grapple is a FAR more realistic option than many other options. "If we're going to give ANY weapon ten points against armor..." Agreed. If you want to turn it up to 11, you switch to fire... It sounds like a simple two-handed spear was the best bang for the buck...
I think that spear and shield against cavalry, depends on how it is used: an over-head grip may be weaker than a two-handed grip, but the under-hand grip gives much more "firmness". And you can always rest the back-end of your spear on the ground (if it has a back-spike even better) and the stopping power of that would be greater than that of a two-handed grip. And if you have a somewhat large shield, you could crouch on one knee, with all your body covered by the shield and the spear braced against the ground. A lance at full charge hitting the shield might still get you somewhat injured, but I believe that you'd still have a better chance of stopping a lance with a shield than with a two-handed spear. And I think that if you angle your shield in the right way, you could stand a chance of deflecting the lance (not saying easy, but certainly possible). A two-handed spear might be better at actively stabbing the horseman once the danger of the lance has passed, but if a lancer was charging at me at full-galop, I would rather hide behind my shield while pointing the spear defensively towards the enemy than try to actively stab him.
It would be interesting to follow this up with an analysis of the typical 'load out' of the Roman Infantry, English army pre-gunpowder, and how to outfit a modern prepper for a zombie horde right after all the bullets run out (which will be surprisingly fast).
Love your content. Just want to say it's a little funny that long pole arms like those used by the Greeks fell out of favor when the Romans adopted a different form of fighting, which fell out of favor when Heavy Cav was developed which caused a return to long polearms in the form of pikes. ect. Gotta love history
I view the single spear as superior in single combat as spear and shield. The attacks and bindingpotential are just better. As a Longswordfencer i have much more trouble defeating a single spear because defending against it is much harder. Against missiles and a group of people is where the shield get its purpose
My only disagreement with you is that I would rate spear and shield lower for one vs one fighting, and two hands on a simple spear as higher for one vs one. In my experience I tend to drastically prefer two hands on a spear over a spear and shield as long as I am not worried about being hit by missiles. Otherwise I think you are pretty spot on, I just tend to have a much harder time stopping a single opponent from charging me down with only one hand on a spear, whereas with two hands I feel like the distance "sweet spot" is much more forgiving.
My methodology would be based on history. The polearms that survived to end of the medieval period into the Renaissance were primarily halberds and glaives, especially for individual guards and specialists, and pikes that dominated the battlefield until the end of the 17th century. As regards winged spears we have plenty of illustrations of their massed use (Augsburg psalter, etc.), so they must have considered them to have advantages.
If someone were attacked by a mad aggressive dog (of the kind that are in the news) or similar wild animals, which would be the best to fend them off with?
Very informative video Matt as always. It was a good idea to rank these different pole weapons. ps: As german speaking individual I have to say your pronunciation of the word Ahlspieß was very interesting. You butchered it but it was still pretty good for a non German native speaker. It is hard word to pronounce.
Yes, Finally another video about Matt's favourite poles! By the way, when is the video about the coat of plates coming? I recently rewatched one of the videos about the brigandine, and you said a future video will be dedicated to the coat of plates. I would love to hear you ramble about that armour for half an hour or more, especially since it was your disertation subject. A promise is a promise, Matt!
It’s too bad we never got a discussion of polearms between Matt & Gary Gygax, whose articles in The Strategic Review and Unearthed Arcana introduced many of us of a certain age to the topic. 🙂
Hi Matt. I would like to add a few points. First I believe that the winged spear would actually have another advantage against cavalry because since it has wings there would be a lower chance of getting stuck in the enemy because of over penetration with the wings preventing it from happening. Second, in terms of cavalry again, I feel that another issue the Dane axe and poll axe might have is the head of the axe becoming lodged into the enemy as you impact with the weapon, due to the angle of the head to the haft and also due to the angle at which you would swing at, which could dislodge the weapon out of your hands as the horseman goes past. Third I also seem to recall a video that either you or lindybeige did a while back testing spear and shield vs spear in 2 hands against opponents with various types of weaponry. If I recall correctly the spear in 2 hands performed better than the spear and shield. I was wondering your thoughts on that video now.
The pike ranking for single combat seems perfectly appropriate, even the people historically using them were aware that they're not much good in single or disorganized combat. As I recall, it was common practice in the 30 Years War to switch to shortened, so-called assault/storm-pikes when assaulting a city, which in essence were pretty much two-handed spears. Those would be much more useful when fighting on fortifications or in the streets, and for even more narrow quarters people would have their various sidearms along.
To the contrary, period sources directly contest the notion pikes were an awful weapon for single combat. Antonio Manciolino recommended the 12-14+ft lancia over the 8ft(ish) spiedo: "Longer weapons are to be preferred to shorter ones: therefore, the spear is to be preferred to the spiedo, holding it against the latter not by the butt (dangerous because of the weapon’s length) but at mid-haft and with good advantage. Similarly, it is better to take a partisan rather than a two-handed sword." A longer pike-type weapon would presumably be worse than Manciolino's lancia, but probably not dramatically so. George Silver gave the advantage to lighter 8-9ft hafted weapons like his short staff over anything longer but still gave pikes & other long staff weapons odds over anything shorter. Pikes also saw widespread use fighting in loose formation in 16th-century European warfare; extraordinary pikers often defended the shot (arquebusiers, etc.) & in that role might have to face multiple foes in melee combat with some room to move around. In 16th-century China, soldiers likewise used pikes in small teams as well as in large formations. None of this evidence from fencing manuals as well as military treatises makes much sense if pikes were awful in single combat.
I think you did underrate the bill relative to the others in the anti-cavalry role. That hook was basically perfect for action against the rider if you were in range. Probably why they called it "paardenschender" (horse-violator) in Dutch and "rossschinder" in German.
This video is giving me flashbacks to geeking out over the nomenclature of polearms appendix in the 1e d&d unearthed arcana. Unfortunately both left out my favorite polearm, the claymore.
Appreciate your knowledge and candor. That said I don’t think you took into account power, this overrating spear and shield. Shields disappeared some time ago and I think power of thrust or cut is part of it. You just don’t get as much from a single hand thrust of a spear. Also you scored spear and shield higher than pike and then proceeded to say why pike would beat spear and shield. Scoring appears subjective in cases like this.
It is notable that spear & shield was a very marginal combination in 16th-century Europe & China. Pikes were everywhere in both regions in this era, & in Japan. Sword & shield saw significant use in China & some in Europe, sometimes with javelins or other thrown weapons but very rarely (if ever) with spears for close combat.
Spear and shield is just so versatile, you could drop the shield and 2 hand the spear or drop the spear and use a sidearm either a sword or mace and you still have a shield
i agree with the general evaluation in regards to historical effectiveness however i wouldnt personally ever want to use the spear and shield. you have to hold the shield. basic spear or winged spear is fine
There is a reason why spear and shield was superseded by pike so comparing the two rather depends on the period. The length of the pike enabled more ranks to engage, armour is more effective than shields vs early shot and a mass of pike staves can also disrupt arrows so, at least for mass use, I think the pike was slightly underrated.
Pikes were used more as an area denial system than to actually kill the enemy because people, generally, don't want to die charging into a thicket of pointy sticks. Like he said, you stick your archers behind the pikemen and the archers do most of the work. The only real weakness was to ranged weapons as pikemen are usually not heavily armored and can't carry a large shield.
spear and shield agaianst cavalry, to me, would depend greatly on the shield. With certain shields you could brace for charge while keeping a shield wall, which, in my opinion, would move that score to an 8. other than that seems spot on to the way I see it.
The pike in a mass formation protects against arrows if shot at in a high angle and probably also directly. It`s as if you try to shoot someone in the forest at an high angle.
Halbreds, glaves and such add a defence making it easier to deflect or bind weapons, including a lance, while others provided the offense. I do like the Clubmen of the Civil War, often driving both sides into the next county.
6:00 GLAIVE BABY!! Glaive: One on one - 10/10 In Army - 7/10 Cavalry - 7/10 Armor - 8/10 Majority of the problem is in the reach of glaive which is easily rectified. Make it longer
I would give a dane axe more than a flail. A flail has to be swung and is never a threat unless it's under power. A Dane axe is able to hook and would present a threat to horses if they get to close as well as hooking riders. Not that it's great but it at least has a few situations where it's effective unlike the flail. A flail was effective how it was used as a specialty weapon.
Matt, at my HEMA school we learned a bit about Dane axe because they also do Viking reenacting/combat. We learned that the Dane axe can be used to thrust with the toe of the axe. Not all axes can do this, but most of the examples I've seen of Dane axes (including yours) can thrust since the toe extends further than the top of the pole. They can also hook like a bill. And even though they don't have a hammer, they could arguably still be used to bludgeon with the back on the axe head. In your experience do you not consider the toe of the Dane axe suitable for thrusting? Always appreciate your content.
I have to disagree with the ranking of spear and shield in single combat, I've been on both sides of spear+shield vs two-handed spear and the spear+shield was at a disadvantage there. The two-handed spear user could outrange (even with identical spears) the spear+shield user, two-handed had the advantage in the bind, and up close the one-handed spear just struggles at that range majorly. Frequently the one-handed spear would be knocked aside, and its user charged down and killed at short range. The same thing happened in other weapon pairings as well, the leverage disadvantage of one-handed spear and weakness at short range kept being the deciding factor.
I'd argue that the spear & shield should get the greater score in each category between itself and the 2h spear, as one can always ditch the shield if that might serve advantageously. So, slightly lower than everything otherwise but takes the cake in a random scenario due to the greatest versatility - makes sense.
I think the scores are very fair. I do think bashing was a bit under represented but I imagine they all preform similarly in that regard so it doesn’t really effect scoring.
On the flail, I agree that it only deserves 3 against a cavalry charge, but I think it would be quite useful in the post charge situation where horsemen are milling around striking down at surrounding infantry. The Hussites used flails very successfully as a small percentage of their pole weapon armed infantry. Poor on defense, the flail is very difficult to defend against. Flailmen absolutely need to be mixed in with pointed polearms.
I think the main reason the great axe didn't get a great score was because you didn't include a category it was specialised or really good in, and several it's not quite meant for. If you included shield walls or medium armour infantry it'd get a better score. I'd still give it one more point in formation combat, though. You can thrust with it, and you don't need to swing as much as a flail.
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Still a fan of the halberd, as method for footman (enlisted) to bring down horseman (officer) hook to drag them down “off of their high horse” ax to cut the horses legs , and spear point for the kill.
Finally someone gives the glaive attention, its criminally underrated, I think glaive & shield would be a devastating combo, like the Zulu warriors, but better
@@Nioclas64 I have heard Joanna of flanders used a glaive .
I think a japanese Naginata is a kind of Glaive often used by Women , is there a relationship beetween womens and glaives ?
The main strenght of the naginata is that is a scythe, where you just change the angle of tang in blade from 90-degrees to 0 degrees. It is a weapon ANY farmer can get.
Hey Matt! 😀 LK Chen just came out with a reproduction 1860 light cavalry saber. I'd be really interested to know what you think about it and how it stacks up to the real thing.
It makes sense that a lot of these scored very close to one another. If one were clearly superior to the others, then presumably we wouldn't see the huge variety in polearms that we did historically. Everyone would have used the same thing.
Also: I know you didn't include non-European weapons, but as someone who practised naginata for several years and has some experience with the guandao, I'm Team Glaive!
Good point - Japanese and Chinese forms of glaive would get the same scores as the glaive here. I actually meant to mention them in the glaive section and forgot!
Right. I thought of the naginata and the yari, too; but the Eurocentric terminology of this video is really just a convenience...whatever name you use, the weapon types are largely the same the world over.
@@ericblevins6467 Yeah, I agree that it mostly boils down to local terminology for basically the same thing. For example, every human culture since the palaeolithic has had some kind of spear, and they all presumably had different names for them. That said, there are a few regional weapons that might be unique enough to be considered separate weapons, rather than just regional variants of a universal type. E.g., I'm not sure that the Chinese dagger-axe (ge 戈) has a direct equivalent in most other cultures. I also remember seeing some very unusual (to my eye, at least) Thai polearms that didn't look like anything from regions I'm more familiar with (Europe, Northeast Asia, or the Middle East).
The definition of what constitutes a "polearm" is an interesting question in its own right. E.g., Are the goedendag and the nagamaki short polearms, or are they just a weird club and a weird sword? I'm not sure.
@@JT_Soul I would say a war scyth is actual very similar to the chinese Ge. Given the war scyth was not nearly a common, but functions quit similar.
@@JT_Soul Also other weapons like the Ilkwa is that a polearm? I mean its a short stabbing spear, almost more like a spear/gladius
Here's the final tally for all the weapons:
Single Combat Formation Combat Anti Calvary Anti Armor Total
Spear + Shield 10 10 7 3 30
Spear 8 8 9 6 31
Pike 1 9 10 2 22
Partisan 9 8 8 7 32
Glaive 10 7 7 8 32
Halberd 8 8 8 8 32
Polax 10 7 5 10 32
Bill 8 8 8 8 32
Flail 6 6 3 7 22
Great Axe 8 6 2 7 23
Ahlspiess 7 8 9 8 32
Spear+optional shield 10 10 9 6 35
Edit: Sorry this only looks right on desktop. Thanks to Thornescapes for suggesting to add Spear and optional shield, which combines the best scores of both, as a spearman (given a few seconds) could ditch the shield and opt for using the spear two handed instead. Feel free to discuss it in the comments, I'm not 100% on the idea myself, and I'd like to hear some more takes on it.
You are the true hero. Thank you.
I would add another category. "Spear + optional shield". If someone has a spear and shield, it's fairly quick and easy to just drop the shield if necessary. It's the same weapon for both, after all. If you use this logic and combine the best scores of "Spear + Shield" and "2H Spear", you end up with 35 points.
@@thornescapes7707 Thanks for the great suggestion, while I really like the idea, I'm questioning whether or not it would be fast enough to unstrap the shield. Yes, it would only take a few seconds, but a few seconds is a lot of time in a fight, so I'm not certain about the idea unless someone were to test it. Plus, if the enemy knew about this shield dropping tactic as a counter to cavalry/heavy armor they could feint a cavalry charge, make everyone drop their shields, and then attack with infantry or missile weapons since picking up and putting on a shield takes considerably longer than dropping it. Imo, it'd be better to just pick one and stick with it. Don't get me wrong, I still like the idea enough to add it into the chart!
@@pieguy5692 A boss gripped shield would only take 1 second. A "strapped" shield would take about 2 seconds. It isn't physically attached.
There are also some shields that had a long strap (guige) on them so that you could drop the shield and it wouldn't be on the ground. I'm not certain how common they were, but there is documentation about them. They might have been designed for this purpose, I'm not certain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guige
@@thornescapes7707 yeah, my bad, I've actually made boss gripped shields, I just completely forgot to mention then lol, I was thinking of the shields used in phanalaxes, which are obviously a different story from center grip shields
Auspice... lol
Gary Gygax would approve. For many people of a certain age, their first introduction to polearms was seeing many varieties listed in Dungeons & Dragons and wondering "WTF are these things?". Man liked his polearms.
@@thunderlaugh9085 Depends on the edition. The current version of D&D does not have many polearms: glaive, haberd, pike, spear, trident. Only the spear can be thrown. The others could be thrown but because they are not designed for throwing the effect is very limited. It's the older versions, specifically Advanced D&D written by Gygax in the mid/late 1980s that has all the polearm varieties: bardiche, bec de corbin, bill-guisarme, fauchard, fauchard-fork, glaive, glaive-guisarme, guisarme, guisarme-voulge, halberrd, lucern hammer, various lances, pike, ranseur, spetum, trident, voulge. What these all were was not explained at the time, leaving the more detail oriented players visiting the library to look them up (I did). The older editions had no specific rule for throwing a weapon that was not designed to be thrown, although they were big on allowing improvised rules. An obvious solution would be to treat them like a spear but limit the range and chance to hit.
i still remember, "military pick" i knew what it sounded like but surely that cant be right...
My exposure was Diablo II which also had an oddly numerous amount of different polearms. It's also where I learned that they were a distinct thing as barbarians have a "polearm mastery" skill.
Wasn’t there a Bohemian Ear Spoon in there somewhere?
Unearthed Arcana 1983 or 84 ish.
The spear and shield really only starts to fall down when cavalry and armor start to show up, which explains their dominance until that point.
And explains the rapid evolution of archery equipment and tactics, and then firearm development, right after the mongols conquered everything from the Pacific ocean to Germany
Cavalry? Cavalry had been around long before the spear and shield started to decline. However we do see two handed polearms like the voulge and early halberd coming into widespread prominence as the front rankers of armies like the Swiss get better protected. My thoughts are that the improved armor meant less vulnerability to missiles and a two handed polearm that can hook can not only hit much harder than any one handed weapon but also hook and rip away at shields and enemy weapons.
Nothing to do with Cavalry, spears were still the most common battlefield weapon for massed formations well after Cavalry started appearing.
I think the second part of your statement is the real reason spears started to decline in use. Armour. As armour got heavier and started to cover more of the body the spear was far less capable of punching through that armour. As the common soldier became, through history, that much more heavily armoured then the usefulness of the Spear and shield on the battlefield declined.
This of course is referring mostly to Europe, I am not as familiar with armour development in other areas of the world, such as large portions of Africa, as well as most of Asia. So it may well be that spear and shield kept more relevance in some areas for longer because the standard soldier may be less well armoured than the comparable European Infantry, and in other regions may have broadly mirrored the situation in Medieval and Late medieval Europe.
@@alganhar1 I should have noted that spears were still used fairly often by knights on foot, but they had more reinforced hafts and the spearheads developed diamond shaped cross sections so they could strike armor with more effect.
In Japan at least, we see a similar trend with some yari blade cross sections becoming triangular or diamond shaped as well, something you wouldn't bother to make unless armor protection warranted it.
What about cataphracts?
I think an interesting follow up would be more of the logistics questions around those same weapons. Like "how easy to make?" "how easy to carry to field?" "how easy to maintain?" would be interesting to see differences (if any). Though I guess many of them would have a lot of "same" answers, would still be interesting conversation on how these things might change given logistics?
Everything but the spear and shield drop a grade, the ahlspeis and flail lose 2.
That's a great question. Because those "little" details actually end up playing a significant part in the logistics of an army, so the are not really little after all!
I reckon that the poleaxe is practically just a better greataxe that is much more difficult and expensive to make. Similarly, the winged spear, while only slightly more complex, probably wouldn't be seen too much on the battlefield compared to the mass producible spear.
@@thekaxmax A flail as used by the Hussites have to be the easiest to maintain, since the only metal parts is either the chain or the top.
I think the pike is the big stand out there. Everything else is easy for an individual soldier to carry in most places, but lugging around a 16-20 foot pike would be difficult and unwieldy even on an open road or field, and borderline implausible through any rough or forested terrain.
Awesome video descriptive on the use of these lethal weapons! Recall family were visiting the Vatican, and their Swiss Guard had an immense polearm standing next to a giant church door we thought open to tourists! We thought we could traipse inside but that polearm suddenly blocked our entry, whilst a friendly smile emanated from that Swiss Guard. We apologized and his friendly smile didn't disguise the fact that his polearm was quite imposing and real! Lol
POKEY STICK
Bonky sticks too
Stick. Good. Metal stick. Even better
*Flail has entered the chat*
@@MisterCynic18 Ahh yes. Little stick tied to big stick.
I’m down with that. How many kills has a pointy stick had in history and prehistory? Even John Wick with his custom ultra short portable concealed spear… a pencil, a f7+king pencil.
The flail may have lost the competition, but it has won my heart!
You just need to combine it with war wagon of the Hussites to shine))
Arms and armor did a video once talking about how scary effective two handed flails are at breaking up duelers.
yeah, Matt is a bit tough on the farmer's flail, particularly looking at it out of CONTEXT with regards to mass combat. Hussites beat the crap out of armoured knights when combining the with war wagons.
@@smithryansmith well, he didn't consider context of storming the walls or repelling those.
@@dilen754 good point
“Bear in mind the horses usually have lances”
I’ve been underestimating the might of historical equines this whole time!
Handgonnes were on poles. I think they deserve to make the top 10. They get at least an 11 in range.
Well, considering that handgonnes were missile weapons, rather than thrusting/cutting weapons, they don't really belong in this comparison, despite the poles.😉
@@Lucius1958 What about bayonets then?
I feel like spear and shield is de facto a better choice than 2 handed spear, despite scoring lower, because you always have the option of just dropping your shield if cavalry or armored opponents show up.
I think part of it is that a spear designed primarily for use with two hands is typically going to be longer. Also the specific ones that Matt mentioned (winged/partizan) have been designed with chopping capabilities in mind - something you'd not tend to do for a spear designed primarily for use with a shield.
@@TakunaNuva Not necessarily. The golden age of spears in Europe was the migration era, where they generally used the same type of spear with and without shields. It's more a matter of how you use it, and Thegn Thrand made an excellent series of videos several years back explaining how the "gigging" technique gives the overarm usage much more power and reach than we would expect.
Also Matt did separate the winged spears from using a spear 2 handed. ;)
Isn't the spear somewhat hard to control with only one hand, making it a poor choice for single combat?
@@YenzQu That's how I understood it yeah, I was surprised he scored spear + shield higher than 2h spear for unarmed single combat.
Something I think is often not appreciated is that Mesoamerica (the area where the Aztec, Maya, etc are from) had a great variety of polearms: Granted, there's a broader point to be made about how Mesoamerica in general isn't viewed as part of the broader Ancient and Medieval world despite having complex societies with huge cities, formal governments, and organized militaries during those periods; but like, most people are at least vaguely familiar with their use of the Macuahuitl as a weapon: Their Polearms? Not so much. (There was a large variety of other swords, clubs, maces, types of armor, etc, too, but Polearms is the focus here): Obviously, you had simple spears, just with a obsidian or flint point on the end of a shaft (or poles with a sharpened wood point or a blunt tip, like a quarterstaff, I guess?), but there were more complex constructions too:
The Tepoztopilli for example was an Aztec polearm: You had a long shaft, which then ended in a broad, spade or leaf or diamond shaped wooden head (the exact shape and proportions differs depending on the depiction), which, like the Macuahuitl, was lined around the edges with obsidian blades. Hassig, who wrote the gold standard text on Aztec militarism and warfare, seems to think that this would have been less just a thrusting weapon, and rather also used for slashing, comparing it to a halbred. There was also a surviving Tepoztopilli alongside a surviving Macuahuitl (then the only, now there's 1-2 other surviving specimens) housed in the Royal Armorry of Madrid, which we have photos and sketches of (though the pieces sadly were seemingly destroyed in a fire, though the suits of Samurai armor they were pictured along are still around.... Some people have skepticism about the photos of the macuahuitl/tepztopiloi in comparsion to the sketches, since the scales are different), and in those sketches, both weapons are interestingly depicted without gaps between the blades as so often seen in Mesoamerican depictions, which would make sense to form more of a flush cutting edge.
The Codex Rios also shows what seems to be an almost "Glaive" version of the Macuahuitl, with the iconic paddle-bat shaped wooden core (albiet not full length) lined with blades on the end of a long shaft (though not as long as Tepoztopilli). As far as i'm aware, this is the only depiction or description of this form of the weapon, and sources variously mislabel it as a Cuauholloli (the Nahuatl/Aztec term for ball headed maces), or as a "two handed Macuahuitl). Down in Oaxaca, surviving Mesoamerican books/manuscipts showing Mixtec and Zapotec armies, rulers, and soldiers, such as the Codex Selden, Zouch-Nuttal, etc, there seems to be weapons similar to this glaive, with a shaft (variously either full length or shorter), which oddly tapers, being thicker the closer to the head you get, with the head then being lined with blades. It's hard to say if the head is spade shaped like the Tepoztopilli, or is more of a club like a macahuitl/the glaive, since the proportions differ significantly even inside the same document, but it seems to be almost between the two, and the head also seems to not be made from the same piece of wood as the shaft, but rather affixed to it or otherwise the weapons being designed to give the impression they are, with the tapered end of the shaft extending past the width of the head
Mixtec documents also seem to show spears with a almost triangular, needle like point, which is then lined with serrations of some sort. Maya spears also sometimes have serrated blades, albeit affixed to the upper portion of the pole length, not on the point itself, so are probably decorative: See Yaxchilan lintel 41, for example. In general, it's pretty common for Maya spears wielded by high status soldiers or rulers to have decorative components along the top portion of the pole on their spears: On the Bonampak murals, for example, you see a spear where most of the top third of the spear is in a jaguar pelt "sleeve", with the bottom end of that sleeve being tasseled with quetzal feathers, and the top portion above it directly below the point being inlaid with precious stones.
Both Mixtec/Zapotec, Maya polearms (There are also some Maya weapons which seem to be half or full length shafts with huge flanges or spikes protruding from them along the side, in practice probably more like clubs or picks then polearms?), and the Codex Rios glaive also occasionally have balls of feathers or cloth with tassels affixed to them around the top portion behind the point, too: I know this is something you see in some Eastern/Asian polearms, and may serve a similar purpose, but I also wonder if these would have been heraldic to indicate royal dyanysty, the city state, unit division, etc: I know the emblem of some Mixtec royal dynasty affixed to banners and stadards were different arrangments of feather orbs, for example. But this sort of decoration seems largery absent from Tepoztoppili.
Some groups had very, very long, 10-12+ foot pikes/lances: Per Bernal DIaz, The Chinantec civilization (one of the cultures in Oaxaca alongside the Mixtec and Zapotec) apparently used lances longer then the Spanish's, with "two fathoms of knives" (or one fathom in another mention) attached (The Maudslay translation here proposes that it was a dual pointed spear with then two lines of blades extending down from the points along each side of the shaft). The Pipil, a Nahua offshoot group way down in El Salvador, had some apparently 20 feet long, and there were also shorter spears. I don't have access to the original accounts describing these, but "Armies of the Aztec and Inca Empires, Other Native Peoples of The Americas, and the Conquistadores (Armies of the Sixteenth Century)" depicts it much like Tepotzopilli, except the head and the blades extend down to almost the top third of the entire shaft length, and notes it was dipped in poison, though the book has some issues so I take it with a grain of salt.
Finally, there are some ceramic figures from West Mexico and the Gulf Coast areas in Mexico which show some truly bizarre polearms: Some of the bits on them may merely be decorative tassels, which would make them less odd, but the ceramics seem to show some almost Pole-axe like hatchet, spike, and blunt protrusions around the polearm's head in different directions. I really wish I was able to link images for these and the other things I've mentioned, but sadly youtube tends to get iffy when I do that.
But yeah, as you can see, quite a bit of variety here! It makes sense, since the area had organized armies for thousands of years and would have had to develop a great variety of weapons, but it's not something that's often apperciated in broader conversations about polearms, or their different types of clubs, maces, other weapons, etc in those conversations about historical weaponry and armor. Sadly, this is also probably only a small cross section of the true diversity of their arms and armor, considering barely any surviving specimens remain, and we only have scarce descriptions and visual depictions in Spanish accounts or the few surviving Mesoamerican books and accounts that the Spanish didn't destroy.
I'm also sure Andean civilizations like the Inca, Moche, Wari, Tiwanku, Chimu, etc had their own large variety of polearms, I know metal halbreds were a thing there, but i'm less familar with that area.
Great comment.
Very interest.
I didn’t know all that!
Fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing!
Wow, where could I read all of that!!?? Incredible! Are you a scholar yourself?
Thanks, Matt! I really enjoyed this vid. It was informative and entertaining.
My single point of disagreement is in relation to ranking anti-cavalry weapons. You focused entirely on the moment of first contact between the cavalry and infantry. In that moment you correctly stated that reach was the most critical factor. But of course the engagement didn't end in that single brief moment. After the shock of contact the cavalryman had to regain his composure and control of his mount, back away, turn and then withdraw. In those few moments the bill and halberd could use the feature other weapons you rated identically just don't have; the hook.
Cavalrymen could be hooked and pulled off their horse using halberds or bills. The very likely result would be the severe wounding or death of the cavalryman. There's plenty of accounts of exactly this happening, especially in late Medieval battles. Thus I'd give the bill and halberd an extra point in the anti-cavalry category.
Please let me know what you think about this. I'd be very interested to hear your opinion.
Thanks again!
Another point you touched on is that armies were combined arms affairs. Pikemen were frequently protected by interspersing soldiers with other weapons in their ranks. A great sword-armed man could deal with infiltrators trying to get at the pikemen while also striking at the narrower end of enemy pikeshafts. In an overlapping rank of shield & spear men, soldiers in the second rank with longer two-handed spears could move up to thrust over the top of the shield bind to deliver long range thrusts. Archers put up rows of sharpened spikes to thwart cavalry charges, reaching out with their bills to hook and unhorse any cavalryman that tried to get too close.
These are just a few examples. A video where you discussed common weapons combination used in battle formations would be extremely interesting. I hope you'll consider that.
Thanks!
I love the spear since it’s the basis of where everything else comes from, be it a halberd or a glaive or a pike or being used with a shield. It is the bare essentials for being effective on the battlefield, one pointy stick and you become a weapon.
I also love the look of certain cutting spears like the Yari or some of the ones from the Viking era.
Matt! New fan from East Texas here; caught one of your videos a couple months back and haven’t been anywhere else since, catching up on Medieval history since.
Hope this early comment reaches you, thanks for doing what you do…
Best wishes, God bless
Welcome aboard brother! Since you're here you might as well check out Todd's Workshop.
If you haven't been anywhere else then you're missing out. Check out Tod's Workshop and pretty much anything by or with Toby Capwell.
@@camerongunn7906 lol, way ahead of you bro, maybe I exaggerated a bit on ‘haven’t been anywhere else’ by including Tod in since I found him through Matt as well. His neutral approach to his historical recreation stuff is outstanding; all of his “what if.. ‘ and “nothing says they did, nothing says they didn’t “ way of looking at things… I can latch onto either of these guys episodes for hours
@@Warentester already at Tod’s, and am a fan of Toby, I’ll be digging into his content soon enough
I’d be interested to see how a greatsword would score by these standards.
Very well as long as cost isn't included
@@thekaxmax Depends. It is always outreached and I wouldn't want to go up against some of the more agile polearms, or something like a Jumonji Yari/Spetum (spear with side blades that can cut you on the way back)
I would guess as follows:
7 for duelling due to comparably heavy weight to reach ratio. Probably beats the flail and pike, but the speed of spear thrusts and the multitude of trapping opportunities with the more complex pole arms are superior IMHO.
6 for massed ranks, due to similar issues like the great axe and flail.
5 against cavalry, you could use them as a makeshift spear albeit very short, similar issues to the great axe.
4 against armour. This is where the great sword falls really short. Less potential for blunt force trauma then even a two handed spear due to the distribution of weight, and less agile than a spear for thrusting. Half-swording to turn it into a short heavy spear would likely be best, though I doubt something like a murder strike would work without seriously damaging the blade due to the weight of the hilt. (Infinitely potent when ending them rightly though.)
22 total
So overall, not terrible in any category, but greatswords IMHO shine most as tools of area denial, suited to bodyguards, and seemingly used to counter pike formations, though we can't be sure of the exact use and effectiveness of that due to lack of sources.
the list is meaningless because you don't equip soldiers based on a weapon's average performance but its specialized strength. Then you deploy your army according to their specializations. This average is like rating bows in the middle because their single combat and anti armor are terrible. Yet this is meaningless because neither of these metrics are what bows were used for. It's the same for a pike and other weapons.
I disagree with the conclusion on pikes v.s armour. We have many pikes with heads specifically designed to deal with armour, and the weight of a pike on a 14-15 feet shaft have a good deal of weight behind it and works as a battering ram when moved back and forth. The sarissa have a heavy but-spike which will increase this effect even more. This will increase the kinetic energy on impact quite a lot. We have primary sources on pikes being used against armoured opponents as the primary weapon, as well as sources on them penetrating plate armour, presumably of munition grade quality. Do a test for yourself and you'll see. If what a rondel dagger when used against armour surprised you, a pike definitely will do the same.
I think he may have only been considering it from a single combat perspective.
I would also have expected it to score much higher vs armour.
Maybe Matt can do some testing in another video?
one thing that might be interesting is to rank how they are for an armored user, since wearing armor can change how aggressive you can be with a weapon
flails were used specifically by Husites against cavalry and very successfully. from the war wagon fortresses and also in formations.
I like how you separated them into those distinct categories, that really makes sense in how they are useful depending on the circumstances. I agree wtih your rankings on the weapons and I think your approach does well to take into account the different variables depending on the use.
Sword and Shield vs Cavalry: You can always drop your shield, and use two hands to brace the spear while you face the charge and then pick up your shield afterwards.
But then that is still using two-handed spear really.
Having this informal style of video with your knowledge and experience behind it results in awesome content!
Fairly good scoring system for all weapons. Personally I like the spear used with 2 hands but if I had to pick something else it would have to be the pole axe
In "Spears are better than Swords", I think we saw spear and shield perform worse in duels against the swordsmen than spear in two hands. After that video, I actually thought spear and shield was more of a battlefield weapon set, and that two-handed spear was better in single combat. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
As a 5th dan BB in trad jujiustu, I can testify to how good a two handed staff weapon is versus a sword. My sig other tears me a new one every time i pit bokken against their jo. A shield means the staff weapon is one handed, so it just becomes a point, and once you get past that, you're good to go. Two handed? Nope. Get past the point and the haft will get you. Spear and shield is definitely battlefield better though; after all, you need cover from those arrows and sling stones...
I think in my limited experience, I find that the spear in two hands has a shallower learning curve than the sword and shield together. The people I know who are good at that matchup are very good into either two handed spear or sword.
Yes, because the shields work better in a team. Once bypassed you’re screwed if you don’t have backup.
Regarding dueling with partizan & rotella, Achille Marozzo explicitly wrote it was fine & possibly advantageous to ditch the rotella & use the partizan in both hands. That's a point of evidence against the spear & shield being better than spear in two hands, though the rotella is only a medium-sized shield.
spear+shield is better in some matchups while Spear alone is better in others; spear+shield is generally very good against long, two handed polarms because the spear (especially used over the arm) is a superior close-in fighting weapon and can be thrown in an instant to outreach any of them. the reason sword+shield (and to a smaller degree, even just sword on it's own) performs better against spear+shield than it does against 2h spear is that:
1. part of the advantage of being able to throw your weapon is lost when you already outreach your opponent. (even moreso when your enemy has a shield)
2. being better than most polearms for close-in fighting is mostly worthless when going against a weapon that massively outclasses you at that distance anyway.
3. Spear+Shield is significantly harder to get good at than either 2h spear fighting or sword fighting: Being more of a "jack-of-all-trades" weapon set means you need to be far more adaptive in your fighting style (2h spear and swords are both specialised for one engagement distance) and additionally spear+shield is just a bit less intuitive to use.
I like this type of rating over tier lists. It examines each of the weapons in many different cases. In some cases a weapon is supreme, while in other times it does poorly. Then there are the weapons that are just good general purpose.
Thanks for video, Mr. Easton.
I believe there must be two mandatory categories: (1) cost of production & maintenance; (2) efforts & time to master particular type of weapon.
Spear and shield had the extra option of leaving the shield hanging on the back and wielding the spear two handed. That would give to it the highest score.
As a tie breaker, you could give a versatility bonus by adding to each total the median of the individual scores, that would penalize the specialized weapons that have mostly low scores and a very high score.
I kind of feel that way as well. Also excluded is the spear can be thrown into the horse or horseman, while maybe not always the best idea it is an option none of the others can do well.
I think war scythe as kind of back drop for other elaborate head polearms would be nice. And I was really missing bardiche in this video.
I think the greataxe deserves more points in armored fighting than the flail. It's not as good at getting around shields as the flail is, but it's nimbler and it's more capable of hooking. So you can easily pull someone in armor off balance and then deliver a chop. Maybe not a "cleave someone from crown to groin" type of chops like they describe housecarls doing, but enough to give someone a really bad day.
My ideal fantasy setup would be decent armor combined with large shield and spear as the main weapons, a war hammer as a side arm, and a (Rondel) dagger as a backup. Plus maybe a sling for ranged combat - might as well carry one and a bunch of sling bullets since they don't weigh much or take much space.
Ranking videos from a specialist are always fun! It would be even better if we saw the ranking on the screen ie putting pics of the weapons on some kind of matrix or least a spreadsheet with points for specific categories and total. When it comes to talking about numbers it's good to see them on screen as well, for a better grasp.
As usual good video, only way you can argue against your scoring is put it to the test. 👍
Any chance of doing a video looking at the winged hussars, please?
What a treat! One of those rare HEMA videos that is _not_ about swords.
It's always fun seeing these kinds of rankings and seeing that, shock of shocks, the best weapons tend to be the ones that saw the most use historically, as their popularity was largely _because_ of their effectiveness. From the Bronze Age -- probably even earlier -- to the adoption of firearms, pointy stick and handheld cover is hard to beat.
In my brief experience with spear and shield it is to hard to maneuver the spear. This makes it really easy for people to close with me and almost impossible to retract the spear fast enough with one hand to deal with them. Unless dealing with missiles my defense comes from my reach. If I can keep them at distance the shield is useless. If they close then the shield can help but I have no offense at that point so it just makes it take a little longer to kill me. My options at that point are rather to try and disengage or to try and close to a grapple.
I've heard many authors claim that the Macedonian phalanx was actually well protected against arrows, because with that forest of long pikes projecting in front and up above the men, arrows were likely to hit the shafts of the pikes and deflect, losing their momentum and falling down fairly harmlessly. I'd love to see some sort of practical experiment to test that and see if a forest of pikes really does protect against arrows, or if they still fall amongst the men with deadly effect.
Maybe for the inner ranks but they would still decimate the front
@@napsec9807 at very short range where the arrow shots have almost no arc to them the pikes definitely wouldn't offer much protection to the front ranks. There would have been a lot of pike shafts over the heads of the front ranks at increasing angles, though, so if a forest of pikes really does deflect arrows it should be about as effective at protecting the front ranks from arcing arrows as the back ranks.
The simple thrusting spear will always be my favorite.😁
Strangely enough, I've always been partial to the halberd. Something about it is just.... right to me.
@@kounurasaka5590 , I definitely like halberds as well. I especially like the looks of the ones from the late 15th/early 16th century, specifically, the ones depicted in the artwork of Albrecht Dürer. I guess we would call those the "Swiss" type.
The speed and lightness if the spear (better endurance) can not be overlooked. I also have become a fan of the spear after ignoring it for decades.
As for Great-Axe vs cavalry, I think realistically, they would be used as part of a formation with other weapons. Spears and shields would stop the cavalry, then great-axes could advance and deal a much more substantial blow to the horse or rider. Bardiches and Lochaber Axes were used well after shield walls and plate armor went extinct, so they were kept around for something
The description of the battle of Hastings says just that.
they were kept to rest muskets on?
The great axe looks like it would be capable of jabbing/stabbing. The geometry leaves the top of the edge jutting out in a point. Not as pointy as a spear, but I doubt a perfectly good stabbing point would go unused in a time of need... :)
as far as polarms go, you may as well say it can't stab; any kind of protective gear will be enough to protect against a greataxe thrust, while most of the other weapons in this list can go through anything that isn't plate armor semi-reliably.
otherwhise you could say the flail can stab as well; getting a thick wooden pole thrust into your face is no joke even if it's blunt.(that is to say, a well backed thrust with any long, wooden pole can break bones; hits to the face can knock you out, blind you or just downright kill you)
This was phenomenally helpful for my worldbuilding research! I need a detailed breakdown of effectiveness like this for different types of swords!
It makes me happy that halberds and bills both got straight eights. Like a Swiss Army knife on a stick. There's no battlefield situation you aren't prepared for. But "jack of all trades, master of none," as they say.
Awh, was hoping to see the godendag on your list!
Great video! Granted, I'm a bit biased as a polearm enthusiast (even as a kid when I was doing martial arts, once I was old enough to train with one my favorite weapon was always the staff), but overall I think the scores you've presented here make a lot of sense and are presented in a way that's easy to understand, even as someone who doesn't have as much hands-on experience with hafted weapons as I'd like to.
Somehow I'd managed to go about a decade or so (the length of time I've been making any meaningful effort to learn about historical military equipment) without realizing that glaives tend to be a bit more like a lighter and occasionally longer pollaxe than they are like a halberd (though the "occasionally longer" aspect might depend on whether you count what we modern folks call the "Lucerne hammer" as a member of the pollaxe family; actually, I'd be curious to see how you'd rank Lucerne hammers, but I imagine they'd score similarly to the halberd and bill or the traditional form of pollaxe depending on the length of the specific example), which I'm going to chalk up to the editions of D&D I'm familiar with giving glaives similar (if not identical) stats to halberds and glossing over pollaxes entirely (what with D&D being responsible for most of my misconceptions about arms and armor, some of which apparently still persisted in my brain many years later, as evidenced by this particular realization). In the context of editions where they're not statted out, pollaxes would presumably be lumped in with greataxes or some other axe weapon, which isn't entirely accurate, but I suppose it's understandable from the perspective that in the context of the two editions I ever made any effort to learn the rules of - 4e and 5e - a pollaxe would likely be mechanically identical to or at least incredibly similar to one of the existing fantastical "superior" axe-type weapons like the urgrosh or gouge (4e); or near-impossible to differentiate from a greataxe within the limited rules for mundane weapons, unless you went out of your way to give it the "special" property despite other clearly multi-damage-type weapons (like many swords and polearms) not getting that same treatment (5e).
Also as a D&D homebrew nerd, it tickles something inside me to see that so many of these weapons got very similar scores (including more than a few with the exact same score), as if someone had balanced them using a point-based system like someone might use while designing playable races/species/ancestries/lineages/[insert your terminology of choice here] or... well, weapons! And then of course the lower-scoring weapons are either more specialized (the pike and flail), an inferior version of a better-scoring weapon (the greataxe compared to the later pollaxe which is basically its upgraded, more-developed descendant), or weren't terribly popular compared to the others (the flail), which is something you often see when evaluating the balance of things in the context of a TTRPG with what's meant to be an objective scoring system.
Admittedly I do find it a little odd that across every category you rated the bill identically to the halberd and always wound up saying things like "it's exactly the same as a halberd in this context", in that it makes me wonder why you didn't lump them togetherfor the purposes of this video. I remember thinking to myself at the start of the video when you listed the weapons you'd be covering, "Is the bill really that different from the halberd, functionally?" Obviously they're considered different weapons, but I'd be curious if there's a context where the halberd and bill DO meaningfully differ in utility, since I've always seen them as basically the same thing except one is shaped like an axe and one is shaped like a pruning hook, and this video hasn't really done anything to change that perception (though if I'm mistaken about their degree of similarity, I'd love to find out why!).
And going back earlier in the video, I think something worth noting about the spear & shield in the context of massed combat is that not only does the shield protect you from missile weapons, it also usually protects the person to your left to some degree as well, and likewise you're protected a bit by the shield of the person to your right (assuming a unit where everyone is holding their spear in their right hand and a reasonably-sized shield in their left, anyhow, which I'm assuming applies to the vast majority of military units throughout history). Not that you could possibly have ranked it any higher in that category anyway (without pulling a Spinal Tap at least), but I think it's something that contributes to its 10/10 score in the context of massed combat.
This was fun! So, here are your numbers vs. mine Matt. Let's see if the formatting works?! Where I disagreed with you, I have written my assessment in parentheses.
Single Combat In formation/massed vs. Cavalry Anti-Armor Total
Spear & Shield 10 (9) 10 7 3 30 (29)
2H- Spear 8 8 9 6 31
Pike 1 9 10 2 22
Partisan/Spetum/Winged Spear 9 8 (9) 8 (9) 7 32 (34)
Glaive/Gisarme 10 7 7 8 32
Halberd 8 8 8 (9) 8(9) 32 (33)
Pole ax 10 (7) 7 (6) 5 10 32 (28)
Bill 8 8(9) 8 (9) 8 32 (35)
Flail 6 6 3 7 22
Grt Axe 8(7) 6(7) 2 (4) 7 23 (25)
Ahl-Spiess 7 8 9 8 32
Spear and shield in single combat are ok as long as your opponent does not have the combination sword & shield or axe and shield, etc. If they do, they can usually get close to you and all they have to do is get past your point once. You will not be able to recover your spear for an accurate stab, before they are in on you. With a shield it is easy to get past the point. You have no buddies to back you up, so in that case you'd be screwed. Those are only a few cases, but they were commonly used cases. You would obviously kick ass vs. anyone without a shield, in this case.
The partisan is just as effective in a formation as it is in a single combat. I mean sure you cannot swing the thing, but you do not usually do that anyway and the little projections can be used to "hook" or shove or deflect other weapons, even just with their geometry. I think they are every bit as good as a two handed spear vs. cavalry, they are light and nimble enough to be 'stabby' like a spear, but they have a bit more weight on the point. Again the projections add to the geometric defensive capability of the weapon, making it easy to scoop or shove an enemy spear, lance or other weapon offline. You can't really do that as well with a spear.
I think you are a bit partial to poleaxes. In single combat, they do not have the reach that a halberd, spear, glaive or bill would have. That counts for a lot, so I gave the poleaxe a 7 in single combat. I also think you over-valued them in formation combat and dropped them to a 6 there. For me, the pole ax was a specialized weapon used by armored men vs. other armored men and usually in a duel situation or a mêlée in a fairly open formation. In a tight formation, they are far too short to cover your friends and you cannot wind up and wail on someone with them, because you do not have the room to swing the bloody thing effectively. The poleaxe is also quite heavy. Poking with it is not as effective as with a spear, bill, partisan.
The Halberd is long and you can hook and pull horsemen off their horses with it. Sure, they will run you through if you try to do that frontally, but I think it is feature that would be valuable in a mêlée with horsemen. The halberd is also long enough to oppose a charge as you said. Plus it can deliver a hell of a chop vs. armor. Arguably more than a bill or glaive, but it is a bit like splitting hairs. I blinged the Halberd up a bit, because of its reach, its nasty chop and its versatility (stab, chop, hook, pick).
The Bill is a bit more effective than a halberd in a formation, you can stab & chop with them fairly well and they are a good medium-thing between weight and nimbleness. Whereas swinging a halberd is like swinging an anvil on a stick swinging a bill is like swinging a falchion on a stick. They are easier to use in a formation than a halberd. Also, they have all those hooks for pulling down horsemen, so I bumped them up to a 9 vs. cavalry. They are just more nimble and versatile than a Halberd. The Halberd does pack a wallop though.
I think you also are a bit partial to Dane axes. I can understand that me too, but I do not think that they are as good as a 2-handed spear, bill or halberd, because of their short reach. I think they are a bit more nimble than a poleaxe in formations. You can stab with the spike on the poleaxe, but getting stabbed with one wing of the blade on the great axe hurts as well and I think the great axe is only a little less effective than the poleaxe vs. cavalry. I think you went overboard there.
We should have added the Goedendag!
When bringing up the subject of winged spears, I feel they'd be a bit more effective against cavalry due to their ability to catch onto targets. Even if a knight is wearing plate, they'd likely end up unseated if they were caught with the langes on either side (if those were larger and hooked, such as those seen on a spetum, corseque, or jumonji yari).
I'd also think this would be slightly safer to use against the horse itself for the same reason a boar spear is useful against a boar, it prevents the horse from trampling you after being stabbed through. Though I doubt a man could hold back a horse for very long, it might provide enough time to get out of the way while also killing the horse, a significant victory.
The shorter pole arms can be incredible in formations but mainly when they’re mixed in with spearmen.
Why do you say that? Surely the purpose of a formation is to present a solid wall of spearheads, and a shorter weapon simply won't reach. Would you put men with short spears or poleaxes in the front rank, and pikemen behind them?
@@jonathanshaltz7750 They do not necessarily need to reach the other side. Halberds and related weapons can hook and bind the opposing line's pikes, disrupting their formation and creating an opening to break through their line. They are also important in that, if and when someone breaches your line, they are advantageous over sidearms for the 'bad war'.
@@jonathanshaltz7750 The problem with such formations is that once the formation breaks, a long spear will be useless. This is also why historically cavalry was actually pretty good against pike formations. They are unable to rotate the formation towards the cavalry, and are left with just a small sidearm to defend themselves.
@@jonathanshaltz7750 Exactly. Heavily armored men with shorter weapons can displace pikes and close in on the enemy pikeman while staying fairly safe because of their armor and the pikemen behind them.
Keep doing videos about polearms and I will keep liking and commenting it.
Very very interesting comparison video. One thing not mentioned, is...wait for it....context. the best pole weapon is the one most suited to the time, place, and opponents. Plus, the training of your troops, (the author and renacator Christian Cameron once made the suggestion, that the poorer quality your troops, the longer the weapon you gave them). My opponent is in full plate and on a horse? Halberd please. My opponent is another Greek Hoplite in linothorax and with and aspis? Spear and shield. My opponent is a Norman Miles using his spear overarm? Dane axe. And if he's a great mass of howling nut-jobs? I'd like a pike and five ranks behind me. Context.
Shout out to the ji, first example of halberds in history and good on both chariot, cavalry, infantry personal and formation fighting while being made from pretty much the Bronze Age to the Iron Age truly a jack of all trades
This was fun, always thought spear and shield was most versatile combination. Have heard different things about the willingness or maybe unwillingness of horses, even highly trained "chargers", to face or jump a fence. Steeplechasers come to mind, but have no knowledge of knights' horses or any way of comparing with today.
halberd/bill are a second rank weapon. Spear and shield in the first rank helps protect the second rank, and when the enemy stalls on contacting the first rank, they have the reach to hit hard, or hook an pull to open holes between enemy shields.
I have never seen any evidence for spear & shield being used in front of halberdiers and billmen. Is there any evidence?
@@scholagladiatoria I had 6 months experience 30 years ago with the SCA, was in a shield wall once, and that strategy was employed. It worked well, and I was told that's how it's done. That's scant evidence from Texas, in the wrong century. NOT exactly primary source, more like sailing a balsa raft across the pacific to show that it is plausible. Love your channel.
@@mattutt2888 so no, then
Might also be worth looking at which polearms are best used by cavalry. Lances were common, but spear and shield were used on horseback, glaives and flails were used on horseback out in Asia.
I by and large agree with your scores and conclusions. I would've given 1 extra to point to the glasses for combat against horses. Assuming you don't get lanced a big choppy blade on a stick is very good for attacking horses, lopping their legs off etc which these types of weapon are often used for.
Halberds and bills also have the advantage of being able to hook and pull a person off of their horse. (At least if you can avoid their lance first)
In Switzerland the Bills were called "Rossschinder" (engl. "Horse punisher"). So we can assume that they were specialized weapons against cavalry.
i think they could be specialised to target the legs and ankles of horses, instead of targetting the body
@@derstoffausdemderjoghurtis ...Or slicing the belly, with the sickle-formed blade, when the horse passes by.
I use a Dane Ax in my local fighting group and I agree with your assessment. It is not as optimized as a pole ax and not at all for use against horsemen.
For single combat against guys in armor it is great.
I appreciate the enthusiasm about the sponsorship!
One more section I'd say would have to be added would be "Ease of training", where single spear would REALLY pull away from Spear and Shield.
I suppose you could consider it a glaive or an axe but I've always been fond of the Bardiche, it's unique crescent blade shape functions similarly to a bearded axe in that you can choke up your hand behind the blade, it has a long point to stab with, and its large cutting surface means you are more likely than most axes to land a decent chop. It's essentially a kind of dane axe. They usually weren't too long, but in the historical usage that is for a good reason since they were used in combination with musket and used to rest the musket on for more accurate firing. If it were too long you wouldn't be able to use it in such a way and the heft of the head would be too difficult to maneuver. You can look up the Russian Streltsy infantry to see what I mean, Streltsy were around from the 16th-18th century and created by Ivan the Terrible so you know they must be cool.
In military terms, that is, ignoring the single combat role, things look a little different.
great axe 15
flail 16
spear and shield 20
pike 21
glaive 22
pollaxe 22
two-handed spear 23
partisan 23
halberd & bill 24
ahlspiess 25
Great stuff matt, butt i must say that the pike is the most underrated weapon...again! The pike was made for mass combat and it was very effective together with the halberd even against cavalry, infantry and armour. we just have too look into late XV and XVI century military history as for example the swiss and the landsknecht. It´s not fair for the pike to be judge as an individual weapon. keep in mind that the pike is weapon that lasted centuries in the battlefields were all the other weapons gradually disappear, and it´s weapon that´s is always being underrated together with the halberd...uff🙂
Period sources directly contest the notion pikes were an awful weapon for single combat. Antonio Manciolino recommended the 12-14+ft lancia over the 8ft(ish) spiedo: "Longer weapons are to be preferred to shorter ones: therefore, the spear is to be preferred to the spiedo, holding it against the latter not by the butt (dangerous because of the weapon’s length) but at mid-haft and with good advantage. Similarly, it is better to take a partisan rather than a two-handed sword." A longer pike-type weapon would presumably be worse than Manciolino's lancia, but probably not dramatically so. George Silver gave the advantage to lighter 8-9ft hafted weapons like his short staff over anything longer but still gave pikes & other long staff weapons odds over anything shorter. Pikes also saw widespread use fighting in loose formation in 16th-century European warfare; extraordinary pikers often defended the shot (arquebusiers, etc.) & in that role might have to face multiple foes in melee combat with some room to move around. In 16th-century China, soldiers likewise used pikes in small teams as well as in large formations. None of this evidence from fencing manuals as well as military treatises makes much sense if pikes were awful in single combat. Civilians also walked around with 13-14ft pikes on their shoulders in 16th-century England.
On to battlefield considerations: Perhaps I'm biased because I focus on the Renaissance, but I can't imagine that any historical soldiers who used spear & shield would have a chance in a direct confrontation with a 16th-century Swiss or Landsknecht infantry formation of pikes, halberds, & perhaps greatswords. I suspect there's a reason spear & shield saw very little use in Western/Central Europe during that period. Sword & shield, by contrast, had modest success, & sometimes targetiers did have darts/javelins/spears (or gunpowder devices) to throw.
Spear and shield against armor: converge and grapple is a FAR more realistic option than many other options.
"If we're going to give ANY weapon ten points against armor..."
Agreed. If you want to turn it up to 11, you switch to fire...
It sounds like a simple two-handed spear was the best bang for the buck...
It makes sense. People use what works. They wouldn't have all been used if they didn't work.
I think that spear and shield against cavalry, depends on how it is used: an over-head grip may be weaker than a two-handed grip, but the under-hand grip gives much more "firmness". And you can always rest the back-end of your spear on the ground (if it has a back-spike even better) and the stopping power of that would be greater than that of a two-handed grip. And if you have a somewhat large shield, you could crouch on one knee, with all your body covered by the shield and the spear braced against the ground. A lance at full charge hitting the shield might still get you somewhat injured, but I believe that you'd still have a better chance of stopping a lance with a shield than with a two-handed spear. And I think that if you angle your shield in the right way, you could stand a chance of deflecting the lance (not saying easy, but certainly possible). A two-handed spear might be better at actively stabbing the horseman once the danger of the lance has passed, but if a lancer was charging at me at full-galop, I would rather hide behind my shield while pointing the spear defensively towards the enemy than try to actively stab him.
Late medieval poleaxe is when pole arm aesthetic peaked imo
Have you ever seen a properly, heavy-hafted billhook? Those are sick
A pole-axe is a distilled halberd ;)
It would be interesting to follow this up with an analysis of the typical 'load out' of the Roman Infantry, English army pre-gunpowder, and how to outfit a modern prepper for a zombie horde right after all the bullets run out (which will be surprisingly fast).
Love your content. Just want to say it's a little funny that long pole arms like those used by the Greeks fell out of favor when the Romans adopted a different form of fighting, which fell out of favor when Heavy Cav was developed which caused a return to long polearms in the form of pikes. ect. Gotta love history
I view the single spear as superior in single combat as spear and shield. The attacks and bindingpotential are just better. As a Longswordfencer i have much more trouble defeating a single spear because defending against it is much harder. Against missiles and a group of people is where the shield get its purpose
This makes sense to me & strikes me as more consistent with historical sources.
My only disagreement with you is that I would rate spear and shield lower for one vs one fighting, and two hands on a simple spear as higher for one vs one. In my experience I tend to drastically prefer two hands on a spear over a spear and shield as long as I am not worried about being hit by missiles. Otherwise I think you are pretty spot on, I just tend to have a much harder time stopping a single opponent from charging me down with only one hand on a spear, whereas with two hands I feel like the distance "sweet spot" is much more forgiving.
I was about to comment the same thing
My methodology would be based on history. The polearms that survived to end of the medieval period into the Renaissance were primarily halberds and glaives, especially for individual guards and specialists, and pikes that dominated the battlefield until the end of the 17th century.
As regards winged spears we have plenty of illustrations of their massed use (Augsburg psalter, etc.), so they must have considered them to have advantages.
Definitely surprising with how even they are. Each have their specialties that they are made for, but can still do great in other categories as well
If someone were attacked by a mad aggressive dog (of the kind that are in the news) or similar wild animals, which would be the best to fend them off with?
Very informative video Matt as always. It was a good idea to rank these different pole weapons.
ps: As german speaking individual I have to say your pronunciation of the word Ahlspieß was very interesting. You butchered it but it was still pretty good for a non German native speaker. It is hard word to pronounce.
Yes, Finally another video about Matt's favourite poles!
By the way, when is the video about the coat of plates coming? I recently rewatched one of the videos about the brigandine, and you said a future video will be dedicated to the coat of plates. I would love to hear you ramble about that armour for half an hour or more, especially since it was your disertation subject. A promise is a promise, Matt!
It’s too bad we never got a discussion of polearms between Matt & Gary Gygax, whose articles in The Strategic Review and Unearthed Arcana introduced many of us of a certain age to the topic. 🙂
Hi Matt. I would like to add a few points. First I believe that the winged spear would actually have another advantage against cavalry because since it has wings there would be a lower chance of getting stuck in the enemy because of over penetration with the wings preventing it from happening. Second, in terms of cavalry again, I feel that another issue the Dane axe and poll axe might have is the head of the axe becoming lodged into the enemy as you impact with the weapon, due to the angle of the head to the haft and also due to the angle at which you would swing at, which could dislodge the weapon out of your hands as the horseman goes past. Third I also seem to recall a video that either you or lindybeige did a while back testing spear and shield vs spear in 2 hands against opponents with various types of weaponry. If I recall correctly the spear in 2 hands performed better than the spear and shield. I was wondering your thoughts on that video now.
The pike ranking for single combat seems perfectly appropriate, even the people historically using them were aware that they're not much good in single or disorganized combat. As I recall, it was common practice in the 30 Years War to switch to shortened, so-called assault/storm-pikes when assaulting a city, which in essence were pretty much two-handed spears. Those would be much more useful when fighting on fortifications or in the streets, and for even more narrow quarters people would have their various sidearms along.
To the contrary, period sources directly contest the notion pikes were an awful weapon for single combat. Antonio Manciolino recommended the 12-14+ft lancia over the 8ft(ish) spiedo: "Longer weapons are to be preferred to shorter ones: therefore, the spear is to be preferred to the spiedo, holding it against the latter not by the butt (dangerous because of the weapon’s length) but at mid-haft and with good advantage. Similarly, it is better to take a partisan rather than a two-handed sword." A longer pike-type weapon would presumably be worse than Manciolino's lancia, but probably not dramatically so. George Silver gave the advantage to lighter 8-9ft hafted weapons like his short staff over anything longer but still gave pikes & other long staff weapons odds over anything shorter. Pikes also saw widespread use fighting in loose formation in 16th-century European warfare; extraordinary pikers often defended the shot (arquebusiers, etc.) & in that role might have to face multiple foes in melee combat with some room to move around. In 16th-century China, soldiers likewise used pikes in small teams as well as in large formations. None of this evidence from fencing manuals as well as military treatises makes much sense if pikes were awful in single combat.
I think you did underrate the bill relative to the others in the anti-cavalry role. That hook was basically perfect for action against the rider if you were in range. Probably why they called it "paardenschender" (horse-violator) in Dutch and "rossschinder" in German.
Feel the halberd and bill should get more for anti calvary due to being able to hook, catch riders off horses
This video is giving me flashbacks to geeking out over the nomenclature of polearms appendix in the 1e d&d unearthed arcana. Unfortunately both left out my favorite polearm, the claymore.
"The Bill. In this specific instance it's functionally the same as a halberd. So i'm rating it the same." -Every instance of Bill rating.
Appreciate your knowledge and candor. That said I don’t think you took into account power, this overrating spear and shield. Shields disappeared some time ago and I think power of thrust or cut is part of it. You just don’t get as much from a single hand thrust of a spear. Also you scored spear and shield higher than pike and then proceeded to say why pike would beat spear and shield. Scoring appears subjective in cases like this.
It is notable that spear & shield was a very marginal combination in 16th-century Europe & China. Pikes were everywhere in both regions in this era, & in Japan. Sword & shield saw significant use in China & some in Europe, sometimes with javelins or other thrown weapons but very rarely (if ever) with spears for close combat.
Spear and shield is just so versatile, you could drop the shield and 2 hand the spear or drop the spear and use a sidearm either a sword or mace and you still have a shield
i agree with the general evaluation in regards to historical effectiveness however i wouldnt personally ever want to use the spear and shield. you have to hold the shield. basic spear or winged spear is fine
There is a reason why spear and shield was superseded by pike so comparing the two rather depends on the period. The length of the pike enabled more ranks to engage, armour is more effective than shields vs early shot and a mass of pike staves can also disrupt arrows so, at least for mass use, I think the pike was slightly underrated.
Pikes were used more as an area denial system than to actually kill the enemy because people, generally, don't want to die charging into a thicket of pointy sticks. Like he said, you stick your archers behind the pikemen and the archers do most of the work. The only real weakness was to ranged weapons as pikemen are usually not heavily armored and can't carry a large shield.
spear and shield agaianst cavalry, to me, would depend greatly on the shield. With certain shields you could brace for charge while keeping a shield wall, which, in my opinion, would move that score to an 8. other than that seems spot on to the way I see it.
Form follows function. The various designs meet a tactical need.
The pike in a mass formation protects against arrows if shot at in a high angle and probably also directly. It`s as if you try to shoot someone in the forest at an high angle.
I'd 100% choose a glaive or poleaxe depending on what I'm wearing as a default. Maybe a nice rondelle.
Halbreds, glaves and such add a defence making it easier to deflect or bind weapons, including a lance, while others provided the offense. I do like the Clubmen of the Civil War, often driving both sides into the next county.
6:00 GLAIVE BABY!!
Glaive:
One on one - 10/10
In Army - 7/10
Cavalry - 7/10
Armor - 8/10
Majority of the problem is in the reach of glaive which is easily rectified. Make it longer
It's called a bardiche
I would give a dane axe more than a flail. A flail has to be swung and is never a threat unless it's under power. A Dane axe is able to hook and would present a threat to horses if they get to close as well as hooking riders. Not that it's great but it at least has a few situations where it's effective unlike the flail. A flail was effective how it was used as a specialty weapon.
Matt, at my HEMA school we learned a bit about Dane axe because they also do Viking reenacting/combat. We learned that the Dane axe can be used to thrust with the toe of the axe. Not all axes can do this, but most of the examples I've seen of Dane axes (including yours) can thrust since the toe extends further than the top of the pole. They can also hook like a bill. And even though they don't have a hammer, they could arguably still be used to bludgeon with the back on the axe head. In your experience do you not consider the toe of the Dane axe suitable for thrusting? Always appreciate your content.
I have to disagree with the ranking of spear and shield in single combat, I've been on both sides of spear+shield vs two-handed spear and the spear+shield was at a disadvantage there. The two-handed spear user could outrange (even with identical spears) the spear+shield user, two-handed had the advantage in the bind, and up close the one-handed spear just struggles at that range majorly. Frequently the one-handed spear would be knocked aside, and its user charged down and killed at short range. The same thing happened in other weapon pairings as well, the leverage disadvantage of one-handed spear and weakness at short range kept being the deciding factor.
I'd argue that the spear & shield should get the greater score in each category between itself and the 2h spear, as one can always ditch the shield if that might serve advantageously.
So, slightly lower than everything otherwise but takes the cake in a random scenario due to the greatest versatility - makes sense.
I think the scores are very fair. I do think bashing was a bit under represented but I imagine they all preform similarly in that regard so it doesn’t really effect scoring.
On the flail, I agree that it only deserves 3 against a cavalry charge, but I think it would be quite useful in the post charge situation where horsemen are milling around striking down at surrounding infantry. The Hussites used flails very successfully as a small percentage of their pole weapon armed infantry. Poor on defense, the flail is very difficult to defend against. Flailmen absolutely need to be mixed in with pointed polearms.
The best part about that poleax is that if you run out of rations and have to butcher your horses for provisions you can tenderize them.
I think the main reason the great axe didn't get a great score was because you didn't include a category it was specialised or really good in, and several it's not quite meant for. If you included shield walls or medium armour infantry it'd get a better score. I'd still give it one more point in formation combat, though. You can thrust with it, and you don't need to swing as much as a flail.