OK, you UK types out there - exactly what are the construction requirements for a re-enactment halberd/bill/spear? what about the thrusting tip - i.e, how do you handle "push of pike"?

Looking forward to your input.

Excellent wasnt it! I picked up a Hound skull Bacinet for £120! Bit of a bargin if you ask me!

Excellent wasnt it! I picked up a Hound skull Bacinet for £120! Bit of a bargin if you ask me!

As for Bills we tend to try and keep the points at a minimum radius of 2.5 - 3 cm (1 inch)
But the main safty comes from the way ther are used!
People also use poles with no point when in big battles, They still work the same way but this avoids the problem of people runningmon to the point when charging!

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For God, King and Lancaster

Thanks for the offer of measurements. I am sure we could use them. Hauptman can of course get a first hand look at it and give his opinion when next you attend an event.

Before you decide on the construction of the blunt weapon you do need to consider how you are going to use it ... which means how was it used at the time and how can (if it can) be translated into a useable style today.

If you use a bill/halbard/glaive etc. simply as a short pike (which I don't believe they did) then there is less of a problem with weight than if used with a smashing action as well.

I believe that there were differences between the English and Burgundian and again Swiss usage but at the moment I can't really pin down exactly what ... it's all gut feel rather than substantive research as of yet.

But from experience in different medieval groups in the UK & Europe each has a different style, none are accurate and all distort the design of the weapon (whether it be bow poundages, tip thickness etc. etc.) for perfectly justifiable reasons, primarily safety.

Unfortunately I feel that the initial concept is far too often based, consciously or not, on the desire for an entertaining fighting style (whether for the public, participants or both) rather than actually working out how they fought at the time.

I am aware of the self-styled 'European Martial Arts' organisations which seem to be springing up and I hope these will help but they also run the risk of making 'workable' &/or 'safe' styles rather than 'real' styles. Also they often fail to address the substantial difference (in my mind anyway) between training/individual combat and full scale battles.
To understand the battles we need to know the organisation and discipline in the field as well as the manner of using the weapons.

So where does this ramble leave us ... in my opinion in need of more research into how they fought before we consider the construction of the bill etc. The net result may be to accept that they are too dangerous to demonstrate in 'combat' and hence have sharps rather than blunts.

What do people feel?

Without a doubt, you are absolutely correct. It is impossible to understand medieval combat without studying it in the context of unit orginization, and the tactical application of weaponry as employed by those units.

As we have armed ourselves as a company, we made it a point to gather weapons as close to their historical counterpart as possible. The only "blunts" we have are unsharpened swords like the Del Tins that Pieter and I have. Our first three halberds are unsharpened "sharps" that are copies of existing halberds in das Altes Zughause - obviously inappropriate for anything but show and drill, but you can't be showing blunts as examples of what the "real thing" looked like when new at a museum.

Unfortunately, the nuts and bolts of their employment is very much in the dark in the 15th c. - there are tantalizing hints, but I've seen little evidence for how units drilled and fought. We do have "how to" books on how individual combatants would use them, Talhoffer, de Liberi, le jeu de hachette - but many of the techniques shown could not be employed in a close formation (IMO). Of course you cannot begin to understand the weapons themselves until you try to learn the proper techniques, which Wolfe Argent as a group has happily begun - thanks to the kindness and efforts of the staff at the Higgins armoury and through the help of Keith Ducklin of the Royal Armouries who they arranged to have visit for a seminar. A first step in a long journey, but that first step is the most important one.

We should start a topic on this forum about employment of hand to hand weapons as units.

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