Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/129

 to the latter part of the XVIth century, and are essentially tournament and not fighting weapons. Of this form must have been the lances for light horsemen, distinguishable in the 1547 inventory of the armouries at Westminster under the heading of "Colin Cleves": "Itm Colin Cleves painted and guilte thone havinge a rounde plate at thande of silver and guilte graven w^t sheff arrowes foure of them lackinge heddes viij." In other words these are staves or lances brought from Cologne, the "rounde plate at thande" being the steel vamplate. There is a very unusual type of lance—a folding lance—in the collection of the late Mr. Rutherford Stuyvesant of New York (Fig. 870). This last-named specimen is not strictly speaking a lance but is a "Swedish feather," carried by cavalry during the thirty years' war. We called them in England "Pallisados."

Even before we come to the XVth century the war-hammer, pole-axe, or battle-axe had become recognized as a hafted weapon fit for knightly use; we shall therefore select it as the next subject for our consideration. To grasp—roughly enough—its evolution we must retrace our steps very many generations. Its early significance as a weapon was far from knightly; for the rude levies of the XIth and XIIth centuries were the original wielders of the war-hammer. Like the "brigans" and "ribaux," who swelled the army for the sake of plunder, the poor levies of the nobility fought with the first weapons upon which they could lay hands, the tools of their husbandry, the hatchet, the scythe, the cattle-goad, and the pick. Of these the pick survived; for in skilled hands it proved a most formidable weapon. To economize space we shall group together the mallet, the battle-axe, and the war-hammer, because the method of their use was similar. So beyond supplying certain illustrations of the so-called battle-axe, we will confine ourselves in the discussion of these associated weapons to giving some account of the war-hammer and of the mace. Throughout the XIVth century, speaking generally, the haft of the war-hammer had the proportions of that of the mace, which, like the war-hammer, was manipulated with one hand. Many fine hammer-heads of the time are extant; but few, if any, and none of those which we have examined possess their original wooden hafts. In the Wallace Collection (Fig. 871) a war-hammer dating from the first half of the XVth century is most representative; for although it is of XVth century construction, it is of the type which is known to have existed throughout the previous century. Two fine hammer-heads were also in the Dino Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York (Figs. 872