Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/153



From the perished frescoes, first half of the XIIIth century. Formerly in the Painted Chamber, Westminster

We will examine it, however, in the shape which it took in the XVth century and onwards. But before doing so we will give the remarkable pictorial evidence of the form which it assumed in the first half of the XIIIth century. This pictorial evidence is taken from the perished frescoes in the Painted Chamber of Westminster (see vol. i, Figs. 143, 144; vol. ii, Fig. 409). Our illustration (Fig. 907) shows a portion of the fresco with mounted knights in the foreground; but it is the group of hafted weapons in the background, appearing over the heads of the knights, that now concerns us. This comprises two battle-axes, a spear, a banner, and, almost in the centre, the blade of a bill, which is here shown in the form of such a bill-head as we are accustomed to associate with the XVth and XVIth centuries. Apart, then, from the most primitive form of bill, to which we have referred in an earlier chapter (see vol. i, page 144), we may take it that the shape of the bill-head was practically the same in the latter part of the XIIIth century as extant examples show it to have been in the latter part of the XVth century. The bill-head must have been as deadly a weapon for cutting as for thrusting; for in its usual XVth or XVIth century form it possessed a long knife-shaped blade drawn out at one end into a strongly reinforced point, with a flattened haft socket on the other, immediately above which are two pointed lugs. In the middle of the back edge of the blade there is also a pointed projection issuing at a right angle; while as often as not the cutting edge of the blade terminates in a curved beak or projection sharpened on either edge, an addition to the principal blade which made the bill a very effective weapon for cutting and tearing, as is shown in the illustrations chosen from the National Bavarian Museum, Munich (Fig. 908), and from the Noël Paton