Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/157

 century (Figs. 911, 912, and 913). The "Brown" bill of England was in most general use late in the XVIth and early in the XVIIth century. Bills were the accepted weapons of the night watch: Dogberry in "Much Ado about Nothing" warns his men: "Have a care that your bills be not stolen." The ordinary bills, however, must have been poor in make and in quality of metal; indeed, so inferior were they that Sir Roger Williams in his "Brief Discourse of War" (1590) states that the bills of the trained bands "must be of good stuffe, not like our common browne bills, which are for the most part all yron, with little steele or none at all." The English brown bill, which is represented in our illustration (Fig. 914), was found in a garden at Sudbury, Suffolk, and probably dates back to the end of the XVIth century. Curiously enough, there is a variety of the bill family of hafted weapons in which the general measurements of the whole head are diminutive. These bills are possibly peculiar to England; for when they are found on the Continent their origin can generally be traced back to this country. We illustrate an example, No. 724 in the Wallace Collection (Fig. 915), which we consider dates within the first half of the XVIth century; the length of the entire head is only nine inches.

The primitive type of guisarme, to which we have already alluded, is merely a hafted weapon mentioned by certain of the early chroniclers (see vol. i, p. 143). Its form remains quite uncertain. Many collectors and students of arms often give the name of guisarme to the bill, but on slender authority. Olivier de la Marche, writing early in the XVth century, describes it as a hafted combination of a dagger and a battle-axe, and attributes to it a great antiquity. The actual type of weapon which in our opinion answers to the name of guisarme, gysarme or jasarme, as it was variously spelt, is of the nature of a slender incurved sword blade, from the back edge of which a sharp upturned hook issues. This elongated hook in some cases runs parallel with the back of the blade, or diverges from it at an angle. The Tower of London shows some fine examples of various types, one of which we illustrate (Fig. 916); another of more robust proportions (Fig. 917) comes from the collection of the Baron de Cosson. We may add that, just as the Voulgières of Charles VII of France were so called from the fact that their main weapon was the "voulge," so the soldiers armed with the guisarme were known as Guisarmières.

The Austrian bardische, or bardêche, the Scottish Lochaber axe, the Jedburgh axe, indeed, the battle-axe generally we will deal with briefly, resuming our short account of the axe comprehensively from vol. i, pages