A few months ago, Wikipedia featured an article on the Battle of Caen, a conflict in which the English attacked the French town of Caen in 1346. The article was illustrated by a super-awesome painting from Froissart’s Chronicles.
As I examined that painting in detail, I noticed something very odd about one of the pole weapons (as Wikipedia calls them) or pole arms (as we knew them back in Dungeons & Dragons days) being used by a soldier. I present the relevant portion of the image below:
The man on the right is holding what looks like an ornate glaive. (I included a glaive in a Halloween illustration on the blog many years ago.) But what caught my attention was the object that the man on the left wields, something that I, speaking as a casual fan of Medieval weaponry, cannot identify. The wooden shaft is topped by a pointed spear head, and there are what appear to be two metal disks mounted on opposing sides of the spear head, with a spike protruding from the center of each disk.
This particular weapon is not some unique aberration; there are two at least additional weapons of the same type in another section of the image (posted below), as well as other possible (though unclear) examples elsewhere in the picture.
In my research, I did find other pole weapons that were similar in that they had a pair of spikes or blades on the opposing sides of a spear head, such as the ranseur and the Bohemian earspoon. (And doesn’t everybody need a Bohemian earspoon?) But there was nothing with anything close to those metal disks at the base of the spikes.
From a Dungeons & Dragons perspective, it seems that we are looking at something that didn’t occur even in E. Gary Gygax’s wildest dreams.
I will also note that weapon in question does not appear on the phylogenic diagram of pole arms shown below. (Was the phylogeny derived using cladistic analysis?)
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