This was posted by William M in another topic. I've split it into its own.



It is a two-handed pole-axe from the British Museum.

The museum card says this:

Steel two-handed poll-axe, the quillon block engraved with the arms of the Commonwealth
English, about 1619-53

Here is a photo I took of it last year:

[ Linked Image ]

:wtf: It looks like a really demented Tuck

I really like this very interesting warhammer---but do you recall its date? Has anyone ever seen it reproduced, or anything like it?

It really looks like a civilian remount from battlefield debris.




The size dosen't seem long enough for a pole axe, but maybe as a tourney/joust weapon? I could see it as a that more.

I can get some idea of size by the other items in the picture, but I'd be curious to know it's exact dimensions.

Michael

Is that a tube welded to the blade? If it's for a panache, this might be some sort of odd bearing sword.

There's always something new isn't there? It seems like this thing ought to be called a two handed hammer or something though, since I do not see an axe head there at all...

The length and shape of the hammer has me wondering if this is a one-of-a-kind cavalry weapon from the late 16th c. The Commonwealth mark and "panache holder" could have been added later as the weapon proved ineffecient or obsolete for field use. It would make an impressive bearing weapon.

Hmm a little more online looking and I find Henry the VIIIs pollaxe armor supposedly displayed with a pollaxe...

[ Linked Image ]

Which I would have called a bec de corbyn.... curiouser and curiouser... it may be that I am merely a victim of our ancestors not bothering to get really very specific about things. A modern habit perhaps...

A bec de corbyn is a form of poleaxe. I'll dig up further detailed info for you in about a week.

I lectured last October for the second IAAC in Vienna about the history of the poleaxe.

And I must say Nate is right :)

Even in the Burgundian treatise Le Jeu de la Hache, the weapon used has a hammer head, back spike (called bec de faucon) and top spike. Also, in the earlier Fior di Battaglia by Fiore dei Liberi, his Azza is of the same type. In Talhoffer too...

Same again, nearly all the poleaxes mentionned in the various Pas d'Armes that took place in Burgundy in the XVth century were of the 'hammer' type.


Fab

I saw something very similar at the Tower of London a couple of years ago.
Sadly no description was next to it.

[url]http://home.comcast.net/~c-wyatt/fullhammer.jpg [/url]

[url]http://home.comcast.net/~c-wyatt/hammerhead.jpg[/url]

Poll is english for head, as in poll tax, redpoll, polling etc.. Ax is english for axe (or a metathesis for ask, but the former version seems more probable in this context). As for not having an axe blade as we conventionally recognise it now, neither does a dagger axe. Maybe it was some reference to a 'nasty bit that you use at right angles to the shaft', or maybe they all started with axe heads and the name stuck when the blade didn't. We still call people plumbers, though copper and plastic have long since replaced lead.
Geoff

Edit: and then there's the pickaxe ............