The battle axe was a broad family of medieval axe weapons, ranging from compact one-handed forms to larger battlefield axes.
The battle axe is the one-handed war axe of early and high medieval Europe: an iron head with a steel edge on a wooden haft, carried with a shield and used from the migration period through to the later Middle Ages.
Its great advantage was never performance but price. An axe head needs a fraction of the steel a sword blade demands and far less skill to forge, so a man who could never afford a sword could arm himself properly with an axe and a spear.
That economics made it the ordinary weapon of ordinary fighters across northern Europe for centuries, and it is one reason axes vastly outnumber swords in the archaeological record.
A one-handed head generally weighs between 0.7 and 1.5 kilograms on a haft of 60 to 90 centimetres. The head is far lighter than its appearance suggests: the blade is thin behind the edge and the metal is concentrated at the socket, not spread through the whole shape.
Most medieval heads were made by wrapping an iron bar around a mandrel to form the socket, forge-welding the two arms together into the blade, and fire-welding a strip of hardened steel along the cutting edge. Only the edge needed to be steel, which is exactly where the cost saving came from.
The haft passes through the socket and is wedged tight from above. It is a simple joint and a weak one: a haft that splits or works loose disables the weapon completely, and haft failure is a recurring theme in accounts of axe fighting.
It was used with a shield, delivered in short chopping blows from behind the shield rim, and it did its worst work against helmets, limbs and the edges of shields rather than against a well-covered torso.
The Bayeux Tapestry shows one-handed axes in use throughout the Battle of Hastings in 1066, carried by English and Norman fighters alike, alongside the far larger two-handed axes of the housecarls.
It also had a hooking function. The lower horn of the blade could be used to drag down a shield rim or catch a limb, and the sagas describe axes being used to pull an opponent off balance as often as to cut him.
Its strength is concentrated force. All the energy of the swing arrives at a short cutting edge, so an axe defeats a helmet or a mail shoulder that would turn a sword cut, and it does so with a much cheaper weapon.
Its weakness is that it does almost nothing defensively. An axe cannot parry usefully and cannot threaten on the return stroke, so the axe-man depends entirely on his shield and is badly exposed the moment he commits to a blow.
It is also easy to trap. A committed swing leaves the haft available to be caught or bound, and the head can be hooked in a shield or a mail skirt, which is why axe fighting in the sources is so bound up with grappling and footwork.
Axes are among the oldest weapons in Europe, and the medieval war axe develops directly out of the tool with no clean dividing line — many early medieval heads would serve for either purpose.
The Frankish francisca, a short-hafted throwing axe of the fifth and sixth centuries, is the first clearly military form, and it disappears by the eighth as fighting styles change.
From the eighth century the Scandinavian tradition drives development, producing the bearded axe with its downward-extended lower blade and eventually the great two-handed forms; from the twelfth century the one-handed axe gradually becomes a secondary weapon as the sword spreads down the social scale.
Scandinavian axes are the best studied, and Jan Petersen's typology sorts them by head shape into a sequence that remains the standard reference for the whole northern European material.
The bearded axe, with the lower edge drawn down into a hook, is characteristically Norse and gives both a longer cutting edge and a hand-hold behind the beard for close work.
Central and eastern European finds show narrower, heavier heads better suited to punching through armour than to cutting, and the Rus' lands produce distinctive small axes with decorated cheeks that sit between weapon and status object.