The bec de corbin is a staff weapon whose head carries a hammer face, a long downward-curving beak and a top spike — a poleaxe built around a hammer rather than an axe.
The bec de corbin is a staff weapon of the later Middle Ages whose head combines three things: a hammer face on one side, a long beak curving downward on the other, and a spike rising from the top.
The name is French — "crow's beak" — and it describes the rear spike, which is the feature the weapon is built around and the one that does most of its work.
It belongs to the family that includes the poleaxe and the war hammer, and it exists for the same reason they do: by the fifteenth century a man in a good harness could not be cut, and something had to be done about him.
This is one of the least stable names in the medieval armoury, and any tidy definition is a modern convenience rather than a medieval fact.
Bec de corbin, bec de faucon, horseman's hammer, Lucerne hammer, war hammer and poleaxe all overlap. Period inventories use them loosely, the same object can appear under several, and the neat museum distinctions between them were largely drawn in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The usable modern convention, adopted here, is this: a head with a HAMMER face and a rear beak is a bec de corbin, while a head with an AXE blade and a rear spike is a poleaxe. It is a serviceable line, and it is not one a fifteenth-century armourer would have recognised as binding.
The head is forged as a unit and mounted on an ash haft, generally between about 1.2 and 2 metres depending on whether the weapon is meant for a horseman or for fighting on foot.
The hammer face is small and often dished or serrated so it bites rather than skidding off a curved plate. Opposite it the beak runs out and curves down to a point, so that a pulling motion drives it in instead of letting it slide away.
A spike on top allows the weapon to be used as a short spear, and iron langets run down the haft from the head — long straps riveted to the wood, so an opponent cannot simply cut the shaft in half. A butt ferrule finishes the other end.
It is a weapon for fighting armoured men on foot, and it belongs to the same world as the poleaxe, the war hammer and the rondel dagger: the fifteenth-century contest between plate armour and the tools built to defeat it.
Each part of the head has a job. The hammer delivers concussion through the plate, the beak concentrates enormous force on a point to punch through or to hook a limb, and the top spike keeps an opponent at distance and threatens the gaps.
The hook is what makes it dangerous beyond simple impact. Catching a knee, an ankle, a helmet rim or a shoulder and pulling brings an armoured man down, and once he is on the ground the fight is effectively finished.
Its strength is versatility against a single hard problem. Against a harness it offers concussion, puncture and a hook, and the wielder chooses in the moment according to what he can reach.
Its weakness is specialisation. Against an unarmoured opponent it is slow, heavy and much worse than a sword, and it demands both hands and room to swing.
Like every hooked weapon it also commits its user. A blow that misses takes time to recover, and against a faster opponent inside the head's reach the wielder is in trouble.
It emerges in the later fourteenth century out of the war hammer and the long-hafted axe, at exactly the point when plate armour was becoming general and cutting weapons were losing their purchase.
The fifteenth century is its period. It appears throughout the illustrated record in the hands of armoured men-at-arms fighting on foot, and in the judicial duel, where combat between two men in harness was the whole event.
It persists into the sixteenth century and then fades with the harness that justified it, though the Swiss Lucerne hammer — a long-hafted relative with a multi-pronged beak — remained in infantry service somewhat longer.