The bill was a hooked polearm especially associated with English infantry, adapted from cutting tools into battlefield equipment.
The bill is the English infantry polearm of the later Middle Ages, developed directly from the agricultural billhook: a curved cutting blade with a hook, a spike and often a rear spur, on a shaft of around two metres.
Its origin in a farm tool is genuine rather than fanciful. The billhook was and remains a hedging and pruning implement, and the military bill is the same idea made larger, heavier and given a thrusting point.
It was the characteristic weapon of English foot soldiers through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, so much so that "bills and bows" became the standard shorthand for an English army.
The shaft runs 1.8 to 2.4 metres and the head carries three or four working parts: a concave cutting edge, a pronounced hook at the top, a thrusting spike, and frequently a rear spur for punching.
The hook is the defining element. Where a halberd's beak punches, a bill's hook grabs — it is shaped to catch a limb, a rein, a shield rim or the edge of a plate defence and pull, which is what the agricultural version does to a branch.
Complete weapons weigh 2.5 to 3.5 kilograms and, like the halberd, carry langets down the shaft to protect the wood. The heads are usually simpler and cheaper to make than a halberd's, which was part of the appeal.
It was the close-combat partner of the longbow in English armies. Archers shot until the enemy closed and then fought with bills and swords, and the two arms are consistently mentioned together in muster records and ordinances.
Its speciality is unhorsing and unbalancing. The hook drags a rider down or pulls an infantryman out of his line, and once a man is off his feet the fight is effectively over.
The English armies of the fifteenth century relied on it heavily, and it remained standard equipment through the civil wars of that century, when English forces fought largely on foot with bills, bows and poleaxes.
Its strengths are cost, familiarity and versatility. A billhook was already in every English village, the transition to the military form required no new skills to make and few to use, and the finished weapon cuts, thrusts and hooks.
Its weakness, shared with the halberd, is that it needs room and a formation. In a press the head is useless, and against a swordsman who gets inside the point the billman is in serious trouble.
It is also less effective than a halberd against the best plate. The bill is a superb tool for catching and dragging, but its cutting edge does less against a good harness than a heavy axe blade would.
It develops from the agricultural billhook during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as militia weapons were drawn from what people already owned and then improved for war.
The fifteenth century is its high point, when it becomes standard English infantry equipment and appears throughout the period's muster documents alongside the bow.
It persisted into the sixteenth century, longer in England than in most of Europe, and Tudor musters still list bills in numbers when continental armies had largely moved to pike and shot.
The bill is characteristically English, and its prominence there reflects a military system built on shire levies equipped from what the community already had rather than on professional mercenary infantry.
Italian workshops produced related forms — the roncone and its relatives — which share the hooked head but were often more elaborate, and Italian parade versions are common in museum collections.
Continental Europe generally preferred the halberd, and the difference between English bill and Swiss halberd is a reasonable index of the difference between the two military systems that produced them.