The poleaxe was a specialized late medieval weapon for armored foot combat, combining reach, impact, hooks, and thrusting points.
The poleaxe is the specialist weapon of armoured foot combat in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: an axe blade or hammer face, a rear spike and a top spike, mounted on a haft of one and a half to two metres.
It is emphatically not a peasant weapon. A poleaxe was expensive, purpose-made equipment for men who fought in full harness, and it was the weapon a fifteenth-century knight expected to use when he dismounted.
It brings every anti-armour method together in one object — cut, concussion, thrust and hook — which is why it dominated the one form of combat where all four were needed at once.
The head carries three working parts: an axe blade or hammer face on one side, a spike or beak on the other, and a spike at the top for thrusting. Every one of them addresses armour a different way, and the wielder chooses in the moment.
The haft runs 1.5 to 2 metres and is protected by langets — long iron straps running down from the head — so an opponent cannot simply cut the shaft in half. Many have a rondel disc guarding the forward hand.
The whole weapon weighs typically 2 to 3 kilograms, well distributed along its length. That balance is the point: it is fast enough to fence with despite its size, which is what separates it from a simple heavy axe on a long stick.
Its home is the dismounted fight between armoured men, which is where fifteenth-century battles were increasingly decided as men-at-arms left their horses to fight on foot.
The whole weapon is a tool for the whole engagement. The spike keeps an opponent at distance, the axe or hammer strikes, the beak hooks a limb or an ankle to bring him down, and the butt end is used at close quarters where the head has no room.
At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 the French men-at-arms advanced dismounted, and the fighting in the press was done with exactly this class of weapon — a battle that illustrates both the poleaxe's dominance and the danger of the crush it was used in.
It is the most complete anti-armour weapon of the Middle Ages. Against a harness that defeats cuts and turns thrusts, the poleaxe offers concussion, a hook and a stiff point, and it applies them all at a reach the opponent must cross.
Its weakness is that it needs both hands and space. A poleaxe user carries no shield and cannot fight effectively in a tight press or a confined space, and the crush at Agincourt showed how badly that can go.
It is also useless mounted, and expensive. This is equipment for a particular kind of fight — one that a knight of the fifteenth century expected to have, which is why so many owned one.
It develops in the fourteenth century out of the long-hafted axe, driven by the same pressure that produced the war hammer: plate armour made cutting weapons ineffective and combined-head weapons necessary.
The fifteenth century is its high period, when it is the standard weapon of the dismounted man-at-arms across Western Europe and the weapon of choice in the formal judicial duel.
It fades in the sixteenth century with the armour and the style of fighting that justified it, leaving the halberd — a cheaper, longer, infantry-formation weapon — as the surviving member of the family.
French and Burgundian forms favour the axe blade with a rear beak; German examples more often use a hammer face, and the vocabulary in each language reflects the local preference.
English sources use "poleaxe" broadly for the whole family, and the modern habit of distinguishing poleaxe, pollaxe, hache and Mordaxt imposes precision that medieval writers did not.
Italian material shows lighter, more elaborate versions made for the judicial duel and the tournament, where the weapon's handling qualities mattered as much as its destructive power.