The spear was one of the most common weapons of medieval Europe because it was cheaper than a sword, useful in formation, and adaptable to infantry or cavalry.
The spear is the weapon of the medieval battlefield. Not the sword, not the axe: a shaft of ash with an iron head, carried by more men in more armies over more centuries than every other weapon in this archive combined.
It is under-represented everywhere except the ground. Poets sing about swords, artists draw swords, and museums display swords — but the graves, the muster rolls and the ordinances all say spear, and the discrepancy is one of the more instructive things about the medieval record.
Its dominance is a matter of arithmetic. A spear costs almost nothing, can be made by any village smith, teaches quickly, and gives an ordinary man a real chance against a better-equipped one. Nothing else in the armoury does all four.
A typical infantry spear runs 1.8 to 2.5 metres with a head of 20 to 50 centimetres, and the whole weapon weighs between 1 and 2 kilograms. Ash is the preferred shaft wood across northern Europe for its combination of straightness, strength and flex.
The head is usually socketed: a flat iron blank forged into a leaf or lozenge blade with the base wrapped around a mandrel to form a socket, which then takes the shaft and is fixed with a rivet. Only the edges need hardening, so the steel requirement is tiny.
Some heads carry lugs or wings projecting from the base of the blade. These stop the head being driven too deep to withdraw — a serious practical problem when spearing a man or a boar — and give a surface for parrying and for controlling an opponent's weapon.
Its power is collective. A line of spears presented together is close to impassable to infantry and horses alike, because each man is protected by his neighbours' points as much as by his own, and the formation only fails when it loses cohesion.
The Anglo-Saxon shield wall at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was built on spear and shield, and the Norman cavalry could not break it frontally for most of the day — it broke when men left the line to pursue, which is the standard way such formations die.
It served mounted men too. Before the couched lance became standard, cavalry used the spear overhand and underhand, thrown and thrust, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows Norman horsemen using it in all of those ways within the same scene.
Its strengths are reach, cost and the speed with which a man can be made useful with it. A levy given spears and a fortnight's drill is a real military asset; the same men given swords are not.
Its weakness is the moment the formation breaks. In a swirling close fight a two-metre shaft is a liability, which is precisely why spearmen carried a seax, an axe or a knife for the point when the line dissolved.
It is also poor against heavy armour on its own. A spear point will find a mail gap and can be driven hard, but against a fifteenth-century harness the infantry answer was a longer, heavier staff weapon with a hook and a hammer, not a plain spear.
The spear is continuous from prehistory and shows no medieval starting point. What changes is context: the migration-period spear and shield give way to the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon shield wall, then to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century infantry line.
The great development is length. From the fourteenth century infantry spears grow into pikes of four metres and more, fielded in deep blocks that could stop cavalry outright — the Swiss and Flemish formations that reshaped European infantry warfare.
The shorter spear never disappeared. It stayed in service as a hunting weapon, a guard weapon and a militia weapon long after the pike had taken over the battlefield proper.
Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon heads are relatively broad and leaf-shaped, built for cutting as well as thrusting, and Norse sources describe spears used to hew as well as to stab.
Frankish and later continental forms include winged and lugged heads in large numbers, and the wing is more common in central Europe than in the north or in Britain.
Mediterranean and Iberian traditions favoured lighter shafts and narrower heads, well suited to the more mobile, skirmishing warfare of the Iberian frontier, where heavy static formations were less useful than speed.