WEAPONS. A Pictorial history

Rome was the keystone which sustained the European civilization of her time and when she fell the whole structure went down with her. So complete was the demoralization that even records of it are fragmentary. It seems incredible that in so short a time men could forget all that had been learned but that is exactly what they did; and it was fear that caused them to do it. Law disappeared and with it all security of life or property. For mutual protection men huddled in little groups under some strong leader. Sometimes they hid in a former Roman stronghold and defended it as best they could or used it as a base for raids on their neighbours.

It was out of the welter of petty chieftains, struggling first for survival, then for supremacy, that feudalism was born: each man receiving protection from and giving service to another more powerful than himself. The earliest massing of these scattered groups in any real strength was that of the Franks under Clovis, about 480 A.D.

As the result of tomb probing some notion has been gained of the equipment of Frankish warriors. They used iron and shaped it well but they hadn't learned to harden it. Their spears were iron-tipped; their thirty-inch swords were iron, but poor things; iron rimmed and braced was their round wooden shield with a large iron boss mounted in its center. Iron-headed too was the francisc, the curiously shaped throwing ax which was the Frank's prime weapon.

The Frankish warrior used no armor except a leather cap reinforced with crossed metal bands. He wrapped his legs to the knee with strips of cloth or leather over the long "trews" or pants he wore. On his body was a belted fur jerkin reaching halfway to his knees and giving him some protection.

In England the Anglo-Saxons used very similar equipment. Their broadax had a longish handle and was swung as a battle-ax but their short-handled "taper ax" was thrown. King Canute measured some land by marking it "as far as a taper ax can be thrown."

By the time of Charlemagne (c. 800) the Franks, though clinging to the francisc, had learned to harden iron; and the lorica, a jerkin of chain mail, began to be worn by him and his men. Charlemagne's sword was longer than Clovis's, and it had a crossed guard at the hilt which was used on swords for six hundred years after him. Some of the crack troops of the Franks now wore helmets with scalloped leather curtains which hung about their faces, and they ornamented their legs by crisscrossing the wrappings all the way up. This was a general style almost everywhere at this time and is the ancient basis of the design of the Scottish Argyll socks.

The Anglo-Saxons had discovered that their long-handled pruning bill was useful for lopping off limbs-other than those which grew on trees. This was the first of the "pole arms," and was used as long as any of the pole arms. Only a few examples of English military bills still exist, because it seemed only sensible to the ex-soldier, returning to the farm, to put his bill back to its original work, and most of them were worn out that way. The Saxons also worked a variation on the mace which must have had great possibilities in the hands of a good man. It was called by a gentle and poetic name—the "morning-star." Its heavy, usually spiked head was attached to a handle by a short length of chain, and though it might be a little hard to control, when it did land it took the fight out of the toughest Norman.

The beginnings of the system of vassalage and knighthood were set up in England about the time of King Alfred the Great (872). King Arthur, if he lived at all, is assigned to a period about two centuries earlier. That would make him a half-wild chieftain. His Round Table of knights was invented for him by later romantic legends. The paintings of them in fourteenth-century plate armor hit some kind of high mark for the ridiculous. Actually, only a few wealthy Saxon leaders could afford chain mail or jazerant jackets and iron hats; most of them fought bareheaded in .their shirts. The Anglo-Saxons used the bow, but chiefly as a hunting weapon. In war they depended more on the sling, a Roman habit which they may have adopted during the Roman occupation of Britain.

Once the cavalry of mounted knights was established, the common foot soldier became and remained for some centuries almost useless. He was armed with whatever he could pick up around home, and he could rarely do any real damage to a mounted man in chain mail. Some yeomen were used as slingers and archers and some few had arms given to them, but for the most part they seem to have impeded the knights who did most of the fighting, as much as they helped them. The Dark Ages remembered nothing of the Roman science of fortification. They began again with wooden stockades and earthworks. By the beginning of the Middle Ages, men were building stockades, ditches and drawbridges for defense and with these, at least as early as 585, came a return of the battering ram and some kind of ballista. The old "tortoise" to protect the men at the ram also came back with the new name of “snayle."