The other use is the 'deutsche Stoß' (German/Landsknecht style thrust) where you grab the weapon at the end of the shaft in a position at the hip. There are two archetypes, the 'schweizer Stoß' (Swiss style thrust) where you grab the pike at the balance that is 2/3 of the shaft length from the pikehead and can handle it overarm and underarm. The earlier long spears might still have been constructed in a spear-like fashion without an as tapering shaft and more of a blade, like the winged lance and boar spear, but time and fashion surely dictated terms.Īnother issue on length of spears and pikes is how you hold them. Pike comes from a non-German source (French piquer?) and means a weapon that has a thrusting point. It's 'Spieß' in German while 'Speis' is an old general word for something to eat like in 'Speis und Trank'. Two millenia earlier, it would be a Sarissa. In short, if you fought with a spear in the 16th century, you would call it a pike, and make it 4-5m long.Ī hundred years earlier, the same weapon might have been called a lance, or 'huge f'in spear' I am not sure if the term 'spear' is use in the renaisance The shorter, 2,5-3m spears where simply called half-pikes. The word 'pike' is a simple derivate of 'pique', or point. Like so many other terms for weapons, it might simply be a matter of which period you are in. Posted: Wed 25 Apr, 2012 10:42 am Post subject:

Mount and blade lances