Meyer, A Thorough Description of the Art of Fencing (1570)
Foil (noun): a tool designed to mimic a weapon's characteristics and reduce the risk of injury in recreational use.
Longsword foils, known to HEMA as "feders," incorporate a slim, flexible blade to mitigate injury from strikes, a blunted tip to prevent puncture wounds, and a flared schilt to help protect user's fingers from slippery binds. Feders make big sacrifices for safety - their narrow blades have little presence in what meager bind their dull edges yield. But they're useful to us, so we put up with their deficiencies.
To be fair, feders and other foils are essential to modern HEMA practice. We could not fully test our textual interpretations without full-speed sparring, and the only way to do that safely is with foiled weapons. Therefore, a student of the medieval and renaissance halberd would seek a halberd foil that allows for safe, fast sparring. Perhaps such a polearm is an impossibility. It's a series of contradictions - it must be heavy enough to simulate the real thing but must strike softly enough to be safe. It must be as long as historical examples but safe to use even with all the leverage of a seven foot pole. Its characteristics in the bind must mimic the real thing. Polearms are notoriously difficult to make safe (you can't blunt a staff), but I'm willing to see how close I can get to a sparring-safe halberd.
Did historical students use halberd foils?
Fencers of the Gothenburg Free Fencer Guild use wooden halberd foils in class. (And pikes and staffs)
Joachim Meyer depicts halberd foils in his 1570 treatise, A Thorough Description of the Art of Fencing. Although no description is given of their construction or specifications apart from their graphical depiction, these halberds are clearly foils - a ball is present on the tip to mitigate thrusting injury, and the fencers are not wearing any special protection to ward off cuts, indicating that the sparring weapons are not sharp.
Unfortunately, we can make out little other than the ball tip of Meyer's halberd foil. We can't even say for sure whether the illustrations depict actual objects or are merely artistic representations of fencing techniques. Though it seems safe to assume that 16th century fencers did not train with sharp weapons, the illustrations don't clearly depict blunt edges - indeed, some of the halberd heads come to very acute points. It seems reasonable to assume that these foils would have been made from wood, but at least with regard to halberd foils in particular, there just isn't enough evidence to make such a conclusion.
Fencers using wooden dussacks. 1531.
So, Meyer's lavish illustrations are little help in ascertaining the characteristics of a historical halberd foil other than to illustrate that fencers rounded their halberd tips to avoid thrusting injury. Fortunately, we have other evidence of solid wood training weapons from Meyer's time - notably from depictions of the dussack, a short proto-saber. Modern HEMA knows the dussack as a leather-padded training tool that requires little gear to handle safely, but most historical depictions seem to indicate solid wood construction. Extrapolating on this observation, Meyer's halberd foils could easily have used wooden heads as well. Therefore, I'm of the opinion that halberd foils, to the extent they were used in the past, were likely constructed from wood.
Purpleheart Armoury leather dussack
Wooden dussacks can still crack fingers, so many modern versions are wrapped in leather with a seam along the edge. When broken in, this thick leather edge provides good padding in sparring. Given the dussack foil's light overall weight, blows do not carry very much momentum and so the risk of concussive injury is low. These features make the leather-covered dussack foil a very good training tool and recreational sparring weapon.
Perhaps historical halberd foils also used leather to soften the impact of blows, but as noted above, Meyer's halberds have no sign of leather padding. The evidence seems to indicate that historical fencers placed more emphasis on making their foils "less lethal" rather than "sparring safe" - perhaps they simply trained at slower speeds or accepted the risk of injury. Regardless, we have other considerations unknown or ill-understood to historical fencers - namely, the danger of mild traumatic brain injury. Our foils must not only be safe from accidentally cutting and piercing, they must also mitigate the risk of concussion. So although examining historical halberd foils is a good start, we should move beyond what the past has to offer in order to design a solution for our 21st century context.
a modern halberd foil
Examining the HEMA longsword foil (the feder) is useful for understanding how a weapon can be made safe for high speed sparring. The design of the feder address two distinct issues that must also be solved by a halberd foil - safety in the thrust and safety in the strike. Perhaps we can adapt the feder's solutions to the task of creating a sparring-safe halberd.
A blunt longsword and a longsword foil.
A feder combines a blunted tip with a flexible blade to soften the impact of thrusts against the body. The wide tip spreads the force of the thrust across a larger area, softening the impact and reducing the likelihood of piercing into the target. Additionally, the blade is designed to flex after a certain threshold of force is applied, further softening the impact of a thrust.
Force in the strike is mitigated in part by the mass distribution of the feder's blade. Unlike a sword, where mass near the tip imparts more momentum into the target for the purpose of carrying it through in a cut, a feder's light blade carries less momentum, transferring less energy into the target. Additionally, the feder's wide edge spreads out the force of the impact to further soften blows.
Unlike thrusting force, striking force is largely dependent on the wielder's decision of how forcefully to throw the strike. If the wielder utilizes good cutting structure and intends to strike hard, even the least blade-heavy feders will make a big impact. But the point is that the feder is optimized for lighter hits, unlike the longsword it imitates. Essentially, the feder's design makes it easy to pull blows - that's the quality we're after in a halberd foil.
Courtesy Matt Sennett, Maryland Kunst Des Fechtens
Courtesy Matt Sennett, Maryland Kunst Des Fechtens
So, a longsword foil softens its impact by:
deforming - flexing in the thrust
spreading the force over a large area, and
impacting with minimal mass
A halberd foil can incorporate all these properties. The pictures to the right are designs for a sparring-safe Dane axe I got to use at Autumnfecht, an annual HEMA gathering in the DC region. The Dane axe, a predecessor to the halberd, is an approximately four-foot axe with a thin, broad head. The foil version I tried out has a head made from kydex and leather, and its design mirrors the properties of a longsword foil very well.
Kydex is an easily-worked plastic that becomes floppy when heated but re-stiffens when cool, keeping any shape it is molded to. It is flexible, but when bent, springs back into shape. The kydex in the Dane axe head bends sideways upon impact with a target, dissipating the force of the blow, much like a feder bends in the thrust. However, it is stiff enough to hook, push, and pull as well as its steel counterpart.
The force of a blow is also dissipated by the wide, soft leather edge on the axe head. Much like the modern dussack foil discussed earlier, the soft leather spreads out and cushions the force of a blow.
Finally, the Dane axe foil I handled had a light, teardrop shaped shaft that added little additional mass toward the axe head. The lack of mass at the head helped prevent the foil from delivering massive hits - in standard longsword sparring gear, this design could be used full-speed. It is not significantly more dangerous than a feder, in my estimation.
Given it's effectiveness, I plan on mimicking the kydex and leather design of the Dane axe foil. We'll see how well this design allows the halberd foil to dissipate force. I'll update this series of blog posts as the project unfolds - stay tuned!