Much more to the point

"......................................Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge."

                                                                        Coriolanus          (I, i)



Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus begins with hunger, that most ancient of afflictions. The citizens of Rome are clamoring for bread. They have learned to hate the self-indulgent patricians of privilege, and that hatred simmers. The lean and the famished are on the outside looking in; that figurative window is in danger of being smashed with the weapons of the mob: the fist, the club, the barrel stave, the pike.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is the end of an ornate ceremonial pike that dates to the nineteenth century, by which time pikes had long since ceased to be regarded as effective weapons in battle. Not that the idea of their use had by then disappeared entirely: in London during World War II, there were brief and ill-advised discussions of the idea that even a pike-wielding Home Guardsman was of more use than a completely unarmed one. But the concept of using so primitive a weapon in the midst of a 20th-century war was widely regarded as ludicrous and morale-busting, and the idea was soon scrapped.

During the European heyday of the pike in the Middle Ages, the weapon could be reasonably effective if wielded by well-trained, disciplined troops: the Swiss were among the most highly regarded in the use of both pikes and halberds, which were essentially long-poled axes that also had a sharp spike at their extreme end. Some had a hook-like appendage that was used for violently dismounting an opposing horseman. The poles of pikes were usually at least ten feet long; some were twice that.

It should be added that the pike was a much less effective weapon if the battle came to close quarters: although the poles varied in length they were inevitably cumbersome if not impossible to use if an attacker managed to get close enough for a face-to-face encounter. Tactics frequently called for formations of pikemen to maneuver in conjunction with mounted troops or infantry armed with shorter weapons, to compensate for this liability.

Ultimately, of course, gunpowder weapons cleared most bladed weapons from the battlefield. It isn't easy to regard this as progress.