Driving a hard bargain
I’VE been unsuccessfully bidding on arms and armour all year and I’m beginning to understand the pain and depression addicts experience when forced to go ‘cold turkey’. Whether my growing catalogue of failure is because I’ve been feeling more constrained than usual with my daughter’s wedding to finance (job now done); an ever-improving eye meaning I only want the better bits on offer – said items usually drawing the most bids – or the collapsing pound making our auctions ever more attractive to those dratted overseas internet bidders, or a combination of all three, I have no idea. All I know is that I’ve had nothing new to smuggle into the house and then surreptitiously add to an armour – four currently in various stages of construction – or hang on a wall. And mighty frustrated I am, too.
My last success was in December 2018; one of those ‘I’d be mad to let it go at that price’ objects, although; the orcs with their lethal halberds versus the knights and heroes with their fancy swords. In fact, and I have argued about this with the ‘experts’, come a dogfight to the death I would have left my sword hanging from my belt and grabbed a halberd – a combination of spike for stopping charging horsemen; axe for removing limbs and a ‘peak’ (like a vicious bird’s beak, or can opener) for punching holes even through plate armour. This lethal head is mounted on a 4ft to 5ft wooden haft that was then swung by men with muscular arms and shoulders. At the Battle of Nancy in 1477 the army of the aptly named Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, was annihilated by the halberd and pike carrying Swiss. Before turning their attentions to banking, chocolate and fancy timepieces the Swiss specialised in being mercenaries. Charles’s head was cleaved in two by a halberd. Just imagine the kinetic force required to inflict an injury like that to a knight wearing an armour of the finest steel. Last December, Thomas Del Mar had a wicked-looking, mid-16th-century, south German/Swiss halberd that came from the Brunswick ducal armoury at Schloss Marienberg; a superb provenance. It had a shortened 3ft haft (most wooden hafts on ancient polearms are replacements for obvious, wood-boring beetle reasons), which explained its low looking £600 bottom estimate – 18 more inches of wood and it would have been a few hundred pounds higher. I made a cheeky £500 bid. And got it. If you want ‘cheap’, early, killing steel, look no further than polearms for value for money.
