Arms of Late Rome and the Middle Ages: From the Spatha to Mons Meg

The spatha was a long straight sword, roughly half a meter to a meter in length, used across the Roman Empire from the first to the sixth centuries AD. It reached Roman forces through Celtic mercenaries and was first a cavalry weapon, then gradually replaced the shorter gladius as the standard heavy infantry sword. Its form carried on into the swords of the Viking age and of medieval knights.

The plumbata was a lead-weighted throwing dart with a wooden shaft and fletching. Late Roman infantrymen clipped several inside their shields to throw before closing for melee, a practice described by Vegetius and in the Byzantine Strategikon and confirmed by archaeological finds such as those at Wroxeter.

The onager was a Roman torsion-powered siege engine, a catapult with a bowl, bucket or sling at the end of its throwing arm for hurling stones at fortifications or enemy formations. Ammianus Marcellinus documents it in 353 AD. Its name comes from the kick of the machine as it threw, likened to the wild ass called the onager, and historians sometimes confuse it with the later traction mangonel.

The francisca was a throwing axe that served as a characteristic national weapon of the Franks during the Merovingian period, roughly 500 to 750 AD, and stayed in use through the reign of Charlemagne. Its arched head was about 14 to 15 centimeters long, the whole weapon weighed around 600 grams, and it suited throwing at about 12 meters. Anglo-Saxon examples have been found in England.

The Dane axe, or long axe, was a two-handed early medieval battle axe that emerged in the Viking Age and spread beyond Scandinavia from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Its broad thin blade, twenty to thirty centimeters along the edge, with horns at toe and heel, was made for powerful cutting strokes against shields, cavalry and unarmored opponents. Its design later lengthened into poleaxes and halberds.

The goedendag combined a club with a spear in a wooden staff roughly 90 to 150 centimeters long with a metal spike set in the widened end. Flemish city guildsmen used it to great effect against French knights at the Battle of the Golden Spurs near Kortrijk on 11 July 1302, and it appears in carvings on the Courtrai Chest.

The morning star is a medieval club-like weapon with a spiked ball mounted directly on a shaft, combining blunt impact with puncture wounds. It came into widespread use around the start of the fourteenth century and is especially associated with Germany, where it was called the Morgenstern. It is often confused with the flail, whose head hangs on a chain.

Mons Meg is a bombard, a large medieval siege cannon, built in 1449 on the orders of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and sent to James II of Scotland in 1454. Its bore is about 510 millimeters and it fired stone shot weighing around 175 kilograms. Its barrel burst in 1680, and after decades in the Tower of London it was returned to Edinburgh Castle in 1829.