Description:
Sergeant's halberd with a small, tapered steel spear blade with six small holes along the edges; over a curved, pierced steel head typical of New England with its openwork decoration of scrolls, crosses, and diamonds; and long wooden handle painted brown with a tapered iron tip. It retains a good amount of its original paint. This kind of halberd was not intended to be used in combat but in some cases parade armor was used for defense. This halberd came from a Sheldon descendent, Mrs. Hazel Sheldon Martin of Greenfield, Massachusetts (see 2766 and 2766A); however, it is not clear from 1952 correspondence between Henry N. Flynt and Mrs. Martin in the object file if this was a Sheldon family piece. Flynt mentions going "up into the attic of that wonderful old house and make available to me some of the nice things that have an association with Deerfield." The halberd, a weapon mentioned in the records of almost every colony, was a type of polearm (a lineal descendent of various forms of lances used during the Middle Ages) with an axehead balanced by a beak or fluke and topped with a sharp point; the flat, steel cross piece could be either pointed at both ends or have a cutting edge at one end and a bent point at the other. There is a record of halberds being used in combat during the Pequot War (1635-1637) in New England; the Massachusetts Bay settlers brought three halberds for their sergeants, and later the governor's guard of Massachusetts carried halberds. Polearms were also carried by footmen accompanying governors on ceremonial occasions. Polearms as weapons had been virtually abandoned by most European armies by the American Revolution; the halberd, pike, and spoontoon were replaced by the fusil and bayonet although halberds and spontoons were still carried as symbols of rank and in ceremonies. In early British regiments, the officers carried spontoons; the halberd was the symbol of a sergeant in most European armies; and the pike was the enlisted man's pole arm. England officially abolished the halberd in 1791, the spontoon in 1786, and the pike around 1700. Neither American-made halberds nor spontoons followed any uniform style, and many were copied from the British. George Washington considered polearms effective weapons; in 1778, a council of Washington's brigade commanders developed official standards requiring that spontoons have a 6 foot staff with a 1 foot iron section. The American army also ordered large quantities of pikes which were probably used as trench spears to defend fortifications.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+53.017 |
