The sword may be the soul of the warrior, but for much of history such a weapon was out of reach for the common soldier—himself often a non-professional that spent the majority of his time farming or pursuing a trade. The span of the Dark Ages and the Early Middle Ages, stretching from the decline of the Western Roman Empire to the First Crusade (circa AD 500-1100) is marked by a military technology and methodology different from previous and subsequent eras. Gone was the time of the professional, state-sponsored soldier typified by Rome at its peak, while the age of the mounted knight with his finely made weapons and armor of high-quality steel lay centuries in the future. The Viking Age (circa AD 700-1000) was the era of the foot soldier, sometimes an experienced professional raider like the Vikings of the Great Army (9th century), but more often than not a common man who understood war as yet one more duty—or opportunity—in a life of obligations.

The weapons of this period are as likely to be found in a farmhouse as on a battlefield, and are characterized by their usefulness in day-to-day life—the axe for cutting wood, the spear and bow for hunting, and the single-edged knife for everything from household work to butchering animals to eating. Unlike the sword, these weapons are not solely for use in war, and would be the kinds of things a village blacksmith could make easily and relatively cheaply. These weapons are of simple construction, require less iron and less specialized skill to forge than a sword, and were much more common as a result.

Until the rise of gunpowder, the spear was humanity’s ubiquitous weapon. In all eras and places its simple design and usefulness made it the clear choice for equipping masses of men. It required neither the offensive-mindedness of the axe nor the training of the sword to be effective, and was an excellent weapon in the hands of an unskilled or part-time warrior because it kept the enemy at a distance. A further benefit to morale and battlefield effectiveness was the spear’s narrow frontage, which allowed men to fight shoulder-to-shoulder in a protected, compact formation.

The socketed head of the spear could be easily created by a blacksmith, and the five to ten foot shaft (most often of ash) procured by the warrior himself. Spearheads of this time came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with long and narrow blades being predominant. Spearheads were typically lozenge-shaped, with a thick central rib and sharply tapering sides. Unusual variations—such as the ‘winged spears’ first used by the Carolingian franks to catch shields and armor, and the broad-bladed cutting spears found in Scandinavia—foreshadow the proliferation of cutting, stabbing, and ensnaring polearms that would arise in Medieval Europe.

Almost as common as the foot soldier’s thrusting spear were the short spears and javelins used by most peoples of the Viking Age, from the poor Irish kern to the wealthy Viking sea-raider. Thrown weapons of this kind were a commonplace for Germanic tribal warriors of the preceding era—as well as that of their paramount enemy, the pilum-throwing roman legionnaire—and such weapons were capable of piercing shields, leather, and linked mail armors. The effectiveness of piercing weapons, and the range advantages of both thrusting and throwing variants of the spear, meant that these weapons were used by warriors of all walks of life—from the humble slave to the King and his retainers.

The axe is the weapon most associated with the Viking raider, whether it be the long broadaxe (or ‘Danish axe’), or smaller axes designed for one-handed use or balanced for throwing. Found in every household and made by every smith, the axe would feel familiar in the hand of anyone living in a forested land such as Scandinavia. The poorest of warriors could always bring his farm-axe to battle, but superior designs for use on the battlefield made for better weapons. Contrary to common belief, the war axe was a light, fast, and well-balanced weapon, though one requiring an aggressive style because of its extreme forward weight. But this forward weight, the concentration of mass behind the striking edge of the axe blade, made for a weapon capable of crushing bone through mail, splintering and catching shields, and killing or incapacitating even a helmeted man with a blow to the head. Long axes were often used to strike downward upon the enemy in the tightly packed ranks of a shieldwall battle, and ‘bearded’ axes (so called because their blades projected downward into a flange) were useful to catch an opponent’s shield, weapon, or clothing and disarm him or pull him off balance.

The axe became the symbol of the elite Varangian Guard of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. For centuries, Swedes and other Norseman comprised this semi-mercenary body of soldiers, which made its mark on numerous battles throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. But perhaps the pinnacle of the Dark Age axe was the Danish Bearded-Axe used by the Saxon Huscarls, the elite household troops of the Anglo-Saxon Kings that emerged in the hybrid Saxon-Scandinavian society of the English Danelaw. This massive weapon was as tall as a man, and it is surmised that the huscarls trained to use it in an open-stance, left-handed style so that its strike would come at an enemy’s unshielded side. This weapon was said to be lethal against both armored men and horses at the Battle of Hastings (1066).

Many of the Germanic tribes of the Age of Migration (circa AD 400-600) took their name from a particular, favored weapon. The Franks were named for their ubiquitous throwing axe, the francisca, the Lombards (Langobards, meaning ‘long beards’) that settled in Northern Italy were named for their bearded axes, and the Saxons of Frisia owed their name to the heavy, single-edged knives called saxes.

The sax (also seax, scramasax) became a favorite in the British Isles, both with the descendants of the original Saxon conquerors of England, and the Norse settlers that came to occupy the region starting in the 9th century.

The sax ranged from three to thirty inches or more in length. The smaller versions of it were used more as a utility knife while longer blades were used for heavier tasks (as one might use a machete) and, of course, for warfare. The sax has a straight blade, its unsharpened side slanting abruptly to a point at around two-thirds of its length. The more extreme tapers of this kind are called ‘broken back’ saxes. Most saxes were not of the same quality steel as a pattern-welded sword of this era, and hence tended to be thicker and heavier. Carried in a sheath on the belt, the sax made an excellent weapon of last resort on the battlefield. Some longer versions of this weapon were hilted as swords, and used in the same way, and may have even been constructed along similar lines. Many beautifully inlaid saxes survive from the Dark Ages, and demonstrate that it was a weapon favored by commoner and noble alike. Indeed, in many Dark Age societies the carrying of a knife or other weapon denoted a man’s free status, and would have been a universal mark of one’s social rank.

The bow would have been a familiar weapon to anyone living close to the land in this period, as well as for those of warrior societies. Used in everything from raids, ship-to-ship fighting, and pitched battles, the bow was the most effective ranged weapon of the Viking Age. Most European bows of this period were constructed of a single piece of ash, yew, or elm, and were similar in make to the famous English (originally Welsh) Longbow of the succeeding era. Bowmen were used either to skirmish at the opening of an engagement alongside other missiles (javelins, axes, slingstones), or positioned to fire indirectly over the heads of their comrades at the rear of a battle. A variety of heads and arrow types were employed, including incendiaries for use against buildings, as well as barbed and piercing arrows.

One of the primary functions of missile weapons in pitched battles was to disrupt the closely packed ranks of a shieldwall formation and make it more vulnerable to frontal assault. William the Conqueror famously used his massed archers to do just that at Hastings in 1066 against a solid formation of Saxon infantry. Fresh from a victory in the north against an invading Norwegian army under Harald Hardrada, Harold Godwinson’s Anglo-Saxon force was perhaps the finest infantry army of the era, an exemplar of the methodologies of the Viking Age. But William’s Normans (themselves but a few generations removed from Viking settlers in northern France—’Norman’ literally means north man) represented something new. It was at Hastings that the Viking Age culminated in a new battlefield synthesis with the effective deployment of what would prove to be the dominant weapon system of the coming era—the armored shock cavalrymen. With the rise of the medieval knight the importance of the amateur infantryman would decline until the Hundred Years War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the weapons and armor of the Dark Ages would undergo a rapid evolution.