[safisher]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

You effectively pointed to a whole shelf or a whole library of books and claimed the evidence was in there. IT would be more useful if you could at least point to a book, chapter or page.

So it's still evidence you need? (Since I was on my phone, I didn't feel the need to drill down the to the html level.) Very well.

I would suggest you review the fighting books of Camillo Agrippa, Di Grassi, Talhoffer. Most of these manuals will include pole weapon fighting, and many of them will include illustrations of men in armor fighting with these weapons. You tend to see something like this:
http://selohaar.org/VeritasSwordplayAcademy/index.htm

You will also find them using the hammer version:
https://talhoffer.files.wordpress.co...07/falkner.jpg

Isn't it weird that even a blunt weapon is being swung against armor to which it is impenetrable?

Again, I suspect the idea outside of tournaments was to batter your foe, knock down or knock away his weapons, and give a killing blow. That blow could be with the spike, or it could be with hammer or axe blade. They are all there for a reason.

The weapon stats in Martial Arts depict a fearsome SW+4 cut. That beats a lot of low-tech armor, and even the fighting style in Martial Arts suggests that you'd need heavy armor to resist their attacks.

As you should know, being one of the authors of Low Tech the halberd has two other damage types modes in addition to sw/cut.

Co-author of High-Tech, and yes a contributor to Low-tech, I was lead playtester on the the first one, actually.

But the quote certainly makes clear they used the swing cut. You can't seriously be claiming the halberdiers didn't use the edge, can you? I whole unit of guys with massive two-handed axes, and no one strikes with them?

Also the quote you supplied mentions mail armor, while the subject of this thread seems to be plate armor.

The rules apply to armor, and certainly some of those knights were in mail, and some were in plate, as could suspect in transitional harness (Dan Howard covers this in some detail in the French Chevalier in his loadout book). (And it sorta stretches the imagination a bit that the vanguard of duke's army is not armored knights.)

From the dissertation I cited earlier:

John of Winterthur described the appeal of the halberd when he explained what Duke Leopold was up against at Morgarten. He writes: “Also the Swiss have in their hands death weapons, which have been called in popular speech ‘Helnbarten,’ and are very frightful. These slice like a razor and slash into pieces such strongly armed opponents.”

Razor, slash. Hmm.

And just the next paragraph, it says:

"So, the iron halberd was the first versatile pole-weapon that put the foot soldier at a distinct advantage over the knight: it could crack through armor. An expressly offensive weapon, its value, then, was that it significantly decreased the protective appeal of plate armor. While it also left the halberdier vulnerable—it had to be carried with both hands, so those who wielded it had to give up the shield—its effectiveness was apparently worth it, especially for footsoldiers like the Swiss, who were lightly armed
anyway."

Now, I've given you primary source material and illustrations, and a doctoral thesis. Please do not tell me that I have not provided evidence that swing cutting weapons were used on the battlefield against plate armor.