least twelve inches long, and bound with iron like the halbard, which was shorter, to at least the middle of the staff. The black bills were also shorter and from Germany, but the best halbards were Milanese. The partisan with us seems to have been more a weapon of parade, various in form, with or without wings, and richly decorated with engraving, painting, and gilding. The pike was eighteen to twenty-two feet long, with a tassel to prevent the water running down. The "Staves" in the Tower under Henry VIII. included 20,100 morris pikes, some highly decorated, and 2000 javelins, mostly richly mounted, as if for the Court guards. The army taken to France in 1513 comprised, according to the Venetian ambassador, 6000 halbardiers and 12,000 men with holy-water sprinklers, a weapon never seen before, six feet long, surmounted by a ball with six steel spikes. The name was a quaint joke, like the Flemish Godendag or the Swiss Wasistdas and Morgenstern. Besides these there were tridents, pole-axes, collen cleves, boar-spears, rawcons, partisans, and other forms of staff weapons in smaller quantities. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--Profile of the helmet belonging to the French suit (Fig. 32). In the guard-chamber of Windsor Castle.] An English army sometimes comprised light cavalry even in the earliest times, perhaps none more singular than a miserably-accoutred force of mounted Irish armed with target, short javelin, and great outlandish knives, but without using saddles, in the reign of Henry V. The army of Henry VIII. in 1513 comprised 9000 to 10,000 heavy barbed cavalry and 8000 light horse, and 2000 mounted archers. His "Retinewe of speres" comprised a page, a cushet with javelin or demi-lance, and two archers, all mounted, to each man-at-arms. An English force of about 400 demi-lances serving Henri II. in 1552 "for their pleasure," were in short petticoats, red bonnets, body with brassarts of plate, and high leather boots above the knee, mounted on swift little horses and armed with a lance like a demi-pike. The infantry, though not yet a permanent standing force, except in the case of the Royal bodyguards, was now a recognised arm into which men enlisted as a professional career for the term of their lives or until disabled. To handle the pike or arquebus efficiently required long training, and veterans were always accepted before recruits. It was their steadiness and power of manoeuvring in action that lessened the value of heavy cavalry, and consequently contributed, more than any other circumstance, to the rapid disuse of the cap-à-pied suit of armour in the field, so noticeable in the next chapter. V _The Age of Enriched Armour_