Axe Question

[Interested Party]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

However somewhere along the line about 400 years ago people started to call it a "pole axe", as if it were named thus because it was an axe on a pole. Language changes over time and sometimes original understandings of words are lost.

I discovered that a poll axe was a very sophisticated medieval weapon. Nothing to do with ordinary axes as tools at all.

Then there is the "poll axe" that was used to kill animals in an abattoir.

In order:

The term, and language in general, was static in the Appalachian mountains of the US. It was still used to mean an ax with a weighted butt when I was a kid.

I always understood the weapon to be a pole ax due to the length of the handle rather than the counter weighted cutting edge.

The poll of a normal ax was used to kill animals when bullets were considered too expensive. The animals were moved into a narrow enclosure. A person straddled this enclosure standing on the fence and swung downward onto the forehead of the animal. This always baffled me as a kid that the bitt wasn't used. I didn't understand how brain trauma worked at that age.


I gueess I always had a soft spot for axes as well.