Seventeenth-century infantry consisted largely of pikemen and musketeers. By the 1640s the pikemen's main weapon was 18 feet (5.48 metres) long in theory, but often shorter in practice, for soldiers sometimes cut off a foot or two to make it more manageable. They also carried a sword, though this was generally of poor quality. At the beginning of the century pikemen wore a rimmed helmet (‘pikeman's pot’), breast- and back-plate, and articulated tassets covering the thighs, but armour was discarded as the century went on. The pikemen of the New Model Army seem not to have worn body armour, and Sir James Turner reported that in 1671 pikemen were ‘naked’—that is, unarmoured—everywhere save in the Netherlands.
The pike was at first regarded as a more honourable weapon than the musket. Shakespeare's character Pistol asks the disguised Henry V who he is. ‘I am a gentleman of a company, ’ replies the king. ‘Trailst thou the puissant pike?’ asks Pistol. ‘Even so’, is the reply. It required greater physical strength than the musket, so the sturdiest soldiers became pikemen. An index of the determination of infantry was their preparedness to come ‘to push of pike’. Cromwell wrote that at Worcester (1651) ‘the dispute was very long, and very near at hand, and often at push of pike’.
The proportion of pikemen to musketeers shrank steadily. Early in the century there were perhaps two pikemen to one musketeer. This ratio was reversed by the time the English civil wars broke out in 1642 (see British civil wars), and by 1691 English regiments that left Ireland for Flanders had only fourteen pikemen per company, less than a quarter of their strength. The 17th-century soldier Sir James Turner had already complained that there was ‘an universal contempt for the pike’. Although the pike was effectively rendered redundant by the invention of the bayonet which, in effect, made every musketeer his own pikeman, it lingered on well into the 18th century, and Saxe retained a lasting affection for it.
Pikemen made an occasional reappearance in armies denied more potent weaponry. A participant in the Irish rebellion of 1798 recorded that ‘Every man had a fire-arm of some sort, or a pike. The latter weapon was easily had at the time, as almost every blacksmith was a United Irishman.’ In 1940 many members of the British Home Guard carried pikes, often made from bayonets attached to poles.
— Richard Holmes
