Page "Pole weapon" Paragraph 5

Staff-weapons in Medieval or Renaissance England were lumped together under the generic term " staves " but when dealing with them in detail we are faced with terminological difficulty.

There never seems to have been a clear definition of what was what ; there were apparently far fewer staff-weapons in use than there were names to call them by ; and contemporary writers up to the seventeenth century use these names with abandon, calling different weapons by the same name and similar weapons by different names.

To add to this, we have various nineteenth century terminologies used by scholars.

We must remember too that any particular weapon ... had everywhere a different name.