Morning star (weapon)

The second and much simpler type would have been hand-cut by peasant militia men, rather than turned on a lathe, from wood they had gathered themselves and fitted with nails and spikes by the local blacksmith.

The third type was decorative in nature, usually short-hafted and made of metal, one sixteenth century example being of steel and damascened with inlaid gold and silver, in the Wallace Collection of London.

[4] The holy water sprinkler (from its resemblance to the aspergillum used in the Catholic Mass), was a morning star used by the English army in the sixteenth century and made in series by professional smiths.

The head is a separate wooden cylinder slipped over the top of the shaft and reinforced with steel bands, with five metal spikes in symmetrical arrangement.

The second example has an all-steel head of complex craftsmanship with four V-shaped spikes mounted on a long shaft that measures slightly less than two metres in length.

In the poem Le Chevalier Délibéré written by Olivier de la Marche and first published in 1486, there is an anonymous woodcut depicting a knight carrying a rather simple morning star with spikes mounted in an asymmetrical pattern as well as a flail equipped with a single spiked ball, known in German as a "Kettenmorgenstern" (literally chain-morning star) which is technically a military flail.

The weapon was used to great effect by the guildsmen of Flanders' wealthy cities against the French knights during the Guldensporenslag or Battle of the Golden Spurs near Kortrijk (Courtrai) on 11 July 1302; however, on account of superior but more expensive alternatives, it saw limited service from the fifteenth century on, being used exclusively by the Flemish burghers.