‘A DESPERAT WEPON’: RE-HAFTED SCYTHES AT SEDGEMOOR, IN WARFARE AND AT THE TOWER OF LONDON

The Royal Armouries possesses two scythe blades of pre-mechanised manufacture, mounted axially on straight hafts to form weapons. An inventory of 1686 lists eighty-one scythe blades at the Tower of London (by 1694 described as booty captured from the Duke of Monmouth’s rebels at Sedgemoor) and the surviving pair was probably among them. The Duke’s shortage of standard-issue equipment made improvisation essential, and the choice of re-hafted scythe blades owed to their widespread, well known and effective use by irregular forces in Britain and Europe since the late Middle Ages. Monmouth’s ‘sithmen’, some hundreds strong, took part in skirmishes and in the battle of Sedgemoor itself. Of interest to the Tower authorities as curiosities and for their propaganda value, the scythe blades were displayed, in diminishing numbers, from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century, and these two until the 1990s. In the future they will be displayed again, representing Monmouth’s rebels and countless others, and a weapon type that deserves a greater level of study and recognition.


INTRODUCTION
Over recent decades most major museums have published their 'Hundred Treasures', 'Director's Choice', or similar items in the genre. The Royal Armouries, which published Treasures from the Tower of London to accompany an exhibition in  and is soon to produce a similar title, is no exception.  Selecting the 'treasures' was an interesting process, highlighting the variety of reasons for which an item might make the grade. In the case of the Royal Armouries, the parlance of heritage management was borrowed to assess the degree to which an asset might possess an agreed set of 'values' that, when added up, could quantify that asset's overall 'significance'.  These values go beyond the obvious typological, technological and artistic attributes of an object (or class of objects) to embrace those derived from that object's association with past events and people, its impact on history and society, and its importance to particular communities or causes. Such objects may therefore have few intrinsic qualities as artefacts, while having a significance rooted in broad or particular aspects of history, human endeavour or experience in which they played a part or whose nature they illustrate.
Firmly in this category are the Royal Armouries' two worn and battered scythe blades (fig ), adapted and re-hafted to form the business ends of staff weapons for the Duke of Monmouth's rebels in , and picked up by the victors at Sedgemoor.  Of plausibly seventeenth-century origin, there is little reason to doubt that these were among the eighty-one 'scith blades' recorded at the Tower in ,  and which were, by , described as spoils from the battle.  Crudely improvised, perhaps mere days before their capture, they recall the forlornness of Monmouth's venture, are embedded in the popular image of Sedgemoor and have featured in its representation by artists (fig ), historians and novelists ever since.  On a broader scale, they recall innumerable encounters in many countries over many centuries, in which desperate men with makeshift arms fought powers and professionals they could rarely hope to beat.
The general aims of this article, therefore, include calling attention to such struggles, parallel to but rarely included in the mainstream study of warfare, and of a specific but widely used weapon type that has received almost no attention from historians of arms  ). The artist shows the improvised nature of the weapon, the blade lashed to a crudely dressed sapling. Image: Tate/Digital Image © Tate, London .
'A DESPERAT WEPON'  and armour;  pursuing the subject, meanwhile, has been encouraged by the renewed interest in Monmouth following the appearance of Anna Keay's  biography,  the objects' brief appearance in a recent exhibition at the Tower  and the discovery of a so-far unpublished account of Sedgemoor, rich in information on the 'sithers', written in - by John Taylor, a Royalist volunteer.  A critical edition of the text by Professor John Childs, which has done much to inform this article, is published in conjunction with it.  More specifically, what follows starts with a description of the Royal Armouries' items, their manufacture and date, then examines the quantity and type of Monmouth's conventional armaments, his need to improvise and the methods of procuring and converting the blades, and is followed by some discussion of how the 'sithemen'  were deployed in the campaign and at Sedgemoor. The article also briefly examines the military use of re-hafted scythe blades in Britain and Western Europe from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century and their effectiveness. A final section summarises the history of the storage, display and description of Monmouth's scythes at the Tower of London since .

SCYTHE BLADES AT THE ROYAL ARMOURIES
The Royal Armouries possesses four weapons incorporating scythe blades. Two of these (VII. and VII.) were created in the nineteenth century for display purposes and have been on view since  in the Hall of Steel in Leeds.  These relate only loosely to this article, which centres on the other two: VII. and VII..
The first is a complete 'crown' blade, forged from a bar of wrought iron with a cutting edge of steel  (as opposed to the riveted or 'patent' form introduced in the have come from specialist water-powered workshops in Worcestershire or Sheffield, active since the fourteenth century, but whether their products had reached Somerset by the s is unknown. 

MONMOUTH'S WEAPONS
The story of James, Duke of Monmouth (-) and his rebellion has been told many times.  For present purposes it is enough to recall that he was the illegitimate but protestant son of Charles II and Lucy Walter, and was persuaded by a number of disaffected parties in the spring of , while in exile in Holland, to rebel against his newly succeeded and catholic uncle, James II.  Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis on  June   with a supply of arms and armour borne by two small cargo vessels (one 'commanded' by Mr James Hayes)  and eighty-two men, mostly aboard the Helderenberg, a -gun fifth-rate under Cornelius Abraham van Brakell.  Attracting at his high point up to , recruits,  the duke scored some initial successes, but the rebels were crushingly defeated by the royal army at Sedgemoor on  July and the duke was captured forty-eight hours later.  He was executed on Tower Hill on  July, about  of his followers elsewhere,  and a further  were transported during and after the Bloody Assizes.  While it is often said that the rebellion was foredoomed, Monmouth had some gifts as a leader, a good military record  and had previously, as Captain General of the Army in , prepared at least one detailed and costed list of equipment for a seaborne expeditionary force.  As such, although short of time and money, he took an informed interest in munitions and supplies, exercised through the agency of Nathaniel Wade, a Bristol lawyer-turnedsoldier.  According to Wade, in May , the duke went to Rotterdam to raise money and in the meantime left orders : : : to provide two small ships and about  foot arms,  Curasses,  Pieces of Artillery mounted on field carriages,  as I take it barrels of Gunpowder with some small quantity of Granado shells match and other things necessary for the undertaking : : :  . Rowlands , -; Cope , ; Hey , , -. . Keay , . . Clifton , -, ; Keay , -. . This date and all others are given in Old Style, that is, as recorded at the time, according to the Julian calendar. To convert to New Style (Gregorian), add ten days. The two ships and material were 'provided' at a cost of 'near £'presumably purchasedalthough the crews were Dutch;  the use of the Helderenberg, chartered after learning that 'several of the King's men of war were on the Coast', cost Monmouth an additional sum of about £,.  The small ships were subsequently captured off Lyme on  June by Captain Richard Trevanion RN of the Saudadoes,  and the Helderenberg seized at St Ives, en route for Spain, probably on  or  June.  She was commissioned into the Royal Navy in , but sank two years later after a collision.  A second account of the equipment procured in Holland, by Lord Grey, Monmouth's co-conspirator and cavalry commander, appeared in his Secret History of the Rye House Plot and Monmouth's Rebellion, written in  at the king's request, although published only in .  According to this the preparations : : : were as follows,  suits of defensive arms;  musquets and bandaliers;  pikes; as many swords;  barrels of powder, besides what was provided for the frigate; a small number of double carabins and pistols, the quantity of them I cannot remember: our frigate carried two and thirty guns, and we had besides four small field-pieces.  The lists are, with one proviso, usefully complementary. Wade's account can be taken to mean that foot arms were bought for , infantry, while the , 'Curasses'by  long discarded by pikemen and hardly ever worn by musketeerswere intended for cavalry, who then still wore breast, back and pot  (known then and now as 'harquebusiers' armour'), as Monmouth and Grey did themselves.   How much of the imported armour was actually used is another issue; as we know that only ' horse'  marched out of Lyme, and given that carts were in short supply, most of it was probably left behind. The report by the Royalist gunner Edward Dummer that, on arrival at Lyme on  June, he found 'Back and Breast and Head pieces for betwn.  & ' in the town  supports this, although the mismatch between his figure and Wade's, as well as that of , is best explained as an exaggeration.
Armour, though, was less important than weapons. From Grey's account we learn that the cavalry was supplied with a number of pairs of pistols and carbines (that is, shortbarrelled, snaphaunce muskets), and that the foot arms included standard-issue weapons for pikemen (swords and pikes) to the number of . Grey's account, however, is at first sight puzzling in noting only  muskets, but, as John Tincey has suggested,  it would make much more sense if the figure were a misprint for , (it appears at the end of the line), in which case Wade's purchase would have equipped , men according to the standard proportion of : musketeers to pikemen. This also tallies with the c £, budget, as at a rough estimate the muskets, swords, pikes and armour would have cost about £,, leaving a plausible £ to cover the cannon, cavalry arms and the two smaller ships.  As Wade tells us, this equipment was mostly successfully unloaded, although forty barrels of powder were left behind on the transports:  Our Company was by the Duke divided into  parts,  thirds whereof were appointed to guard the Avenues of the Towne. The remaining third was to gett the arms & amunition from on board the ships my part of it was to gett the  peices and the armour a late th-century cuirassier's harness. The helmet at least belonged to 'Mr Cosway of the Royal Academy' (presumably Richard Cosway RA, -). Whether these actually had any Monmouth connection is questionable at best. . BL, Lansdowne , fol r. . TNA: PRO, WO /, . Partly quoted by Ede-Borrett , . . 'An anonymous account printed in The Bloody Assizes, reproduced in Chandler , . . BL, Add MS ,, ; the date in the MS is  June. Reproduced in Chandler , . . Tincey , . . Grose cites prices for Civil War period muskets @ s d (, ), pikes @ £ s d (, ; corrected to s d in the  edn) and 'Footmans' armour (breast, back, tassets, helmet, gorget) @ £ s (, ). Walton (, ) gives the  price of a foot sword at s d and s d, and of a Pikeman's sword in  at s (, ). Everett-Green (, vol , - Jan , item  ( Jan)) prices muskets at s d and pikes at s d apiece. Scott (, ) gives the price of a foot sword in  at s, of back, breast and pot in the s at s d and of a pike in  at s d. . Charnock -, vol , -. Charnock's account has Trevanion capturing 'two transports on which he found forty barrels of powder'.


THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL of Canon on shoare and see them mounted which I performed by break of day having good assistance of mariners and townsmen.  Additional muskets and powder were seized in Lyme, on the day of landing, from the town arsenal.  The cannon were probably three-pounder 'minions',  although as shot have been found on the battlefield of lb oz and oz  (the second of which would have fitted a ½ inch 'robinet'  ), which could not have been fired by the other side, they may have been of mixed gauges.
The expectation was, however, that the recruits to Monmouth's army would themselves provide far more weapons than he could bring, as Monmouth had been assured by his unreliable accomplice John Wildman and the spy Robert Cragg earlier in the year.  But this was not to be, largely thanks to the absence of gentry volunteers. Nevertheless, other means of acquiring conventional weapons enjoyed some success. On at least one occasion ( June) equipment was taken from the Somerset militia, whose retreat, Wade tells us, 'was little better than a flight, many of the souldiers coats and arms being recovered & brought in to us'.  Mr Williams's deposition of  July  mentions that 'severall of the militia of dorset and somerset came in with their arms',  and other militia weapons were seized from their stores, as at Taunton on  June.  Arms were also seized from ordinary houses, as revealed for example at the trial of Matthew Bragge, who had led a party to a catholic household for this purpose.  Great houses, likely to house sporting guns and sometimes militia equipment, might have offered richer pickings, but these seem to have attracted little more than threats, and on only one recorded occasion, on  June, Thomas Allen, steward at Longleat, reported to Lord Weymouth his fears of 'a summons for horses and armes', and that John Kidd, a former estate servant,  knowing 'what armes were heretofore in the house : : : will break down your house to find them and may be fire it'. In the event Kidd stayed away and Longleat was spared the loss of the ' case of pistols


: : :  muskets, some old birding pieces,  pikes,  halberds, and  sutes of armor' to be found there.  On  July, at Bridgwater, it seems Monmouth was offered (bizarrely, by none other than the brother of the Master Gunner of England) 'a Machine, which would discharge many Barrels of Musquets at once : : : to be play'd at several Passes [ie in defence of the town] instead of Cannon', that is, an 'organ gun', a row of musket barrels fixed to a frame and which could be fired almost simultaneously.  Monmouth refused the offer, but may yet have had one, if not used at Sedgemoor, as the Tower inventory of - lists an 'Engine of  Musq't Barrells: taken from the late Duke of Monmouth', valued at £.  The fact remained, however, that Monmouth was woefully short of proper weapons. The rebel author of the 'Anonymous Account' of , probably Colonel Venner,  lamented that the duke's decision not to engage Albemarle and the Devon Militia on  June 'in the end proved fatal to us, for had we but followed them we had had all their arms', they would have driven all before them and been at Exeter in two days.  Andrew Paschall, the loyalist and politically minded rector of Chedzoy, observed that 'on Sunday  June, he [Monmouth] marched into Bridgwater with about , menarmed about ,, unarmed about ,'.  It was observed of Monmouth's troops by Sir Thomas Bridges on  June that of 'his men some [were] well armed, others indifferent, some not at all, only having an old sword or a sticke in their hande'.  The 'Anonymous Account' also notes that on the approach to Bridgwater ( June) 'we were now between four and five thousand men, and had we not wanted arms could have made above ten thousand';  on arrival at Frome on  June, 'we wanted nothing but arms',  but were disappointed that what might have been provided by the inhabitants had 'by a curious stratagem' been 'taken from them a few days before our entrance'.  Then, in relation to the  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL failure to take Bristol, the account notes that 'For had we but had arms, I am persuaded we had by this time/ had at least twenty thousand men. And it would not then have been difficult for us to have march'd for London'.  In his deposition of July , Richard Goodenough, Monmouth's paymaster, similarly lamented that 'If they had had , arms, they had had as many men, but brought onely  arms',  ruefully noting what they might otherwise have achieved. While his figures must be treated with caution, Taylor's account of Monmouth's forces on the eve of Sedgemoor tells us that Monmouth had, in addition to better-armed contingents and his 'sithears', ' foot more, some with Halberds, Prongs, bills & what they could gett', and, in addition to ' hors compleatly Armd', about ' hors more, which some had Arms & others none'.  Elsewhere, he describes the army as 'badly armed'.  The need for improvised weapons was therefore obvious and urgent.

SCYTHES IN WARFARE
Scythes have been used in Britain since at least the first century AD,  and, until the late nineteenth century, were the principal tools for mowing hay, barley, rye and oats, and from the eighteenth century, for wheat.  Scythes are used two-handed, standing up, using a rhythmic swinging motion, the blade slicing through the crop near the ground: they should not be confused with sickles, also used for reaping but held in one hand while the other grasps the stems, and which have narrow crescent-shaped blades. Scythes in their intended form can, at a pinch, be used as deadly weapons, as allegedly in the martyrdom of the unfortunate Saints Sidwell, Urith and Walstan by pagan reapers, and whose symbol is a scythe.  At a more factual level, they are known to have been presented as weapons, if not necessarily wielded, in unplanned stand-offs between various authorities and rural labourers, not least by reapers actually at work: examples include those at Wolsingham (Co. Durham) in an incident related to enclosure in ,  and one at Holme Fen (Cambridgeshire) in , related to drainage.  Such occasions cannot have been uncommon.
Unadapted scythes also appear in historic images of combat, such as that after Holbein of the German Peasants' war (-), Jacques Callot's Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre series of   and even a contemporary depiction of Sedgemoor ( fig ), although the draughtsmen may not have realised that the blades were usually re-hafted;  at least one  sixteenth-century author, Paulus Hector Mair, even produced instructions for their use in duelling, although whether actually practised is doubtful.  What may be an unadapted scythe is shown being used to cut a ship's rigging in a fifteenth-century tapestry at Berne.  However, a working scythe, with the blade fixed to the haft or 'snath' at an acute angle, while capable of making martyrs, is a very clumsy weapon. On the other hand, re-fixing the blade axially to (that is, in line with) a straight haft makes a weapon to be reckoned with. In several European languages the result was dignified by its own term, reflecting their widespread use; hence, for example, Kriegsennse, Sturmsense, faux de guerre, falce di guerra, boiova kosa (Ukrainian), boevaja kosa (Russian) and bojowe kosa (Polish)the English equivalent, 'war scythe', appeared only in the twentieth century, reflecting its relatively sparing use in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the term is more familiar to war-gaming enthusiasts than historians. Terms are important in identifying the use of re-hafted scythes in historical documents, but there are pitfalls: the French term fauchard or fauchon, for example, describing a variety of pole-arms with curved blades, is derived from faux, but only thanks to their loosely similar appearance, and not to the fauchard's real form or origins. Terms clearly confused people even in the Middle Ages, including, it seems, the draughtsman of the English Assize of Arms of  (discussed below).  The depiction of an unconverted scythe wielded by Perseus, in an early fifteenth-century illustration of Christine de Pisan's L'Épître à Othéa of c , probably owes to the artist's interpretation of her word fauchon.  To complicate matters further, a variety of purpose-made pole-arms with curved blades also resemble the re-hafted scythe and have a cutting edge on the inner or 'concave' side of the blade: the most obvious is the glaive, with a straight-backed but curved-edged hafted blade of -ft long, followed by the gisarme, with a rigid blade sharply curved towards the tip and spikes to the rear, and the many variants of the bill and the woodman's slasher. Consequently, terms alone in the Middle Ages and later cannot be relied upon to differentiate re-hafted scythes from superficially similar but quite different weapons. Modern historians, unfamiliar with scythes, weapons or either, sometimes describe a variety of pole-arms shown in medieval and later images as scythes, as they are apt to do with sickles.
Scythe blades could also, incidentally, be used to make a form of sword by straightening the tang and fitting a hilt: an example, supposedly owned Thomas Müntzner, leader of the German peasants in , is displayed in the Dresdner Rezidenzschloss; this is certainly a scythe blade with a straightened tang, although the eagle-headed brass hilt is seventeenth or eighteenth century and the object's real history before the late nineteenth century is unknown.  The 'Saxon's sword' at the Tower, described and illustrated in the s and s, may be another ( fig ).  Many agricultural, forestry and other tools can, of course, be used as or converted into weapons, notably the pitchfork and the threshing flail, both of which appear in descriptions and depictions of rebel actions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, including in the contemporary woodcut of Sedgemoor (see fig ); sickle blades could also be mounted on poles, if creating a weapon of dubious value. However, the abundance of scythes, used in both arable and pastoral farming, and the ease with which they could be converted prompted their particularly widespread use as weapons from the sixteenth century well into the twentieth. Although most commonly used by rebels and insurgents, they could also be issued to militia units or others attached to official forces: the municipal arsenals of Solothurn (Switzerland), for example, bought  Segessen (scythes) in ,  and the town council of Berne acquired large numbers in the seventeenth century;  the Royalist irregulars raised by Reverend James Wood against the rebels at Preston (), were 'armed partly with swords and pistols and guns and partly with scythes fixed to the end of a long stick',  and in  or  the garrison at Gibraltar was equipped with £-worth of 'upright scythes to defend the covered way or counterscarp'.  In , contingents of the Hungarian militia were, according to their commander, 'mostly armed with scythes'.  They were also used by Polish volunteer units raised by the regular army in  (discussed below).  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL Surprisingly, however, while routinely mentioned in secondary sources and fiction relating to the Middle Ages, hard evidence of use before about  has proved elusive.  Tantalisingly, the English Assize of Arms of  contains a reference to the falces with which men with land and goods worth less than £ were required to muster at the king's request, along with gisarmes (gysarmas), knives and 'other small arms',  but the meaning is unclear: while falx was used in classical and medieval Latin to mean 'scythe', it referred also to other tools, and its use here may be intended to include any kind of pole-arm, improvised or otherwise. In fact, the earliest reference to (what were presumably) re-hafted scythes found in preparing this article, in either Britain or Europe, is that of . This remains something of a puzzle, as, while scythes were less abundant before the Early Modern period, and would have been less effective against armoured soldiers than their cloth-clad successors, it is hard to believe that they were not used as weapons, for example (and as is routinely claimed in secondary literature) by the Hussites,  or in the Jacquerie of , in , by Cade, or in any of the hundreds of rural and provincial revolts of the period. Instances of earlier use will no doubt come to light.
As it stands, in a British context, the Sheffield 'scythes which had a most Keene edge', discovered with other arms in  en route to the Scottish rebels, are the earliest knownalthough, as applicable to the reference of , the inference is that these were weapons, or to be part of weapons, of an established type;  this is at least in keeping with a contemporary woodcut showing 'Prentises and Sea-men' assaulting Lambeth Palace in May , in which the re-hafted scythe held by at least one of them passes without comment in the lengthy caption.  The next mentions relate to occasions in the Irish rebellion of , one early in the year  and another later, during both of which the protestant refugees in two castles in Co. Cavan (Ireland) successfully attacked their Irish besiegers with 'scythes upon long poles'.  Instances followed in the English Civil Wars, including at Bradford in December ,  at Crowland  and Birmingham  in  and at Colchester in ,  and re-hafted scythes were also a favoured weapon of the civilian 'clubmen' Oates , . Oates (, ) cites an order regarding the mustering of loyalist volunteers before Preston: 'bring what arms they have fit for service, and scythes putt in straight polls and such as have not, to bring spades and billhooks for pioneering with'. Ryder (, ) states the rebels were armed 'partly with scythes fixed to the end of straight sticks'. . Oates ,  (citing Evening Post, , - Oct ), the men held 'firelocks, swords, halbersds, axes, scythes, forks and such weapons as they could get to make a proper defence'. . Oldmixon , : 'but the next day they came in greater Numbers, with Scythes, Reapinghooks, set in proper Handles, about two Yards long, large Clubs, and some Fire-Arms'. . As recorded in the memoirs of James Johnstone, known as the Chevalier de Johnstone On the Continent the deployment of such weapons was an all too normal practice for centuries, on the part of small bands and armies, in great campaigns and local revolts, and engagements from skirmishes to battles. Recorded sixteenth-century instances may be confined to the German Peasants' War of   and the revolt of the Pitauds (France, ),  but seventeenth-century ones are more numerous, including in the Austrian Jacquerie of ,  by the Ukrainians against the Poles at and after Berestechko in ,  by the Cossacks under Stepan Raziin in -,  and by the defenders of Mons in .  Eighteenth-century instances (other than those in Poland) include those in Bavaria in  (the Sendling massacre),  in the Pugachev rebellion of -,  in the Vendée in ,  and against the French near Berne in  (Breitenfeld and Grauholz).  The next century saw them used in preparation for the landward defence of Copenhagen in ,  near Kassel (Hesse) in a rising against the French of ,  by the Prussian Landsturm (militia) in ,  in the Peninsular War,  in the Vendée again in ,  and in both Hungary  and Baden in .  In  a manual for the use of the Swiss militia was published in Chur (Graubünden), illustrating scythemen, in uniform and out, and describing their usefulness and deployment.  In the twentieth centuryother than in Polandthey were used in the Spanish Civil War.  . Pole-mounted scythes were used at Frankenhausen (May ): Belfort-Max , . An example considered to be th-century is held in the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden (inv no. BAAQ ), as is a reproduction (BAAF ), described as 'a replica of a war scythe from the peasants war' (observed on site  May ). . Paradin , -: the men of Saintes, in revolt against the salt-tax were 'embattonez de harquebuzes, arbalestres, fourches de fer, picques & Faux, enmanchees à l'envers'. . Auguste Demmin (, ) noted that 'In Austria during the Jacquerie or peasants war [that is, -] all smiths detected converting agricultural implements into weapons were punished with death'. . Chevalier (, ) relates that after capturing a redoubt and its Polish garrison, the Ukrainians 'abbatirent les testes avec leur faux, armes dont leur infanterie se sert ordinairement au lieu de piques'. See Basilievsky , . . Anon , . The author is grateful to Sofia Piller for translating this passage. . The artilleryman Pierre Surirey de Saint-Rémy wrote in his Mémoires d'Artillerie (, vol , ) that, during Louis XIV's siege of Mons in , 'faux à revers' were used by the defenders 'with some success, but later they were thrown back with great losses, and a great quantity of these scythes were taken from them'. . Probst , two-page pl between pp. -, described at p.


But it was the Poles who made the most widespread use of re-hafted scythes, most famously at the battle of Raclawice in  and others of the same year,  and again in ,  ,  ,  and - (the 'January uprising').  Twentieth-century use may have begun in  in Austrian Poland, where both uniformed and peasant-clad nationalist volunteers were drilled in using the re-hafted scythe, and at least one illustrated manual was published, in , to instruct them.  The weapons were used again in anger in the s, but probably the final use of scythes in warfare on any scale, and perhaps the most heroic and forlorn of all, was in Eastern Pomerania in : on  September, in a manner reminiscent of Monmouth's action in , the Polish commander in Gdynia ordered the re-quisition and conversion of  scythes, augmenting an existing force of scythemen that soon numbered as many as ,. By  September, having seen much action and some tactical successes, they, along with regular forces in the province, inevitably succumbed to overwhelming German strength.  A result of all this was that scythemen (kosynierzy) became symbols of Polish nationhood, abundantly represented in art and literature in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The most famous manifestation is the spectacular Panorama of Raclawice, painted for the centenary of the battle and now at Wrocław, which gives a convincing, moving and terrifying impression of scythemen in action ( fig ); the re-hafted weapon, or at least the blade, appears on numerous nationalist emblems from the late nineteenth century onwards,  and the crossed blades, along with a  haft-end, two with tangs bent round to form sockets, and one flattened and pierced with three holes for rivets ( fig ). All twelve are thin-bladed, ground on the underside and have raised ridges at the rear, as with (bar the grinding) VII. and VII., although whether steel-edged or wholly of wrought iron is unclear. The blades are the survivors of up to fifty displayed there, 'many' still hafted, until , and have a traditional and part-recorded history of great interest.  A scythe blade with a straightened tang at Snowshill Manor (Gloucestershire), in the former collection of Charles Paget Wade (d. ), may be another, although the wear pattern suggests it may have been adapted for use in an improvised chaffcutter, or at least re-used as such.  As for those abroad, the Metropolitan Museum of Art formerly had two,  and the Philadelphia Museum of Art at least one,  but most, . Cat nos K ROB and K PEN. They are described as late th-century. The author is grateful to Olivier Renaudeau for this information. . Cat no. D.. The blade might, however, have been adapted from a hay knife. The author is grateful to Françoise Pineau for providing photographs. . Information provided by museum staff. The effectiveness of 'war scythes' is most obviously indicated by their widespread and enduring use, but is also illustrated by specific instances and recorded details. Among these is the gruesome death of a tax official in the Pitaud revolt, decapitated by a 'Faux emmanchée à l'envers',  and during the Irish rebellion of  mentioned above, when the Irish 'made such foul work and havoc amongst their enemies that such persons as were not cut to pieces, or mangled with these terrible weapons, were either taken prisoners or forced to run away'.  Taylor, although not at Sedgemoor,  but who can be assumed to have visited the battlefield on  or  July and spoken to survivors,  tells us that: for indeed these Sithes was a desperat Wepon, loping off at one Stroak, either head, or Arm, and I saw a man layinge among the dead, whose back was clove down, by Others from the same collection can be seen at Schloss Kyburg. . Ulrich Kinder, pers comm  Aug . There are at least twenty-six on display. They are on loan from the Swiss National Museum in Zürich and are said to date from the th century. These are sophisticated weapons, with purpose-made square sectioned hafts, to which the blades are fixed by fitting the flattened tang into a slot and fixing with two rings. In most case the blades have been ground to a point.  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL one struck of these Sithes, and a horse whose head at one strock, was almost separated from his body.  In a marginal note he adds that 'now that their orders was to cutt of the bridle arm, thereby the disable the riders, and defend themselfs, the which they to the last stoutely did'.  An eye-witness at Prestonpans observed similar effects: 'The MacGregor company with their pikes [re-hafted scythe blades] made most dreadful carnage' and 'cut in two the legs of horses, as well as the horsemen through the middle of the body'.  In the Vendée revolt of , Louis Brard, a participant in an engagement at Vrines (Poitou-Charentes), reported that the survivors of a scythe assault 'were missing limbs, had horrible gashes, with shreds of flesh falling from their bodies'.  At Raclawice, Kościusko's own account of the battle explains that the Russian battery had time to fire only two rounds before 'together [our] pikes, scythes and bayonets broke the infantry, overcame the cannons and took apart the column in such a way that the enemy cast aside his weapon and ammunition pouch as he fled' (see fig ).  Aigner (see below), while himself not a front line combatant, asks in his Manual, 'who will not admit that scythes are a terrifying weapon in the hand of our Peasants fighting for property, liberty?' He further explains that: The scythe terrifies the horse with its brightness, and thereby slows the momentum of the cavalry; it puts to the cavalryman a weapon more terrifying than a sword and inflicts mortal blows upon him. This I have from mouths worthy of belief, as in the camp of the commander-in-chief of the armed force are found peasants who so nimbly and swiftly put scythes to the cossacks that their heads flew off in the blink of an eye.  A report of Lublin in  similarly observes that, cornered by the Russian cavalry, Some of the insurgents tried to defend themselves; and, with sharp scythes which were their chief weapons, inflicted frightful gashes upon the men and horses : : : Many of the mangled horses were to be seen, having lost their riders, galloping about with their entrails hanging out.  This account is a reminder of the effectiveness of scythemen, in particular, against cavalry, horses' bellies and sinews being very vulnerable to their long sharp blades; hints that this was well understood are to be found in a number of sources, including in the incidents at Bradford in  (mentioned above), where Sir John Gothericke 'had his horse killed with  a syth',  'our sythes and clubs now and then reaching them, and none else did they aime at'  and when the Parliamentarian musketeers fired on their counterparts, the scythemen 'fell upon their horse', the aim being their 'scattering'.  Their actual effect could be enhanced by their psychological impact, not least on professional soldiers confronting a weapon of unknown capability and against which no drill had been devised, possibly heightened by the image of the scythe-bearing 'Grim Reaper', of biblical origin, depicted in increasingly familiar form since the fourteenth century.  As noted at Colchester in , the 'sythes, straightened and fastened to handles, about six foote long' were 'weapons which the enemie strongly apprehended, but rather of terror than use'.  In a similar vein, Monmouth's 'sithes' were indignantly described by the Royalist drummer Adam Wheeler as 'cruell and new invented murthering weapons',  and by Taylor as 'Strang and Unheard of'.  John Oldmixon, a twelveyear-old witness to the battle, was convinced of both their practical and psychological effect: had Monmouth's battle plan succeeded, he later wrote, 'the soldiers : : : asleep in their Tents : : : might have been cut to pieces by the Scythemen, of which the Duke had , [and] the Terror of the Weapon unleashed on the sleeping royal army [would have] added to the Slaughter and Horror of the Night' and 'given the rest of the Duke's forces an easy Victory'.  In a similar vein, in  it was noted that Vendéens, attacking a battery, 'avec leurs faux et leurs fourches : : : écharpaient les artilleurs frappé de stupeur,'  while another contemporary, noting the peasants' use of 'faulx emanchées à l'envers', added that they were 'weapons of terrible appearance'.  The point is well reinforced by the German troops' disproportionate fear of the Gdynia scythemen, whom they called 'die schwarze Teufels' ('the black devils'), and later made the victims of vicious retribution.  To this it might be added that the potential military usefulness of scythes, both pre-and post-conversion, could be recognised and feared by officialdom. In Austria, during the Peasants War of -, smiths detected converting agricultural implements into weaponsif not exclusively scytheswere punished with death;  and a similar order To test and add to historical evidence of the effectiveness of the 'war scythe', in  the author had the tang of a haft-less blade straightened by the Otley blacksmith Joseph Pack, and fitted it to an ft hazel haft, reinforced at the sharp end by two iron collars, and then honed it to a carving-knife sharpness.  The blade is a twentiethcentury example of the 'Austrian' type, a little shorter, thicker and heavier than Monmouth's scythes and which therefore handles differently but makes a weapon close enough in type for some useful experiment. The effect on a suspended (roadkill) roebuck carcass, showed, in short, that eye-witness accounts of dismemberment and evisceration are all too plausible.  The fact was, however, that re-hafted scythes as a battlefield weapon bore no comparison in overall effectiveness to purpose-made equipment, particularly to firearms and pikes in trained hands or to disciplined and determined cavalry. Fighting a live and retaliating opponent would have been more testing, not least in that a freshly cut haft, especially in summera far cry from the professionally made pikestaff of seasoned ash with langets could have been severed by a powerful sword stroke, which may explain the apparently short-handled weapons shown on the contemporary playing cards (see fig ). In addition, rapid shrinkage of green hafts would have required repeated adjustments to the fit of blade, or soaking in watereven, in the case of Monmouth's rebels, between  June and  July. Scythemen, therefore, tipped the scales of victory in few major battles involving regular or official forces -Raclawice being the most obvious examplealthough their role in skirmishes and actions could be tactically important, as, for example, at Prestonpans, Lublin, and even in Gdynia in . This was recognised by Kościusko himself who wrote that 'The strength of Pikers and Scythers cannot withstand regular armies', although his remedy was that 'they are themselves incorporated into regular armies', suggesting that the issue was more with training than the weapon.  To this effect, he commissioned the Warsaw architect Chrystian Piotre Aigner (-) to write his remarkable Krótką naukę o pikach i kosach (A Short Treatise on Pikes and Scythes) of , setting out how both could be used to best effect ( fig ) Monmouth's men garnered these weapons by a variety of means. Some must have been brought in by the rebels, newly made for the occasion or as relics of the Civil War; some of the  members of a 'Club army' who joined Monmouth's army encamped near Bridgwater on  July may have inherited such things;  Thomas Allen reported that when John Kidd and the cloth worker Weely marched out of Frome on  July, 'their armes were Hatchets, Clubs, Hayforks and Sythes riveted into poles about  foot long'.  As these sources, Taylor  and others show, scythes were not the only tools pressed into or adapted for service by Monmouth's forces, but Monmouth's order to requisition them, within a week of landing, shows that they were the weapon of choice: presumably the duke was impressed by those his men already had, but may also have recalled their use against him at Bothwell Bridge in .  Accordingly, on Friday  June, as noted in a postscript to an anonymous account of the rebellion, there: were issued out warrants and subscribed Mon; requiring all Constables in their respective hundreds & tythings, to bring into the camp at Taun[ton] by Saturday mor:  of the clock all sythes; of those warrants I sawe one, and read it at Kingstone.  The text of one of the warrants was transcribed by Paschall, headed 'a copy of the warrant for scythes' and is addressed in this case 'To the Tithing-men of Ch.'. It states that: These are, in his Majesty's name, to will and require you, on sight hereof, to search for, seize, and take all such scythes as can be found in your tything, paying a reasonable price for the same, and bring them to my house tomorrow by one of the clock in the afternoon, that they may be delivered in to the commission officers, that are appointed to receive them at Taunton by four of the same day, and you shall be reimbursed by me /what the scythes are worth. And hereof fail not, as you will answer to the contrary. Given under my hand this  th day of June, in the first year of his Majesty's reign.  The text was published by the lawyer, historian and would-be biographer of Monmouth, Samuel Heywood (-) in .  The 'Tything-men' were parishioners responsible for public order, usually subordinate to elected constables; Monmouth's claim to authority was, only hours old, as 'king', hence the threat to the tything-men of having to 'answer', and, according to George Roberts, writing in the s, of 'having their houses burnt'.  The ten-mile distance between Chedzoy and Taunton suggests that the warrants were issued to a number of places within at least that radius, and they were perhaps printed;  the example seen by Heywood may been preserved by Paschall. How many blades were 'delivered in' is unknown, but the strength of scythemen by the end of the campaign, at about , suggests some success; a 'reasonable price', meanwhile, would have been between one and two shillings apiece.  The 'house' in Taunton was presumably 'Mr Hookers', described by Wade as the 'Duke's quarters in this town'.  What is obvious, however, is that there would have been little time after issuing the order on Saturday  July and  o'clock the next day to cut and prepare enough hafts, preferably ash or, at a pinch, of hazel, willow or birch. Taylor noted, as observed after the battle, that the hafts he saw were 'Strong Stafs about ten feet long, of good supple Ash, about ½ Inch Diameter'.  There was still less time, between  o'clock and the army's departure for Bridgwater on the same day, to adapt the blades, even though a smith working in a forge would have needed no more than five to ten minutes' work per item,  and a few minutes to prepare at least one iron ring or ferrule to keep the haft from splitting.  Using the simplest process, as in the case of VII., the next stages were to shape the shaft to take the rings and then drill and shape a socket to fit the tang, tasks that took the author (in making the replica 'war scythe' discussed above) four to five minutes and about thirty-five minutes respectively.  Fitting the blade and driving it home was the work of a few seconds, so, using this method, the whole process (apart from procuring the haft) of creating the weapon would have taken roughly an hour; the other methods described below, which may also have been used, could have taken a little less. The result was illustrated ( fig ) and described by Taylor: 'these Sithes were about fower foot Long, and fower inches brod, and one Inch thick at the back', and he added that 'in the Lowerward they were bound with a ferul [ferrule] and had a sharp spike, about  inches long, in all respects as you see in the figure',  a refinement that was perhaps a rarity. Taylor also relates that the 'sithers' had 'pistols sticking in at their Girdles, and brod sords, in wast belts', but this is unlikely to have applied to many, any more than the plumed and lace-bedecked costume portrayed in his drawing.
Creating these weapons in a hurry, of course, depended on the availability of smiths and forges, although at a pinch it could have been done without specialist equipment by any practical man. Monmouth's ranks, as any army's had to, certainly included smiths and farriers, such as James Edwards of Shepton Mallet  and Daniel Manning, apprentice to Walter Upham, who was conscripted at Shoreditch (near Taunton).  There must also have been smiths in Taunton, perhaps including Messrs Caninges, Ayles and . In  the going rate was -/each (Cope , ); in  a stock of  score (,) scythes at Cradley (Worcs) was valued at £, that is, about s d each (Rowlands , ). In 'the th century' a new scythe cost between s d and s d (Hey , ; Shenoy , ). The Tower inventory of -, however, values foraging scythes at s d each (BL, Harley , fol v). . MacDonald Wigfield , ; BL, Harley , fol r. . National Library of Jamaica, MS , . . David Birchall, pers comm  Nov . Joseph Pack, using a hammer, anvil and a coke-fired forge, took seven minutes to adapt the author's example. . Using 'bar' or scrap iron. Joseph Pack, pers comm Feb . . The hole was drilled with a spiral-tipped spoon auger, and then shaped to fit the tapering square section of the tang with a chisel. This was the most time-consuming part of the process. . National Library of Jamaica, MS ,  . Little , ; SHC, Somerset Quarter Session Rolls, , fol . The author is grateful to Phillip Hocking for providing a photocopy of this document. . Macdonald Wigfield , -, .  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL Case, mentioned respectively in ,  and ,  and the blacksmith Dyer, who came to Monmouth at or on the way to Bridgwater with a copy of the king's pardon and was promptly arrested.  There were, of course, others in nearby villages  (three named in  and )  whose services may have been offered or commandeered, as in the case of labourers summoned to Bridgwater on  July.  The conversion method found in VII. is common to the majority of surviving continental examples, including most of the thirty-seven at Solothurn,  but a still simpler method, at least as illustrated in nineteenth-century images of historic actions and illustrated in detail in the Polish Regulamin Ćwiczeń Kosą of , was to use two rings to fix the tang to the side of the pole's end;  this also seems to have been used by the Vendéens in .  Other simple processes were employed, depending on choice and the form of the tang as found. In the case of a broad, flat tang, it could be inserted into a sawn slit at the end of the haft and secured by rivets, as illustrated by Aigner in , langets also being fitted (see fig a).  A third method, used in the case of two of the Horncastle blades, several in the Polish Army Museum, one at Berne, and by the Vendéens,  was to re-form the tang into a ring, through which six inches or so of the pole could pass and then be riveted to the blade (see fig b).  The fixing method found in the other RA example, VII., would only have been required if, as in this case, the tang was missing, although here the arrangement probably post-dates its arrival at the Tower, as does the haft.
More sophisticated weapons could be made, time and skill permitting, by adapting the blades themselves; as in the early seventeenth-century examples at the Schloss Kyburg, in which they have been re-ground to present a convex edge and a point, and riveted to a square-sectioned or octagonal haft with the aid of long metal strips.  A variant of this, found in an eighteenth-century Polish example, was to straighten the blade itself and point the end.  An eighteenth-century exhibit in the National Museum Krakov, has a straightforward socketed tang, but with the addition not only of langets (fitted under the collar), but also a backward-facing hook, secured by two rivets, for dismounting horsemen.  On the Continent, similar weapons, most commonly in Poland, were made using blades taken from chaff-cutters, broader at the far end and terminating in the spike on which the blade pivoted when in use.  These seem not to have been used in the British Isles, probably as these devices were rarely used here before c . 

DEPLOYMENT AND EFFECTIVENESS IN 
Scythemen first appear in the contemporary accounts of the rebellion in relation to 'Capt. Slape's company of sithes and musquetes being ' added to the duke's forces on  June, nine days after landing.  Their first action appears to have been in the encounter at Norton St Philip ( June), where Wade, anticipating renewed attack by Feversham, 'drew up  pieces of canon into the mouth of the lane and guarded them with a company of sithmen'.  The enemy withdrew, but to be noted is that the scythemen's anticipated role was wholly defensive, that is, to protect the guns and gunners. Scythemen saw action again the next day at Frome, where, the London Gazette reported, recruits (said to have been ,-, strong) armed 'some with Pistols, some with Pikes and some with Pitch-Forks and Sythes'  engaged a militia force under the Earl of Pembroke. Wheeler tells us that the earl 'forced the Rebells to lay downe theire arms', including 'Sithes and the like'.  The next engagement involving scythemen seems to have been Sedgemoor itself. Their numbers, deployment and command are not wholly clear, but a key source relating to both issues is James II's own account. This explains that on the final approach to Sedgemoor were 'the Foott, which consisted of five great Battalions, each of wich had one company of at least  Sythmen instead of Granadeers';  the 'Battalions', as Wade reported, were the Blue, White, Red, Green and Yellow regiments of infantry, in addition to which there was an eighty-strong 'Independent Company which came from Lime'.  King James's report therefore implies a total of about  scythemen (a figure also cited by John Oldmixon)  and that they were under the command of various regimental colonels. Taylor, meanwhile, although not a reliable source for rebel numbers, wrote that 'Munmouth had in his Army  sithers'.  Confusingly, however, Paschall's (longer) account refers to ' scythe-men',  but he was not present at the battle, unlike Life, Reading, including MERL /, <http://www.reading.ac.uk/adlib/Details/collect/> (accessed  Sept ). The author is grateful to Dr Oliver Douglas for information on the museum's holdings. The spike served as a pivot, the blade being raised and brought down by hand or treadle to slice off short lengths of hay or straw pushed towards it along a trough.


Wade, the king's primary source. The king's explanation that scythemen were used 'instead of Granadiers', while surprising in that they had neither the equipment nor training of these elite troops,  concurs with Taylor's comment that 'these sithemen were the Tallest and lustyest men they could prick out'.  Both statements tend to underline the importance that Monmouth attached to these men and their weapons, and King James's is also interesting in hinting thatas was the case with grenadiersthe 'sithemen' were dispersed among the ranks of musketeers and pikemen, as does the reference to Slape's 'company of sithes and musquetes'. Scythemen are also shown mixed among pikemen on one of a remarkable set of contemporary playing cards (fig ),  although not actually at the battle, and in a woodcut illustrating a Broadside of  September  (see fig ).  Other sources, however, suggest that scythemen instead formed a discrete unit (or units). One of these is the confession of John Kidd, which referred to one William Thompson, 'an officer and linnen draper of London' who 'commanded the Scythemen';  another, varying the theme, is Taylor, who tells us that on the morning of Sedgemoor Munmouth ranged both his horse, and foot forces, and put them in order; Himself; and Count Horn, commanded the Infantry; Count Horn commanded the Sithmen particular, and the Left Wing; Munmouth commanded his maine Batatalia of Foot, and the Lord Greay, commanded the Body of the Calvary.  By 'Count Horn', Taylor is referring, as Childs has shown, to the mercenary Anthony van Buys, who had landed with the duke, and eventually turned king's evidence and was pardoned.  Prior to the battle, the scythemen had been formed into a discrete detachment under Captain James Hayes of the Red or Duke's regiment, which we can assume (if these sources are correct) was in the end led by van Buys.  This is consistent with Taylor's claim that after Grey had fled 'Count Horn and his Sithears stoutly maintained their ground against Oglethorps hors : : : until Mounmouth's Main Batallia drew up'.  King James's account is similar in mentioning that Oglethorpe's cavalry 'tryd one of their Battallions, but was beaten back by them, tho they were mingled amongst them, and had severall of his men wounded and knocked off their horses'.  Taylor's comments at this point and elsewhere on the role of scythemen in the battle are also useful in refuting Paschall's claim that scythemen were wholly absent, to the effect that Wade's , 'scythe-men' were among those who 'came not to the fight'.  Clearly they were not, and, as Taylor reveals in describing their effect, they left a lasting impression on observers. It is also significant that re-hafted scythes are shown, respectively, discarded

MONMOUTH'S SCYTHES AT THE TOWER OF LONDON
Sedgemoor ended, as Paschall put it, with a 'total rout of the Duke's army'.  In addition to - rebels killed in battle, many more were cut down in fleeing: the parson and churchwardens of Westonzoyland counted , burials within the parish, and the bodies of others, who died in the cornfields, were only found at harvest.  Their arms were abandoned in flight or left where they fell: the Earl of Pembroke, although not an eye-witness, wrote of 'the rout of Sedgemore, where most of them were killed, droping their armes and flying into ditches'.  Taylor tells us that the rebels 'in the most confused maner betoock themselves to flight, each shifting for himself as well as he could soe that nothing but Scaterd Arms, and dead carcasses lay every where, scattered on the Ground'.  The arms must have included re-hafted scythes, and indeed both the King of Spades and the Queen of Clubs in the 'new pack of cards representing (in curious lively Figures) the Two late Rebellions throughout the whole course hereof in both Kingdoms', printed in November , show them lying on the ground,  as does the only other contemporary image of the battle, the Broadside of September  (see fig ).  The scene must have resembled that in the colourful and ghastly painting of the massacre of a peasant army in  at Sendling, near Munich, which shows dozens of re-hafted scythes and other tools scattered among the casualties.  Normal seventeenth-century practice for the victors, followed by swarms of camp followers, was to seize anything useful or valuable from the dead, wounded and captured, although the speed of the Sedgemoor campaign meant followers were few.  At Sedgemoor, the eagerness of government troops to begin is evident from Adam Wheeler's account, in which he 'was one of those/of the Right Wing of his honour the Colonel Windham's Regimt who after the Enemy began to run desired leave of his honour to get such pillage on the feild as they could finde', although Feversham's answer was at that moment no, 'on Paine of Death'.  This 'pillage' involved the robbing of any prisoners who, as Wheeler put it, 'had a good Coate or any thinge worth the pilling' and 'were very fairely stript of it'.  The retrieval of weapons, however, was a matter of official interest, thanks to their value both to the victors and potentially to enemy survivors. On their destination, Taylor is helpfully specific: following his description of their effectiveness, he adds that 'These Sithes with abundance more of Mounmouth's other Arms were brought Up to London, and laid up in the Armory of the Tower of London'.  The 'other arms' may have included at least some of the armour taken at Lyme and sold from the Tower in , and presumably also Monmouth's cannon, a supposition supported in the mention by an eighteenth-century Tower visitor Georges-Louis Le Rouge, of 'quelques armes & pieces de canon prises sur le Duc de Mont-Mouth' in the Spanish Armoury.  Other items were also captured before the battle: the scythes 'brought away' by the Earl of Pembroke after his encounter with the rebels on  June at Frome;  the powder and armour captured at Lyme on  June;  and perhaps the 'Engine' recorded in -.  Re-hafted scythes first appear in the Tower records in the 'Survey and Remaine' finished on the  September , described as 'Scith blades: with staves, ; without staves, ', all in the 'Serviceable' column and listed under 'Spanish Weapons' (fig );  in  there were '' 'sithes' and '' 'sithe blades' (although '' may have been a clerical error for ''), all 'serviceable' and valued respectively at £ s and £ s d.  Should there be any suspicion that these were not weapons but tools for foraging, those appear in quite separate lists, and had been kept there in large numbers since at least the reign of Henry VIII:  the inventory of January / lists under 'Sundry Stores and Incident Necessary', 'Sneaths for Sithes, ', valued at £ s d;  the  'Remaine' lists under 'Tooles of sorts', including sickles and axes, 'Scyth Blades, ; ditto handles, ; Rings for Scyths, , Iron Wedges for Ditto, ; Wooden wedges, '.  The scythes mentioned were therefore quite clearly weapons, while their listing in  and thereafter under 'Spanish Weapons' implies that they were displayed in the 'Spanish Armoury', which, along with the Line of Kings and (after ) the Small Armoury, was one of the three main attractions at the Tower created after the Restoration.  Its main contents were, it was claimed, taken from the Armada of , and by  had been assembled in the 'Spanish Weopen House', a building near St Peter's chapel, before being re-displayed in  on the middle floor room in a storehouse in 'Coldharbour', the inmost ward, to the south of the White Tower.  The scythes' Monmouth associations were certainly being given out from , probably by Yeoman Warder guides, when they were viewed by the Lutheran Pastor Heinrich Benthem. In his Engeländischer Kirch-und Schulen-Staat of  he noted that 'here some scythes (sensen) can be seen with which a whole regiment of Monmouth's army  was equipped/ and at the beginning caused considerable damage/ as their blood was then still up'.  The main purpose of the display, largely of material allegedly intended to defeat, torture and oppress the vanquished English,  was to trumpet England's invincibility and the perfidy of her enemies. Unlike the Line of Kings or the Small Armoury, however, the Spanish Armoury was effectively also a 'cabinet of curiosities', a type of attraction long familiar to Londoners and their visitors, such as John Tradescant's 'Ark' at Lambeth (extant -), Robert Hubert's 'natural rarities' near St Paul's (s),  the East India Company's, the Royal Society's ( onwards) and the London College of Physicians' (-).  The scythes were therefore not alone in lacking even an alleged 'Spanish' provenance, being accompanied in  by (for example) four 'Danish clubs',  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL ten 'Hercules clubs', 'Heading axes, ', 'King Henry ye 's walking staffe' and a shield 'of wood with pistols', value £.  During the short remainder of James' reign, in line with the government's intentions to discredit Monmouth's cause,  exposing the scythes to the public conveyed a fairly straightforward warning against rebellion, although their makeshift nature would hardly have trumpeted the prowess of the victors. Under William III, however, who had successfully pursued a version of Monmouth's plan,  their display risked being seriously off-message, as apparently noted by the Tower authorities, as the 'Spanish Weapons' in the inventory of  November , during the sensitive period before William became king, included 'Sithes ' and 'Sithe blades ', at s d,  that is, they had been taken off display. In the following year, with the new regime now firmly established, they were reinstated, and the Yeoman Warders, short as ever on political correctness, no doubt made the most of them.
For the rest of the seventeenth century, although only 'some' scythes were on display in the Spanish Armoury, up to eighty-one others were listed among the 'Spanish Weapons', as shown by the inventories of , ,  and -,  presumably stored somewhere else. But by , the year the next surviving inventory was compiled, their numbers had reduced to thirty-nine with staves and fifteen without,  and by the time of the next comprehensive inventory in  there were only two.  Presumably, the remainder had been sold off or disposed of, or perhaps destroyed in the Grand Storehouse fire of .
There is no reason to doubt, however, that some scythes remained on display in the first half of the eighteenth century. While they are not mentioned in the first guidebook -Thomas Boreman's Curiosities in the Tower of  (although trophies of 'the last rebellion in the year ' garner a few lines) they do appear in the anonymous Historical Account of the Tower of London and its Curiosities, printed in  and , described as 'Some Weapons made with part of a Scythe fixed to a Pole which were taken from the Duke of Monmouth's Party at the Battle of Sedgemoor in the reign of James II'.  Very similar or identical terms were used in editions of , , ,  and , and a plate used in the Surveys : : : (of London and environs) by Thornton (), Barnard () and Skinner () shows, among other items from the Spanish Armoury,  a pole-hafted scythe blade, missing its heel (probably VII.), along with the 'Saxon's sword' (see fig ). Intermittent reference to the scythes was made in guidebook editions of the next decadesbeing omitted in  and , included in , and omitted again in .  By , however, they were back in favour, the guidebook pointing visitors to 'A PIECE OF A SCYTHE placed on a pole, being a specimen of weapons taken at the battle of Sedgmoor'.


In  the Spanish Armoury display was rearranged, and in , taking up an earlier suggestion by Samuel Meyrick, pioneer historian of arms and armour, it was re-named 'Queen Elizabeth's Armoury'.  In  it was re-housed in the barrel-vaulted eleventh-century room beneath St John's chapel in the White Tower,  fitted up for the purpose with faux Norman arcading, wall shafts and vaulting ribs. Here, the  guidebook tells us that 'upon the last pillars are weapons used by the rebels at : : : Sedgemoor',  and John Hewitt, in The Tower: its history, armories and antiquities of , notes in Queen Elizabeth's Armoury 'Two scythe blades mounted on staves, and used by the rebels at the battle of Sedgemoor in ',  as does J Wheeler's A Short History of the Tower of London of the same year.  T B Macaulay, writing in the s, noted that among Monmouth's weapons improvised from the 'tools they had used in husbandry or mining : : : the most formidable was made by fastening the blade of a scythe erect on a strong pole', and that 'One of these weapons may still be seen in the Tower'.  An engraving of  of the 'Norman Armoury' (that is, the room re-fitted in ) appears to show one of them, bunched together with other staff weapons, close to its south-west corner.  They appear again under 'Queen Elizabeth's Armoury' in a MS catalogue of  ('Weapon scythe used by the rebels at Sedgmoor '),  and in  the 'scythe-blade weapons of Monmouth's rustics' were deemed sufficiently interesting to be named among other highlights in a piece in the Gentleman's Magazine promoting John Hewitt's Catalogue of ,  in which they are described.  In , however, further changesthese by the dramatist, antiquary and polymath, James Robinson Planchéwere made to most of the displays in the White Tower and the Horse Armoury  with the blessing of the War Office.  In the process, Planché re-ordered the contents of the 'upper room : : : which has for so many years borne the application of Queen Elizabeth's Armoury', removing 'all specimens of a later date than  to other parts of the building', presumably including the scythes.  Between  and , prompted by the recent restoration of St John's chapel above, the mock-Norman décor was removed,  and by August  the remaining contents of the . Ffoulkes (, vol , ) states that 'the contents of the old Spanish Armoury were moved into the White Tower in '. Armoury had been transferred to the western room on the second floor, by then described as the 'Council Chamber'.  The successive movements of Monmouth's scythes around the building after the s need not be set out here, nor their mentions in guidebooks cited,  but they were last displayed from  to  in a part re-creation of the Spanish Armoury in the chapel undercroft. Currently in store, they will no doubt have a place in the emerging plans for the transformation of the Royal Armouries' Museum in Leeds, and their history and significance, and that of the re-hafted scythe in general, explained and illustrated to the extent that they deserve.