The spear

[Stacy Clifford]

This text goes with the picture above from Silver:

To know the perfect length of your short staff, or half pike, forest bill, partisan, or glaive, or such like weapons of vantage and perfect lengths, you shall stand upright, hold the staff upright close by your body, with your left hand, reaching with your right hand your staff as high as you can, and then allow to that length a space to set both your hands, when you come to fight, wherein you may conveniently strike, thrust, and ward, & that is the just length to be made according to your stature. And this note, that these lengths will commonly fall out to be eight or nine foot long, and will fit, although not just, the statures of all men without any hindrance at all unto them in their fight, because in any weapon wherein the hands may be removed, and at liberty, to make the weapon longer or shorter in fight(ing) at his pleasure, a foot of the staff being behind the back most hand does no harm.

[Benjamin Smith]

Joachim Meyer shows some very long staffs as well, probably about 12'-14' likely equivalents of the later pikes used on battlefields, what Silver called the Long Staffs which he defined as anything longer than perfect length (see above). These would be buggers to transport though, and you'd have to get them direct from a hardwood supplier cause I know of nowhere that supplies them. Of course Silver denigrated these almost as much as the rapier as being difficult to use well. I myself use an 8' staff and it works pretty well.

[Stacy Clifford]

I use a 6 ft. staff because they are the most widely available and because anything longer won't fit in my car without banging against the dashboard.

[scott adair]

I know Ernie Perez did some work with the spear a few years ago. After watching him and sparring against his spear I made one up myself. The only problem I had was that to pad it adequately I found that the tip would sometimes fold. It also looked like a large canoe paddle. I recently had to toss it as the tip padding tore from so many sword impacts.

As for real spears, I like Cold Steel. I have an old small assegai with a long shaft. It's just shy of 6'. My only complaint is that only one side of the spear head is solid. They are made like shovels. When you flip them over there is wood exposed on the back side of the socket. This is only a cosmetic issue though. They are well constructed. A friend of mine has their large assegai and it is a fine weapon. Just a bit over 6'.

Scott

[LafayetteCCurtis]

The shortest spear I've used is actually a javelin with a four-foot shaft and a foot-long head for a total of about five feet--just a couple of inches shorter than my height (yes, I'm that short). The long, heavy head gave it a nice balance that makes it suitable for one-handed use. I've been unable to replicate the balance with a training weapon, however, so I haven't had the chance to test it in a sparring bout and figure out whether its length would require me to modify the techniques I've acquired through trial and error with longer spears.

[Stacy Clifford]

Acquiring that balance may just require some judicious shaving of the shaft. I believe I've read before that a balance point of 1/3 of the way behind the point has been found on wooden throwing spears (without stone points) dating back as far as 400,000 years.