Goedendag



The goedendag (also rendered godendac, godendard, godendart, and sometimes conflated with the related plançon) was a weapon originally used by the militias of Medieval Flanders in the 14th century. It was essentially a combination of a club with a spear. Its body was a wooden staff roughly five feet (150 cm) long with a diameter of roughly four inches (10 cm). It was wider at one end, and at this end a sharp metal spike was inserted by a tang.

The name "goedendag" derives from Dutch, usually taken in English sources to have meant "good day", with reference to the revolt of Bruges in 1302, at which the guildsmen of Bruges purportedly took over the city by greeting people in the streets, and murdering anyone who answered with a French accent. This derivation of the name may however be spurious: the name is found only once, in a French account from shortly after the Battle of Courtrai. The Flemings themselves referred to the weapon as a spiked staff (gepinde staf).

The weapon was used to great effect by the guildsmen of Flanders' wealthy cities against the French knights during the Guldensporenslag, the Battle of Courtrai or Battle of the Golden Spurs, near Kortrijk (Courtrai) on 11 July 1302. (The date is still marked as the celebration of Flanders', Brabant's and Antwerp's independence and Flanders' national celebration day.) It is depicted being used against the French knights in the Battle of Courtrai in the carvings on the Courtrai Chest, a 14th-century wooden chest (discovered c1905 on a farm owned by New College, Oxford, England, and now to be seen in the Ashmolean Museum.) There is also a now faded fresco from the Leugemeete in Ghent.

Use
Exactly how the weapon was used is a source of debate. Contemporary illustrations show it being used as a club but the contemporary chronicler Guillaume Guiart, speaking of the battle of Courtrai, states, "each held his godendart raised against the French, the iron as one meets a wild boar". which suggests it was first used as a spear to meet a charge, then a club as the enemy was halted. The goedendag was probably set in the ground secured by the fighter's foot and aimed with both hands. The thicker knob under the spike, a safeguard against the horse impaling itself and then going on to crash into the defender, served the same purpose as the cross bar on a boar-spear. The military historian Kelly de Vries asserts that "its chief function was to bring down a knight from his horse". Verbruggen describes the role of the goedendag thus:

"They were placed between the pikemen, or in the second rank, so that with their shorter, very heavy weapons they could put the horses out of action"

The Chest of Oxford (aka Chest of Courtrai, in English literature: Courtrai Chest) shows men with Goedendags standing behind a line of men with pikes.

Other clubs, maces, swords, or knives could well also have been used by a guildsman for close combat after meeting a charge with the goedendag. On this account, the goedendag was sometimes confused with the halberd, morning star, or Lucerne hammer, a halberd with a hammer instead of an axe blade. In contrast with the goedendag, these were expressly built for professional warriors, to rip a rider off his horse while he was charging or passing by. Such weapons were much more effective but also more expensive, requiring greater craftsmanship to make. They were the weapons of regular infantrymen. This is why regular Flemish troops abandoned the goedendag at the beginning of the fifteenth century; after that point the weapon was used exclusively by the Flemish "burgers".