A spear was not simply what you carried when you could not afford better. It was what said you were free. Spears appear in around eighty-five per cent of early Anglo-Saxon graves that hold a weapon at all, and in roughly forty per cent of every adult male grave from the period — nothing else comes near it. And in many northern European societies, probably including Anglo-Saxon England, only a free man was allowed to carry one, with law codes laying down strict punishments for any slave found in possession of a spear. Hold that beside the rest of the arithmetic. A ceorl's life was priced at two hundred shillings; a thrall's death was reckoned as damage to another man's property. The spear was the object that marked the line between those two conditions, and it cost almost nothing to make — a little iron for the head and a shaft of ash from the nearest wood. The plain Old English words are gār and spere. The poets preferred others: æsc, the thing made of ash, and þrecwudu, the wood for harming.

W. Britain give him a shaft of about the right length — surviving examples run from a metre and a half to nearly three — held low and thrust past the shield rather than raised, with a sword at his hip he has not needed yet. He works directly opposite "Geir" Viking Defending with Spear and Shield, who is doing the identical job for the other side, and alongside "Edgard" Saxon Defending with Spear and Kite Shield, the two shield shapes together. For the harder half of the story, "Overwhelmed" shows a man who has lost his — and what the law had to say about men without one.

Model: 62136 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set