At Falkirk on 22 July 1298, Edward I's knights charged the Scottish schiltrons and lost 111 horses for their trouble. The pikemen did not move. The Scots lost the battle anyway, and that detail explains most of what follows. A wall of pikes could stop cavalry cold. Against arrows, ditches and men with shorter weapons, it was another matter.
Over the next two and a half centuries, three groups worked on the same problem. The Scots kept the hedgehog and left their schiltrons standing still. The Swiss went the opposite way and marched their pike columns straight at the enemy, which made them the most feared infantry in Europe. The Landsknechts of the Holy Roman Empire studied the Swiss, added handguns and double pay for veterans, and eventually beat them at their own game. Every one of these answers worked until somebody found its weak spot. After that the pike block met a bill at Flodden, a sunken road at Bicocca, and in 1525 a rebel army that owned the pikes and none of the drill.
If you want the short version, it runs like this. The schiltron stood and waited. The Swiss pike column attacked. The Landsknechts did a bit of both, with guns. Each formation has one battle that shows what it could do and another that shows where it stopped. This article takes the three one at a time, battle by battle, and then looks at how each of them plays on a table. Our scope is the age when the pike block ruled, plus the first years when the gun began to catch up with it. Armies that mixed pike and musket in tidy proportions belong to a later story, and the English Civil War is a better place to look for them.
WoFun Games makes pre-printed plexiglass miniatures for these armies, with the pike blocks drawn by Peter Dennis and printed in full colour. No painting. No assembly. No glue. You press the figures from the sprue, slot them into bases, and the block is ready to advance. The history comes first, though, because the miniatures make more sense once you know what each block was built to do and where it went wrong.
One Problem, Three Answers
For about two centuries the armoured knight decided battles. Heavy horse hit a line of infantry at speed, the line broke, and the rest of the day was pursuit. Nobody needed a clever reply to that. They needed a long one.
Why did pikes beat armoured knights?
A pike outreached a lance, and horses will not run onto a hedge of points. Length varied with the army. A Landsknecht pike was about 14 feet, the Scots carried pikes of about 18 feet at Flodden, and the Swiss weapon was longer than the Landsknecht's. Men stood shoulder to shoulder, and the rear ranks levelled their pikes over the front rank, so a rider met several points at once. On the march the pikes were carried upright. Halted, the block could point them in any direction, with the front rank kneeling so the men behind could reach over. Armour does not help a horse that refuses the charge.
The drawback was clumsiness. A pike needed drill, open ground and company. A pikeman with an enemy inside his points had almost nothing left to fight with.
The Scottish Schiltron: A Hedgehog With Nowhere to Go
Wallace drew up his army at Falkirk in four schiltrons, roughly a thousand men each by Stuart Reid's estimate, with archers in the gaps and about 500 horse behind. The English cavalry drove off the Scottish horse early. Then they rode at the schiltrons and lost those 111 horses.
Edward saw the point and stopped charging. His archers, crossbowmen and slingers moved up and shot into packed men who could neither retreat nor hit back. When the ranks thinned, cavalry and infantry went in and broke them. Wallace resigned as Guardian of Scotland soon afterwards. Robert the Bruce took the lesson, and at Bannockburn in 1314 he chose ground that forced the English to come to him.
What was a Scottish schiltron?
A schiltron was a tight mass of spearmen standing with their points outward. Historians still argue about its exact shape, and the sources are thin. They agree on the purpose: stand firm, and make the horse go round you.
That purpose was also the limit. A schiltron could not manoeuvre without losing its strength, and it had no answer to a bow.
Swiss Pikemen: The Column That Moved
The Swiss began with halberds, not pikes. At Morgarten on 15 November 1315 a Habsburg column was strung out along a narrow path between a steep slope and a swamp near Lake Ägeri. The Swiss blocked the road, attacked from above with halberds, and rolled rocks down on the horses. At Sempach on 9 July 1386 Duke Leopold's knights dismounted in wooded ground that suited cavalry poorly. Leopold died there with many of his nobles. Why the tide turned is disputed, and the heat of a July midday is one suggestion. Swiss tradition gives the breakthrough to Arnold von Winkelried, who is said to have thrown himself onto the enemy pikes to open a gap. The earliest evidence is a Lucerne chronicle of 1513, so treat him as a legend.
Then came the Burgundian Wars. The Swiss beat Charles the Bold at Grandson on 2 March 1476, beat him again at Morat later that year, and finished the job at Nancy on 5 January 1477. Charles was struck on the helmet by a halberdier while trying to rally his men, and his stripped body was found two days later. By then the Swiss fought in the Gewalthaufen, a dense formation of long spears that went forward rather than waiting.
That forward movement became a trade. The men called Reisläufer, roughly "those who go to war", hired out under written contracts that fixed numbers and pay. Swiss soldiers earned more than their French counterparts but faced harsher discipline, enforced by their own officers. A contingent usually formed one or two big columns with a few crossbowmen and early handgunners running ahead of it. Halberds stayed inside the block to finish whatever the pikes reached.
The Renaissance collection covers the Italian Wars, where Swiss columns marched for the French crown and met Landsknechts on the other side. The Swiss Pikes set gives you 33 figures at 28 mm (66 at 18 mm) on a single sprue, and the rules build a Swiss block from six bases of eight figures, 48 in all, so two sets cover a full block.
Landsknechts: The Pupils Who Beat the Teachers
Maximilian I started raising the first Landsknecht companies in 1486, gathering somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 mercenaries, and the first true Landsknechte, the Black Guard, were trained by Swiss instructors at Bruges in 1487. So the copy was deliberate. It also had its own character.
What was the difference between Swiss pikemen and Landsknechts?
Swiss pikemen were a national militia that turned itself into an export. Landsknechts were a company system built by an emperor. Their pikes were shorter, about 14 feet, and they carried far more firearms. In each company of around 400 men, the best-paid soldiers, the Doppelsöldner on double wages, made up about a quarter and stood in the front ranks, and fifty of them carried arquebuses or crossbows. Ten companies made a regiment of roughly 4,000. The Landsknechts also moved in circular formations rather than charging head down.
The two sides hated each other. After Novara in 1513 the Swiss executed captured Landsknechts who had fought for France. Nine years later the account was settled at Bicocca.
On 27 April 1522 the Swiss in French service were unpaid and impatient, and they insisted on attacking Prospero Colonna's dug-in army without waiting for the French guns. They crossed open fields under artillery fire and reached a sunken road. The road's depth and the rampart beyond it stood higher than a pike could reach. Spanish arquebusiers under Fernando d'Ávalos fired in ranks and reloaded in turn, and Landsknechts under Georg Frundsberg drove back the Swiss who got to the rampart. More than 3,000 Swiss died, including about twenty of their captains. Imperial losses were light. The Swiss run of victories was over.
The Landsknecht Pikemen set holds 34 figures at 28 mm (68 at 18 mm). If you would rather have both sides arrive together, the Renaissance Starter Pack does exactly that: 410 figures, with two regiments of Swiss heavy infantry in the French army and two of Landsknechts in the Imperialist army. The grudge match is in the box.
Flodden: The Hedgehog Meets the Bill
By 1513 the Scots had adopted the Swiss weapon. James IV's army carried pikes about 18 feet long, supplied by France, and the weapon wanted training, discipline and open ground. On 9 September the English under the Earl of Surrey approached by a flanking march, and James moved his army onto Branxton Hill without scouting what lay at the bottom.
The Scots stood in four divisions. Lord Home and the Earl of Huntly commanded the left with Borderers and Highlanders, three earls led the centre-left, James held the centre with his son, and Argyll and Lennox took the right with Highland and island men. What lay at the bottom of the hill was marsh, softened by heavy rain. The pike blocks came down the slope and lost their cohesion in the wet. Long pikes became unwieldy, and many were dropped. The English bills, the favourite polearm of English infantry, outreached the Scots' swords and axes once the fighting closed. English archers added their part. The Scottish heavy guns were slow and badly sited, while the English lighter field guns could fire fast, though historians argue about how much the artillery decided. James IV was killed, the last British monarch to die in battle, and thousands of Scots died with him.
Why did the Scottish pikes fail at Flodden?
The Scots fought like the Swiss on ground where the Swiss would never have chosen to fight. A pike block that must slow down, turn or wade through a bog is a crowd holding long sticks. Once the points stopped, the bills got inside them. The schiltron had stood still on ground it picked. The Swiss column had moved on firm ground. The Scots at Flodden did neither.
You can fight it again with the Flodden Campaign collection. The Scottish Lowland Pikemen set provides 40 figures at 28 mm (80 at 18 mm), and the Flodden Starter Pack holds 367 figures. The Scots get three large pike regiments plus artillery. The English get four regiments of archers, two of billmen, two of men-at-arms, a light cavalry regiment and artillery.
When Peasants Took Up the Pike
In the spring of 1525 the pike changed hands again. The rebels of the German Peasants' War carried pikes of their own, 15 to 18 feet long. They lacked the training for complex manoeuvres, and the men they faced had made a trade of exactly that.
At Frankenhausen on 14 and 15 May about 8,000 rebels withdrew to a hill and ringed it with wagons. Thomas Müntzer had arrived on 11 May with about 300 fighters from Mühlhausen. A truce was agreed, and then it collapsed around midday on the 15th. The princes' army of roughly 2,800 horse and 4,000 foot, largely Landsknechts, opened with artillery and then sent in cavalry and infantry. Over 7,000 peasants are said to have died, though the sources are unreliable, and the princes reportedly lost about six men. Müntzer was captured after the battle and executed on 27 May.
The German Peasants' War collection has eight products, and the Peasant Pikemen set gives you 39 figures at 28 mm (78 at 18 mm). They make a good underdog, and the Landsknecht set from the Renaissance range can stand in as the princes' infantry.
Pike Blocks on the Table
How do pike blocks fight on the tabletop?
Andy Callan's Renaissance rules treat a Swiss or Landsknecht base as two ranks of four figures. In the Starter Pack each regiment forms a block of six bases, three wide and two deep, and every base in that block counts as pikes, even the halberdiers and officers. Pikes roll two dice per base and count two ranks. Veterans hit on 5 and 6 against cavalry or other pikemen. Pikemen never run away, they fall back.
Two rules carry the history. In "Bad War", Swiss and Landsknecht blocks that fight each other take no prisoners and keep going until one is destroyed. In "No Money, No Swiss", you roll a die for each Swiss or Landsknecht unit after setting up. On a 1 the unit marches off and takes no part. On a 5 or 6 the Swiss insist on attacking any Landsknechts in the enemy army and ignore every other order until they have done it.
Andy Callan's Flodden rules model the other lesson. Pikemen rely on forward momentum, so a pike unit that fails to win a round rolls one die fewer per base. The Scots deploy as three squares: a Royal square with noble pikemen in front behind a row of pavises, a Lowland square, and a Highland square without pavises. Squares also ignore the first base they lose, so a pike block takes a surprising amount of punishment before it starts to shrink. Stop it on bad ground and watch the dice thin out.
Which pike army should you build first?
Start with the Renaissance Starter Pack if you want the Swiss against the Landsknechts, since the two armies come ready for each other. For a Bicocca-style test, put one side behind a wall or fieldworks. The rules halve the dice against foot soldiers in cover, and you will soon see why the Swiss attack at Bicocca ended as it did. Choose Flodden if you would rather have the pike as the underdog on bad ground. Take the peasants if you want a battle history has already settled and a table can unsettle.
Every set comes in 18 mm and 28 mm, and the 18 mm version doubles the figures. Pick the scale that matches the rest of your collection.