I really like Spears and am wondering why the Sword is so much more popular.
In England, the shift from spears to swords happens before we have good written sources describing people's attitudes toward weapons, and this makes it very difficult to untangle precisely why swords took over. It's probably about politics and social stratification, and is - in my mind, as someone who also thinks spears are far more interesting than swords - one of the neglected injustices of history ;).
If you go back to the iron age, you find a lot of very interesting things happening with spears. Melanie Giles (A Forged Glamour) has written about spears in burial practices in Yorkshire: many bodies from the ~2nd century BC were carefully, lovingly laid into their graves and, then, had a dozen spear hurled into them by the mourners assembled round the grave. It's weird and magical stuff and, while swords are also important here, really steals the spotlight.
But this is distrupted by the Romans, who frown on private weapon ownership. Giles gave a paper last fall(at this conference) about a recently discovered weapons cache, into which a dozen (or so) warriors carefully stacked and stashed their spears right around the time of the Roman conquest, probably as a way to respectfully divest themselves of weapons that would not have been approved by the Roman elites who were trying to pacify the British tribes.
In Roman Britain, only private elites or soldiers had spears (elites used them for hunting, and we find them at villas with some regularity). At the same time, however, spears remained common in other societies' on the empire's edge. We find many more spears than swords in the sacrificial weapons deposits (where weapons, possibly of a defeated army, were thrown into a bog or lake) like Nydam Mose and Illerup Adal. In fact, there are ten times as many spears as swords in the Illerup bog deposit, leading excavators to suggest that these weapons were, in the warband whose weapons were thrown into the bog, carefully divided between ranks: swords for the commanders, and spears for the rank and file. The division of these ranks into groups of ~10 is thought to be clear evidence of Roman influence on these German people's military structure.
Returning to England in the fifth century (as Roman power in the island, and the west as a whole, was on the decline), we see a few things happening. In the early and mid fifth century, people buried with weapons have a variety of things in their graves: axes, spears, swords. Frans Theuws has argued, for the continent, that these kinds of burials are about making the deceased look like a local bigshot, and I think he's right: weapons had been reserved for power (the army, and elites), and that's where they show up in graves. In ]the mid-fifth century cremation burials at Spong Hill](http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/spong-hill-ix-chronology-and-synthesis.html), we find very few spears: it's all swords. And the swords rare, and almost certainly restricted for the top cream of the local elite. Weapons - and especially swords have, in late-Roman / post-Roman Britain, become a way of showing you're the boss.
But at the end of the fifth century, weapons start showing up everywhere in England, not just in elite graves but in the graves of about half of all the men. And suddenly the swords disappear: half the men are armed, but you often only find one sword per generation (as, for example, in the cemetery discovered in Blacknall Field, Pewsey). This proliferation of spears continues for a few generations into the sixth century, and the Y Gododdin, a northern British poem about a late sixth century battle, is full of heroic spearmen. But as Britain rebuilt after the post-Roman collapse, and these heroic spearmen were gobbled up into larger and larger kingdoms, ordinary people stopped burying spears in the their graves, and they become (again) restricted to the upper layers of society. And, as this happens, swords start to take over again, forming a much larger proportion of the weapons we recover from the late sixth century (and the spears that do survive from this period are really big - almost sword sized themselves). A hundred years late, when the poem Beowulf was most likely composed, spearmen are again pushed down into the rank-and-file; all the elites have swords.
So what's going on? Spears seem to have been much more interesting - both to us as archaeologists, and also within their societies - in Britain before the Roman conquest in the first century AD. But the Romans stamped out much of this martial culture, and replaced it with a hierarchical and socially separated military class, relegating private weapon ownership to hunting weapons among the elite. And while, after the breakdown of Roman rule, we see weapons - particularly spears - appearing everywhere in people's graves (in lowland Britain, that is) for a few generations, they almost recaptured the spotlight (we even have a few cases of spears being thrown into graves again!).
But as elites consolidated power, they needed symbols to show their power over the warriors they hoped to control, and swords - which were more difficult to make, required better materials, and connected these elites to wide-reaching loose networks of powerful spatha-wielding horse warriors that stretched across the post-Roman world all the way to the middle east - fit the bill. Spears, which were useful but ultimately rather more democratic weapons (both because they required less expensive iron to make and could get by with poorer quality iron if the pure alloys needed to make a sword blade weren't available, and because they did lend themselves to cooperative fighting - though early medieval spears were very much suited for single combat as well), became relegated to the social ranks of supporters and followers, just as they'd been under the Germanic chieftains whose armaments were deposited in bogs like Illerup Adal.
There's more to it than this. Spears, in Roman society, were connected with private citizenship (see for example Gaius the Jurists' argument about spears and property rights), and early medieval continental law codes (ie Euric Code) associated spears with a lord's loyal retainers - both of which recognized the spear's role as an 'everyman' weapon. Spears and shields, not swords, were necessary to make various legal claims in Salic Law (6th century Gaul), again affirming their role as showcasing participation in the commonwealth of free society. When social stratification was less intense, as it appears to have been in early sixth century England, spears were able to flourish - but their ubiquity made it easy for them to be eclipsed by the rarer, elite-associated, more difficult to make and acquire blades of the spatha. Which is a crying shame, I think.
But remember that spears, though eclipsed, never go away. If you draw a picture of a knight on a horse, he's going to be holding a lance, not a sword. Spears and lances, like peasants, often fail to grab our imagination as we focus instead on the richer and rarer world of the elite. But you don't have to look far to realize that it was spears, not swords, that shaped the battlefield up until the modern period.
A few reasons come to mind:
There was a switchover between spears as primary weapon in the early classical world (think: Greeks) to swords in the late classical (think: Roman Empire). Before this changeover, spears do get a lot of attention as a heroic weapon. For example, spear throws are the typical opening moves in Homeric heroic clashes, with sword coming out only after the spear clash is indecisive--which, incidentally, mirrors how swords and spears were used in battle. But the Romans deprecated the spear and moved to a sword- (and pila-)equipped legion, and spears lost much of their heroic mojo after that. (In Europe, anyway; in Japan, the sword as the queen of weapons, but the spear was still king.)
The trend toward long swords starting in late antiquity and continuing through the middle ages made good swords quite expensive. A long-bladed sword that could withstand the impact of a powerful cut had to be very well made. The evolution to longer blades was driven by horsemen who needed a longer weapon, and who tended to be from wealthier stock who could afford the necessary craftsmanship. Medieval knightly swords were therefore an aristocratic weapon, suitable for a knight, whereas the footman would be more likely to utilize a polearm of some sort, or a less posh type of short sword such as a falchion. But medieval poetry and literature liked its knights, so the weapons of epic fiction ended up being knightly swords like Durendal and Excalibur.
The spear was ultimately a weapon of mass combat, while the sword was a weapon of single combat. The spear never really lost its martial relevance, evolving by degrees through weapons like the pike and bayonet, even to the modern day. But while mass combats tend to decide history, it is not the stuff of heroes. From the medieval knight through the duel of honour to the survival of swordplay in modern sports like fencing and kendo, swords have always worked better for identifying individual accomplishment. But for all the romance, single combat has not really decided the course of history like the spear has.
I had wondered about this as well. I think that the other points are valid (individual vs group, change in fighting styles, etc.). However, outside of a phalanx-style fight, I always thought that spears could also be thrown.
Furthermore, didn't the effort required to make a truly high-quality sword (sharp, doesn't break) differ greatly?
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When it comes to sward vs spear there is an interesting situation in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the historical coats-of-arm of Bosnia depicted an arm holding a sword. On the other hand a historical coat of arms of Herzegovina depicted an arm holding a spear. The spear on the Herzegovinian coat of arm is broken to emphasize heroism (broken at the battlefield).
