If you go back a couple of decades, the SCA didn't allow face thrusts from spears, so the effectiveness of the spear was much less back then. Spears were considered a 3rd rank weapon.
So much has changed since then, yet the paradigm has still stuck around. I once watched a video from the commander of Pentamere who had told a group of people when explaining how a shield wall works that Dukes with big egos like to go out in front of the line and kill 50 or 60 fighters. A person in the audience asked, "Why do we let them do that?" to which she replied, "We can't stop them."
Here's a question I have. Why would you ever want to stop someone on your side from killing 50 or 60 people? Form over function?
I have noticed that in some areas the leadership as accepted that spears fighting in the front is effective, but only in static battles. In mobile battles the spears will just get run down if they are in the front.
Will they? What if my spearmen are 25 years old and weigh 170 to 190lbs while your unit is in their 40s and weigh over 250lbs each? You're going to cover that ten foot gap faster than they can react? Are you trying to keep your shield wall in tact? Doesn't that mean you can only move as fast as your slowest man?
The nice thing is, I don't even have to tell you that this works in theory. I've seen it objectively work in practice, over and over again.
SCA War Camp
We had a small inexperienced unit matched up against a larger experienced unit with several knights. In the first field battle we fought our unit just got run over. As the scenarios went on, we started doing better. In the last battle, I had convinced one of our newer, younger, faster spearmen to just run way out in front of our unit and engage their front line, and to draw them out of the fight when they charged.
He ran a good 25 feet out in front of our unit and their lead knight, who's an aggressive shieldman, charged at him. As a bonus, a handful of his house followed suit as our young buck drew them out of the fight while breaking up their unit cohesion. He even got a few kills before the fight was over while we were able to stuff the left flank allowing our right flank to win the battle.
Markland Raid on the Rhine
In this battle we fought three single death field battles on a narrow field with limited flanking possibilities. Despite having 3 spears and 2 archers to their single archer, we matched a shield wall to their shield wall with everyone else in the second rank. We were enveloped and got rolled over in quick fashion.
In the second and third battles we lead out with our spears 5 feet in front of the rest of our unit. They managed to get a couple of kills before the charging unit closed the gap while also blinding the shieldmen. Slowing down the impending charge and blinding them allowed the rest of our unit to adapt and gain opportunity kills. The spears only had to back pedal 5-10 feet before the rest of our unit stepped up to assist. This allowed us to win the next two battles.
Drexel Fighter Practice Unit Configuration Experiment
Several years ago we did an experiment where we had one experienced shielman attack a group of three fighters (two of them very new). His only goal was to survive and get to the spear (the spear was limited to walking speed). The first series of scenarios had the spear behind the shield and pole. The second had him start even with them, with the third had the spear starting out in front of the line.
The spear up scenario was by far the most successful, again because it gives him free shots before the shield gets to the line, and blinds the shield as he charges forward allowing the other two fighters to adjust.
See the full write up here:
http://thetacticalfighter.blogspot.com/2017/10/experiment-bringing-your-spears-up.html
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