The boss was often carried out into a sharp spike, and the shield could thus be used for offence as well as for protection. But perhaps such points were also found of use in stopping the cut of a sword, which might otherwise slip down the shield and find a resting-place in the leg or other exposed part.
We shall see as we proceed that such circular shields or targets constantly appear till the middle of the seventeenth century, borne by foot soldiers, with pikes, halberds, and swords, and sometimes as large as two feet in diameter. Frequently foot soldiers are represented with a small target, ten or twelve inches in diameter, wherewith to receive their opponent's cut, while the other arm wields a huge broadsword. Such were in later times called "targetiers." Their small targets were hooked to the side when not in use, and one is represented in 1473 which projects to a point (Hewitt, ii, 488), while others are flat and studded with nails, or otherwise ornamented, such as appear among the Scotch and Irish till a much later date. Small shields of a square form, and ten inches square, were used by fencers with rapiers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Such is a hasty sketch of the circular shields. They were used by all ranks of the Saxon nations--among whom, of course, were those we call Normans--to the end of the tenth century.
Fitness for the purposes of defence is the prime governing law in such matters. We shall see this leading to many strange alterations of shape in after centuries, and, at the date at which we have now arrived, (the first half of the eleventh century,) a perfect revolution in the appearance of shields took place within a space of about fifty years.
Meyrick explains how the Normans who were engaged in the conquest of Apulia, in the south-east of Italy, about the beginning of the eleventh century, learned there the advantages of long and narrow shields, such as were then in use among the Sicilians, and states that about fifty years before the battle of Hastings they received from Melo, the chief of Barri, supplies of such vastly improved arms. The intimate relations with Normandy at that time, and under Edward the Confessor, led to their prompt adoption in England also; and hence in the Bayeux tapestry kite-shaped shields No. 3 are universal among horse soldiers, both Anglo-Saxon and Norman. Some Saxon foot soldiers bear the old round shields, and one square-shaped one appears on that roll.