The lance could be used in one hand, two, or couched under the arm. It could be heavy or light, and used to pierce, bludgeon, trip, unhorse, block, or redirect enemy attacks. Only the couched lance has received much scholarly attention. The view in much of the secondary literature has been that the late medieval knight had only one way to use the lance. This would make the weapon quite unsuited for the chaotic chevauchées, tournaments, and small-scale feuds in which it was employed.
The fixation on jousting is partly to blame. In jousting, the techniques of war were banned, all lances were of equal length, and all passes were made on the opponent's left side. In war or hunt, however, targets came from every angle.
Full lance vs. Demilance
There were two broad types of war lances in medieval Western (lance arrester), which prevented the hand from slipping during impact, before thickening at the butt-end to facilitate being squeezed between arm and torso. By the fifteenth century, the full lance had grown to a length of between 3.6 and 4.2 metres.
