ISTR these were used in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
I don’t know; the class I was taking only showed me how to defend myself against a banana.
…as well as passion fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit…Whole and segments. etc.
Don’t forget the intimidation factor, either. Regardless of how well it actually works, a big spiked ball whirling around on a chain looks nasty. And in most fights, if you can get your opponent to panic, you’ve won.
Posted by Ethilrist:*
Bad advice; actually if you can get your shield edge up to interrupt the passage of the chain, you’ll get less impact from the ball than you would have otherwise.
Historically, you just don’t see weapons with long chains very much (as noted). A mace (iron spiked head on a wooden or iron shaft), on the other hand, can be very useful for close-in fighting.
As a general rule, you can discount about half of what you see on the History Channel.
So what’s the advantage of a mace per se, chain or no chain? I can see how a big heavy thing for hitting people would be handy, but surely a big heavy sharp thing ie a sword, would be even better.
I’m sorry, mr. peasant. You are not nobility. You must surrended your dword, else you might rebel against us.
Your long pointy farm implements are perfectly legal, however. Carry on.
Also note that swords don’t exactly grow on trees. Staves, clubs, and most of a mace, however…
That’s meant to be “surrender your sword”, of course. No one is making you give up words that start with D.
Dammit.
Not all swords were illeagal for non-nobility to carry at all times (laws varied by location and throughout the middle ages).
However, JSexton has got an important point. Up until the high middle ages (maybe a little earlier) swords were very expensive, and even after, outfitting hundreds or thousands of men with them must have been prohibitively expensive. Why damage your nice, expensive sword, when a spiked club will do fairly well?
The advantage is that if you hit somebody hard enough in the head with a mace, you might crush their whole skull, which would be totally sweet. But then again, if you have a sword you can skewer their whole head, which is pretty awesome, too. I guess each weapon has its advantages.
Armor is much less effective against impacts than cuts. A solid blow from even a light mace or war hammer can break bones through armor whereas the same blow from a sword would be warded off by the same armor. Also, it doesn’t matter if a mace gets chipped. It’s just as deadly.
I have a mace, a ball and chain, and some swords. It wasn’t until I got the mace (it was last) that I understood why they weren’t used more than swords. Maces are slow to get up to speed and require much more energy and strength to use effectively. After a few good swings with the mace, i’m tired. With the sword, I’m swinging away for much longer. The speed factor is not to be under-rated either. Against a thrusting weapon, the mace wielder will get stabbed at two or three times for each swing of his own weapon. A mounted warrior might put a mace to good effect in ride-by attacks where he can take to time to set up a good polo-match shot at a foot-soldier, but he’d probably switch to a sword when it came time to trade blows with another mounted man.
With a ball and chain, another problem is the ricochet of the ball. The weapon can only have 6" of chain or have a really long haft. Otherwise, when the ball hits, it can come back at you. Those agricultural flails mentioned above were 5-6’ long with only two or three links attaching the 1’ bar to the end. This provided all the thrashing capability the peasant needed without the danger of him beaning himself on the head or knuckles.
From a physics standpoint a mace or war pick is “brutally efficient” - handle with most of the mass concentrated at the end will give a heck of a whomp when it hits something. A pick certainly qualifies as a “big heavy sharp thing”, what I’ve read is that they were very handy for punching through armor. As others have said they are also relatively cheap and simple to make (compared to a sword) and it’s pretty intuitive to use (so you don’t have to get too fancy with the training).
Thanks for the answers, guys. If I ever need to break a guy’s head through plate mail, I know where to come for help…
Aha. This thread has given me the answer as to what the heck that weapon was that some anime character was drawn with in the Saiyuki anime. Specifically, something that looks like a quarterstaff, yards and yards of chain (artistic license, I’m sure), and a fishtail-shaped blade on the end.
Plus whether that thing would actually have been an usable weapon. ponder Would it help if we considered the chain retractable and the user could reel it back in like a tape measure, converting the weapon to a pike?
Either way, the SDMB has done its work today in fighting ignorance. 
I am so touched that a thread of mine finally caught on with y’all.
I’m thinking that anything with more than, say ten feet of chain would be difficult to even get moving off the ground, and impossible to actually control. At best, you could get it swinging in a big circle over your head. Slowly. And if you ever managed to hit something the whole works would stop in a big tangle, probably with you in the center of it.
Retractability would not be a big plus.
There is a story about a famous Japanese swordsman who had to fight a kusarigami expert. He retreated to a bamboo grove, where there wasn’t enough room to get the flail part swinging.
The disadvantage of a mace or flail is that you cannot thrust with it. Thus it is most useful when armored, so that your opponent cannot stick you whilst you wind up. But cheap to manufacture, unlike (as has been mentioned) swords. Bishops sometimes used a mace instead of a sword - because their oath did not allow them to shed blood. 
Regards,
Shodan
As anyone who has ever used mace will tell you, that isn’t even remotely true. You couldn’t run someone through with a mace, but that is not all all the same as saying you can’t thrust with a mace. You can thrust with pretty much any weapon aside from chains, but maces almost invariably have a terminal point precisely so they can deliver a thrust that is capable of stabbing.
A mace doesn’t require any more wind up than a sword.
Is there any truth to that outside of Dungeons and Dragons? It makes ittle sense since the types of injuries inflicted with a mace will likely result in more blood loss than most knife or sword wounds.
I wonder if all that about priests uses maces comes from Bishop Odo, depicted on the famous Bayeaux Tapestry, wielding a mucking big club at Hastings.
Hypno-Toad, it sounds to me like your mace may be heavier than it should be. Given the shorter length, it shouldn’t be any more tiring to use than a sword. Lots of modern “medieval” weapons are made heavier than they should be. (At the local Renaissance Fair, I used to see a merchant who sold nothing but swords at least twice as heavy as they should have been, with big ball bearings for pommels. Year after year, he fed his customers bullshit about how that was the authentic weight and only the strongest men could use a sword in the old days.)
In SCA fighting, we use “maces” made of a rattan shaft with some form of heavy, but padded head. (Don’t actually want to kill anybody.) I made one using a big Kong brand rubber dog-chew toy; I’ve also seen them done with Nerf balls. There’s something uniquely satisfying about getting in close and bashin’ a guy in the face with one of those.
Form of… CHEW TOY!
Power of… KONG!
Graaaaaaaaaaah!!
In regards to Shodan’s comment and Blake’s query, about bishops and maces, there is a supporting reference made in either The White Company or Sir Nigel, two novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hardly a cite, but I imagine that Sir A probably did some research on the subject. He also includes a great list of the names for collections of animals (parliment of owls, quarrel of bears, etc.) in The White Company. The books are, by the way, ripping good yarns.