by K. J. Parker
Fortunately, there was one man, an eccentric English book-illustrator and sword collector, who was prepared to do just that. Starting in the 1940s, Ewart Oakeshott devoted his life to the medieval sword. Many of the finest extant specimens passed through his hands at one time or another, and, since he wasn’t afraid to pick them up and waggle them in the air, he made the remarkable discovery that they weren’t absurdly heavy and unwieldy; in fact, they handled really rather well. Oakeshott went on to classify sword types from the Viking Age to the Renaissance, and his research was taken up, not by the scholars and curators, but by the stick-jocks and tatami-mat-slicers of the living history movement. Once authentic replicas were available, re-enactors went to the library and discovered the small but meaningful number of medieval fencing manuals, whose existence had been more or less forgotten about since the last brief flurry of interest at the end of the 19th century. The manuals are oblique, elliptical and deliberately obscure—they were study aids for students of the fight schools rather than teach-yourself books—but we do at least have a keyhole through which we can peer at medieval swordsmanship, and form the inescapable conclusion that it was a true martial art of exceptional subtlety and sophistication. With some idea of the fighting techniques, we can go back to the swords and begin to understand them properly.
There are twenty-two well-defined different types in Oakeshott’s classification. Take the Type Fourteen, a popular 14th century pattern. It’s the perfect cutter. The blade is relatively short, wide at the hilt, narrowing to an acute point. Running down the middle for most of its length is a fuller, a broad groove designed to reduce weight by removing superfluous metal without compromising strength; also, in the process of hammering the groove into the blade, you spread metal sideways, widening the blade, thinning the cutting edge to give you a pointier, more efficient wedge. The Type Fourteen was an effective cutter of flesh, but when the armourers upped the stakes by introducing plate armour in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Fourteen was outmatched. It wasn’t stiff enough to deliver powerful thrusts into the joints and weak points of armour. Also, fighters started armouring their legs, which had always been a favourite target (2). A new pattern was needed; still a dual purpose weapon, but favouring the thrust, the way the Fourteen had favoured the cut. The Type Fifteen was roughly the same shape—broad at the hilt end, tapering to a needle point—but instead of the fuller, it had a strong central rib, formed by the forging out of the cutting edges. It was stiffer for the thrust, while still capable of efficient cutting. Superbly balanced (all medieval swords achieve balance by means of a thick, heavy pommel, usually wheel-shaped; the optimum centre of balance is around two to three inches in front of the crossguard) and weighing in at somewhere between two and three pounds, it feels light and quick in the hand. It’s the ideal weapon for sword-and-shield fighting.
The shield, however, was on the way out. Plate armour for the nobility and long-handled cutting weapons for the rank and file that needed both hands to use them made it obsolete in the 15th century, and the Fifteen became the Eighteen (to be precise, the 18a); roughly the same blade, but longer and with an extended hilt, making it possible to use the sword single or double handed. The 15th century longsword is a landmark in sword design, perfection within its own terms of reference, and around it there grew up a school of swordsmanship of which we get tantalising glimpses from the fencing manuals of Ringeck and Talhoffer. By the time these books were written, longswordsmanship was already into the early stages of decadence and decline, the silver rather than the golden age. Suffice it to say, Hollywood has never put on screen a fight sequence as beautiful or viscerally thrilling as the half-guesswork reconstructions of longsword fighting staged by modern re-enactors. Look for them on YouTube and save yourself a fortune in movie tickets.
Talhoffer’s longswordsmen don’t cut very much; and when they do, they tend to come to a bad end. The cut was out of favour, particularly since most of Talhoffer’s book deals not with battlefield armoured combat but fights between unarmoured civilians. Economic and social changes in the late Middle Ages meant that the sword was no longer exclusively the battlefield weapon of the aristocratic knight. With the rise of an affluent urban middle-class, eager to ape their sword-wearing betters and addicted to picking fights in the street, the sword acquired a new, non-military function. The enthusiastic students who flocked to the German and Italian fighting schools in the 15th century weren’t training for war.
The fight schools are a significant development. Trainee knights didn’t need them; they learnt swordsmanship from the castle master-at-arms, practically as soon as they were weaned. The schools were there to teach merchants’ sons how to survive street brawls, a genre of combat for which the military swords of the High Middle Ages weren’t really suited. For one thing, they either needed a shield (3) or else were awkwardly long to wear with everyday costume. Although some form of cutting continued to be taught and practised, the thrust began to dominate, logically enough. Edges shrank, blades thinned and lengthened. Marozzo, who wrote at the turn of the 16th century, teaches an awkward, clumsy proto-rapier called the spada di lato. By the middle of the century, the true rapier had arrived from Spain. Three to four feet long, with only a vestigial cutting edge, the rapier is comparatively slow, best used with a defensive weapon in the left hand (a dagger, a cloak, something to parry with) but it’s much better than anything that had gone before for its intended purpose, the formal duel and the street-corner rumble. By the turn of the 17th century, Ridolfo Capo Ferro had refined rapier fencing to a precise science. It’s not fencing as a modern Olympic athlete would understand it. For one thing, the rapier fencer isn’t restricted to moving in a straight line. He can sidestep, performing devastating moves like the volte (a twisting side-shuffle that leaves your lunging enemy impaling himself on your sword). He isn’t restricted to the ritual exchange of lunge, parry, riposte; defence and counterattack are combined in the same move, making a rapier duel short and extremely lethal. The rapier was soon obsolete itself, replaced by the shorter, lighter, more convenient smallsword, the ancestor of the modern foil. The most efficient non-projectile tool ever designed for killing an unarmoured man, the smallsword made no pretence at a cutting edge. It was a sharp, stiff, triangular-section wire, so quick in the hand that there was no longer time for the rapierman’s sidesteps and simultaneous defence and counterattack. Once again, the sword had arrived at total perfection, only to find once it got there that it was obsolete, replaced by the flintlock pistol for duelling and self-defence.
Poor old sword. Few artefacts have commanded so much care, skill and resources, and at each stage of its development it’s been superfluous or obsolete. If swords had never been invented, history would barely have noticed (4). Other weapons were just as good or better for business purposes; armour always won in the end; apart from a brief spell in the hands of the Roman legions, it’s always been a rich man’s accessory, a status symbol, an overrated icon. Mostly, it survived because it looked cute, and people felt safer if they had one when things got bad.
For a ninety-percent pacifist like me, it’s the weapon of choice. Its purpose is and always has been unambiguous, but compared with the instruments that actually did the business—the spear, arrow, cannon, machine-gun, tank, bomber, nuclear bomb—the sword may be allowed to have a relatively clean conscience. On the battlefield, it was generally the last line of defence rather than the weapon that started the fight. The duellists who died on the points of rapiers and smallswords were at least willing participants in their own undoing. If you want an abiding image of the sword in the West, think of the Polish cavalrymen in World War II who charged the German tanks with their sabres. A professional soldier’s summary of another stupid cavalry charge sums up the sword for me; magnifique (if you like that sort of thing) mais ce n’est pas la guerre—which I’d venture to suggest, is about the nicest thing you can say about any weapon.
NOTES
(1) Actually, it’s a moot point whether swo
rds in the hands of ancient swordsmen could cut mail and cleave helmets. Modern researchers say no, but back in the 13th century they were pretty sure they could, to judge from contemporary literature and art. For example, the Maciejowski Bible, an illuminated manuscript painted for the French crusader king Louis IX, has many scenes showing swords cutting armour in graphic, almost photographic detail. The context is worth considering:
1. The Maciejowski Bible was commissioned by an experienced and horribly enthusiastic fighter, who wouldn’t have been amused by gross inaccuracies.
2. The painter records arms, armour, clothes and footwear with great care and precision. The illustrations are meant to be totally realistic.
3. The battle scenes are generic images of warfare rather than particular exploits of superhuman heroes. The armour-cutters are just plain folks, not legendary heroes of whom exceptional feats are to be expected.
A redoubtable modern experimental archaeologist, one Mike Loades, recently set out to disprove the Maciejowski Bible once and for all. He acquired a very fine reproduction sword and had a very fine reproduction helmet made, looking just like the ones in the Bible, and proceeded to bash on the helmet with the sword for all he was worth. He managed to dent it, but that was all.
Proof positive; except that—
1. The very fine helmet, like the very fine sword, was made of modern steel. Mr Loades didn’t go into details, but the industry standard for modern repro helmets is something like 2mm cold rolled steel sheet. Medieval armour was made of iron, not steel, and the sheets were hammered by eye with sledgehammers, not rolled in a computer-controlled mill. King Louis would’ve traded you the Loire valley and half of Touraine for a helmet, or a sword, as good as the ones Mr Loades used for his test.
2. Most of the armour-chopping in the Maciejowski Bible is done by men on horseback. Add the momentum of a moving horse to the strength of the human arm, and you vastly increase the force of the blow; rather like the difference between getting punched by a pedestrian and hit by a moving car.
3. Mr Loades is one of the most skilled swordsmen currently alive, but he’s a 21st century weakling. They were stronger back then. They could shoot bows that we can’t draw. They could till an acre a day with an ox-drawn plough—we know they could, because that’s the original definition of an acre, but you try it and see how far you get. They could fight all day in heavy armour, which exhausts us in a matter of minutes. Medieval noblemen trained intensively with weapons from childhood. The fact that we can’t do it is no proof that it can’t be done.
(2) Our best evidence about how men died in battle in the Middle Ages comes from the mass graves discovered on the site of the Battle of Wisby, fought in Sweden in 1361. The remains of over a thousand bodies were unearthed there between 1905 and 1928. The dead were almost exclusively local Swedish infantry conscripts rather than knights; they wore mail coifs rather than helmets and little or no leg armour. Considerable numbers of them show cutting wounds to the legs and head, which suggests a fairly basic feint-high-cut-low or feint-low-cut-high style of battlefield swordsmanship, a hypothesis supported by descriptions of fighting in the roughly contemporary Icelandic sagas and elsewhere. Of the skeletons where cause of death could be established, cuts outnumbered piercing wounds by almost 5 to 1. In several cases, both legs had been severed by one blow, though of course we can’t establish whether the weapon used was a sword or an axe.
(3) The shield survived into the rapier era, in the form of the buckler, a steel disc about the size of a dinner plate. The buckler was a handy piece of equipment. You could punch with it as well as defend, and it was just about small enough to hang from your belt as you swaggered about town, though the incessant clanking would have driven you crazy. It fell into disuse when contemporary fashionistas decreed that wearing the buckler (swash-buckling) was just so last year.
(4) Robert Drews, a leading authority on the Bronze Age in Europe, accounts for the extraordinary catastrophe that left most of the great walled cities of the Aegean in ashes near the end of the Bronze Age to the introduction of a new type of sword, the Naue Type II or Griffzungenschwert, wielded by a loose confederation of Sicilian and Sardinian pirates. Drews’ hypothesis is significantly more convincing than the alternative explanations previously offered by scholars, and it’s undeniable that the Naue II was a massive success, appearing simultaneously all over Europe and the Near East and replacing previous types. However, his theory tends towards the Hells Angels school of historical speculation—a bunch of mindless hooligans blow into town, trash the joint and vanish without a trace, as though they’d never been—which I’ve always had problems with. Furthermore, the Naue II is better than most bronze swords but it’s still a bronze sword; smack something hard with it and it bends like a banana. Professor Drews could do worse than invest in one of Neil Burridge’s outstandingly authentic replicas of the Naue II and try it for himself.
Illuminated
Codex Escatoensis XIV.67/3c; 127-339
The truth, the sad, banal truth, is that they’re nothing but a network of three-hundred-year-old Imperial relay stations, built in a hurry in the last decades of the Occupation to pass warning messages about pirate raids. Of course they built them on hilltops, so they’d be visible at a distance, and of course they had to be towers, for the same reason. They used stone because they used stone for everything; white stone because the Porthead marble quarries hadn’t been completely worked out back then. It’s true they didn’t use mortar, and you can’t slide the tip of a knife between the stones. That’s how they built everything—temples, barns, outdoor privies. They didn’t know any other way.
We know this, because we can read the inscriptions they left over the doorways. They look mysterious and grand. Translated, they’re nothing at all. They tell you the station number, the commissioning date, the name and rank of the engineer in charge of construction, and some basic standing orders. We go out of our way to tell people that the ancient writings aren’t runes of power or deadly curses. Nobody believes us, of course. They never do. We rarely want them to.
When I was a kid, I wanted one, for my very own, more than anything in the world. Feel free, therefore, to have no sympathy for me.
She stood up in her stirrups, her eyes positively shining. “It’s a wizard’s tower,” she said.
“There’s no such thing as wizards,” I replied. “You should know. You’re training to be one.”
She ignored me, as usual. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “How old is it?”
“Late Occupation,” I replied. “As you deduced from the style of the masonry and the materials used. Or perhaps you read the date, there, above the door.”
She squinted; the late afternoon sun was dazzling on the white stone. “Procuratorship of Callias and Sthenodorus. When was that?”
“You can look it up when we get home. Come on, will you? You’ve got the key.”
“Are you sure? I thought you had it.”
Laus tibi soli is a third-level excession, primarily designed for bringing the latent silver in alluvial lead deposits to the surface. It also opens most locks. To be fair, she did it quite well. I shouldn’t have had to remind her of the words, though.
A brief digression about women. I have no problem with them. Bearing in mind the disadvantages they suffer from—late onset, early diminution, traumatic dispossession, all that—many of them do remarkably well. And I fully support the recent initiatives to bring more Talented women into the Order, and to help them make the most of their talent while they still have it. In the appropriate disciplines (medicine, primarily; they can also make pretty fair weather forecasters and water diviners) there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t be treated just the same as us, though of course advancement beyond junior deacon is out of the question, they simply don’t have time. I also accept that there’s no substitute for a field placement between sixth and seventh year; all this business about accelerated apprenticeships and pushing them along with fors maius is clea
rly counterproductive, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how you grow and develop as an adept. So, obviously, someone’s got to draw the short straw occasionally. I just wish it didn’t always have to be me.
The first thing I noticed, of course, was the smell. It’s unmistakable.
Actually, it wasn’t just the smell; it was the rather extraordinary combination of the smell and all the usual neglected-building smells—mould, damp plaster, mildewed fabrics, the lives, digestive cycles and deaths of birds and rats. Blend all those with the stink of non-Saloninan physics and you get an entirely unique fragrance guaranteed to tantalise the mind and turn the stomach.
I said something about it. She looked at me. “What smell?” she said.
I looked around. It was more or less what I’d expected. Any normal, sensible person looking to build a tower would opt for a plain stone tube; not these jokers. They used a weird system of tiers of arches braced by internal buttresses; we’ve been studying the wretched things for a century and we still don’t know for sure how they work. Basic architectural theory tells us the lot of them should’ve fallen down years ago, which is why the College of Works refuses to certify them as safe for military use, which is why we’ve got them instead of the Brigade of Signals. When you first walk into one and look up, you’re terrified of sneezing in case you end up wearing the roof as a hat. But there they stand, smugly infuriating, proof against landslips, floods, earth tremors, subsidence and all known artillery. They’ve even survived ten generations of east-country crofters scavenging for building materials, unlike the great castles, temples and monasteries built under the Occupation.