Swords & Knives (also: spies and jam)

[bunn]

1) People in Britain didn't usually get buried with their stuff in the fourth century, so we don't know how common it was to carry a knife
2) But we think possibly there might be more knives found in comparison to other tools in Britain in the C4th.
3) There are very few swords, but that's OK because iron things don't survive well in Britain
4) Anyway, swords were dead high status things and almost nobody had one.
5) therefore everyone was re-arming like mad, only with knives because swords were so hard to make.

Is it me, or does that not entirely make sense?  If iron things don't survive well, how come there are all these knives (if there are loads of knives, which seems unclear).   And if swords don't survive well, how do we know almost nobody had one? And how big does a knife have to be before you can call it a sword anyway?  OK, big souper dooper pattern welded watchercullums are probably hard to make, but at what point during the process of taking some iron and giving it a pointy end does it become 'a sword'...? 

While I'm at it, why do people assume that making horseshoes, by comparison to swords, would be dead easy?  I would have thought making shoes for animals that all have different feet and gaits and are liable to get expensively and dangerously injured if you get it wrong would actually be quite hard.  And I speak as one who tried to make her greyhound wear rubber boots, with a striking lack of success. :-D


Skipping back a couple of centuries, I am intrigued by Hadrian's Frumentarii secret service, but wish to put a cherry on the top.  Would it be ridiculous to invent a Senatorial secret service working in parallel and sometimes at cross purposes with the Imperial one? 

In other news, I am unconvinced by rhubarb jam. It doesn't seem to be very... jammy. It is more like a pie filling in a pot.

Comments

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

From a technical point of view, making a sword (assuming that you're going to be folding the metal and annealing it) is harder than making a horseshoe.

However, making and fitting a horseshoe is an entirely different skill. Actually making the shoe is the easy bit- the hard part is getting the perfect fit, handling the horse, making sure that it is the right shoe for the horse, taking into account any conditions the horse has (for example taking pressure off certain parts of the hoof). A farrier's skills are more veteranary than metalworking (although they have to be able to do that too)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

king_pellinor seems to think that the folding, annealing etc may have been an optional extra for swanky models...

I'm guessing people at the time would not have divided things up into animal-handling and metalwork, but were more likely to see things as 'swordsmith's jobs' and 'farriers jobs'... I wonder how they might have compared the skills involved.

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

Well in smaller communities, the blacksmith would have combined both roles, but I suspect that in larger towns there would have been more specialisation.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

I think you have to do some folding with the poor iron you get early on, but the more you do the better the sword (within limits) but the more expensive it is. Partly it's time, but partly also you lose metal every time you hit it. So your cheap ones will have had less folding done, which is why they're cheap.

Annealing also needs to be done, or the sword will just break instead of bending, but the better the smith the better the annealing will be. It's easy to do (you just heat the sword up), but hard to do well - I'm told.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Presumably you'd also need to anneal knives, chisels, axes etc in that case?

The emphasis when you read about these things tends to be on pretty swords, but I do wonder if people realise just how much easier it is to work wood with a really decent chisel, and how hard it is to work with a duff one (specially in oak, my god! Working oak with bad steel is *painful*). Even nowadays, people don't tend to chuck really good chisels away, there is a second hand/reconditioned market for the things and people tend to only get rid of them when they are worn down to nubs - so I'm guessing their archaeological footprint may be misleadingly small.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

* I know nothing about working metal, but I do know how hard it is to buy a good chisel... :-D

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

It gets horribly complicated :-)

You basically have a trade-off between hard-and-brittle and soft-and-resilient. As you work iron it gets hard-and-brittle, and the annealing takes it back to soft-and-resilient.

Ideally you want hard-and-resilient, but unless you're lucky and get some good steel (which people only got by chance in the 4th century) and know what to do with it you can't have that. Or you can try the Japanese differential-annealing trick, but that's very fiddly.

So you end up with a choice: you can have something that holds an edge, or you can have something that can take some beating, but you can't really have both.

With a smaller object like a knife or a chisel, the stresses are smaller and so brittleness is less of a problem than it is for a 3-foot sword (you can get a lot of leverage on that sort of length), so annealing is less necessary, and can be counter-productive.

If you have a hard but sharp chisel that you take a bit of care with, you probably don't really want to anneal it at all. The hardness means it can be sharp, and sharpness means you don't need to hit too hard when carving, so the brittleness isn't much of a problem. If you annealed it, you'd end up needing to sharpen it all the time. That I think is what you end up doing with axes, as thumping them into trees means they need to be a bit softer if they're going to cope. Though a good thick head would probably help them survive, too.

Modern chisels are probably very carefully annealed and then case-hardened to they have a good hard cutting edge while still being resilient. But that's much easier to achieve with modern forging equipment than with 4th century stuff - not to mention knowing how to make steel in the first place :-)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

With fine carving, you don't hit the chisel at all, most of the work is done with the sharp edge and sliding it along the grain of the wood rather than forcing the blade across it. Which supports your general argument!

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought so. I remember using a mallet on a chisel back at school, but that was by no means "fine" carving :-)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

People do use mallets for roughing out with gouges, but you can't get a fine finish that way. (Or at least, I can't!)

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Actually making the shoe is the easy bit- the hard part is getting the perfect fit, handling the horse, making sure that it is the right shoe for the horse, taking into account any conditions the horse has (for example taking pressure off certain parts of the hoof). A farrier's skills are more veteranary than metalworking (although they have to be able to do that too)

Much more succinct than me! :-)