bunn

I wrote a long reply to this which LJ duly ate. So I shall just say thanks - I think I may go for something like an organisation set up by a group of Senators? I don't want them to be in conflict with Hadrian as such - more bureaucratic misunderstandings and miscommunications. As Hadrian beetles round the Empire with such verve, I feel there should be potential for a fair number of those.

I have read the Annals, but am not sure Tacitus is the best source for understanding how Hadrian's bureaucracy might work, it's 60 years on from Nero after all, and a rather different kind of emperor?

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thecatsamuel.livejournal.com

Cassius Dio goes on into Hadrian's principate (Greek, later) and the Historia Augusta (garbage, but fun).

The bit that's worrying me (and I am your neurotic reader writing a chapter of my PhD on emp and senate here) is that Hadrian is, himself a senator. He always presents himself as working with the senate, albeit with special imperial privileges such as calling meetings and speaking first. He would be advised by a council of senators outside formal meetings. So he simply would not permit a group of senators to "set up" their own group or network even if they were not seditious. Emperors generally were very suspicious of faction and discouraged groups forming that were perceived as a threat - there is legislation and edicts on this.

In an earlier period, you did get lots of delation (informers) but that's not a feature of "good" emps as they won't allow malicious prosecutions.

Palace bureaucracy is the preserve of slaves and imperial freedmen but that is complimentary to senatorial bureaucracy. Mommsen's theory of "dyarchy" (power split between senate and emp) is now totally outdated. Most simply put, the emperor keeps control through his personal authority but his position is still that of a senator among senators.

So any organisation such as you have in mind would have to be completely sub rosa and involvement would expose them to the risk of a treason trial with penalties of loss of property, execution, loss of family name, damned to the memory. It would be very high stakes for them.

Ok I will stop boring on but I hope that is useful for creating something convincing. It's more entertaining than thinking about senatorial processes!

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wellinghall.livejournal.com

Oh good, I'm glad you're friends; it stops me having to refer you and Bunn to each other!

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That's very helpful, thanks. I think I need to decide what exactly I want this group to do.

If I decide to get them involved in the death of Antinous, which is one idea I was vaguely playing with, then they fit the 'prepared to take the risk of treason' model so I can put them in. But that might be overcomplicating matters. I *think* I've thought of a different approach to create the internal conflict I was looking for. It means extending the role of the imperial covert stuff a bit but probably not inventing quite so riskily...

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seasight.livejournal.com

Wouldn't you keep a knife, which is common, and pass on a sword (because it's valuable)? When you're buried, I mean. That seems to make sense. So swords are getting used and not buried, and then they disappear?

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Quite often you'd keep a sword when you're buried because it's valuable, and pass the knife on because it's not :-)

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It's very hard to tell when a knife becomes a sword. Apart from a sword only being useful in fighting, not for actually doing stuff like eating or whittling, I suspect it's at the stage when you'd prefer to say "What, you only have a knife? *I've* got a *sword*", rather than just "my knife is bigger than yours" - as long as it's big enough that people don't start making jokes about how short and inadequate your weapon is, of course.

The saex in particular seems to go from an eating knife a few inches long to a three-foot weapon, and I think everything in between.

I don't know why there are all these knives, but it might be that people find things which are obviously the hilts of something knifelike, but as the blade has gone you can't tell how long it was. As a hand (and therefore a grip) is much the same size regardless of the length of blade, people might be playing it safe and saying "knife" when they aren't sure. Some of the Migration Era swords have grips which seem too small for a hand to fit (some people have suggested you held the pommel in your palm), and I think some saexes have teeny grips too, which might well make them look like knives.

Or it might be that swords are associated with knights, and obviously the Dark Ages (OMT) being pre-mediaeval they didn't have cool things like knights, so couldn't have had many swords either - QED ;-)

The typical weapon is supposed to have been the spear, pretty much throughout the period when swords were popular. You can make a spearhead and a dagger much more cheaply and easily than a sword, and then you can poke the swordsman before he can get close to you.

But I think swords weren't all that uncommon - in a warrior culture, everyone wants to look like a hero even if it means having the sort of cheap sword that bends when you hit people too hard (see some of the sagas). I do like the swords they've found that have "Ingelrii" written on one side of the blade and "Ulfbert" on the other. You don't get that with rare high-status things, you get it with fairly common status symbols - like having a pair of trainers with "Nike" on the left foot and "Adidas" on the right... :-D Although those are rather after your period, to be fair.

Um... [insert coherent conclusion here]

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Aha, now there's something that I thought interesting : apparently there are practically no spear-heads of the period?

Though apparently a type of spearhead which has been identified as Anglo-Saxon is an awful lot like the pre-Roman British spearhead, and so possibly in some 4th-century contexts is being misidentified...

Thank you for the sword-thoughts, they sound convincing to me!

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No spearheads? That sounds very odd.

Mind you, if there are no swords and no knives and no spearheads, it's no wonder they had to invite Hengist and Horsa in :-)

I'd reckon that either the spearheads are being misidentified, as you say; or else that the iron spearhead rusts away and the wooden shaft rots, and you have nothing else left to suggest the presence of the spear in the way that a brass-bound bone grip would tell you there was once a knife around.

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They have knives!

It struck me as odd too. I have another book by the same author about this period, will see if that adds any further details.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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 :-)

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thecatsamuel.livejournal.com

Rather belatedly - have you read Pliny's letters? He is a senator slightly earlier than this, mostly writing under Trajan. Book 10 contains his letters as proconsul (governor) in Bithynia, referring questions to Trajan, with the replies (probably preserved by Suetonius) and a good insight into relationships and practicalities of administration.

Also, Letter 6.31 is an account of Pliny and a group of fellow-senators acting as assessors for Trajan and a very good account of how the power structures worked outside the formal proceedings in the Senate.

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I have read a few extracts, but not the whole thing: that definitely sounds like something I should read properly & make notes about before I go further, thanks!

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:-D
I am very delighted and grateful that such an informed source is volunteering information, but I really would not expect to be able to demand info from complete strangers!

It's not like I'm writing a book : I'm only writing a fanfic of a children's novel from the 1950s: the end result will probably only be read by about 20 people tops. It will be enormously satisfying for me personally to feel that I've done a careful and convincing job on it, of course - but it's not like it's going to be out there on bookshelves annoying people.

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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!

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

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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!)

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1) I would imagine that small tool knives were ubiquitous, as they were in pretty much every pre-modern culture I can think of (especially prior to the invention of special eating utensils). Daggers are a different matter, but I'd be more surprised if for some reason people in 4th century Britain were getting by just fine without one of the most basic human tools.

I'd say forearm-length is about the minimum for a sword--and the types of knives most people carried would be the equivalent of modern utility knives, not honking great daggers or machetes. (The difference between a sword and a knife is somewhat more involved than length--swords have to do a bunch of things knifes don't--and swordsmithing does take a different kind of skillset and is not simple. This is why quality functional modern swords are Very Expensive and quality functional modern knives are considerably less so--plus one CAN do everyday cooking tasks and so on with cheap cutlery and just be annoyed, but a cheap sword may get you killed) and I would be inclined to buy the "swords were high status items" because broadly speaking, small utility knives were widely used historically, while swords were not, for a combination of economic and social reasons. (Pattern welding is overrated and also probably irrelevant to the period.)

I'm not an expert on horseshoes, but I think it's strictly not a matter of easier as different skillsets. The blacksmithing that goes into a horseshoe is pretty basic--and historically horseshoes were made by blacksmiths. The tricky part is, as you say, fitting them to the horses correctly--OTOH, swords have to be balanced, sufficiently flexible, able to hold an edge, and suited for whatever style of combat is the thing locally, and many of those factors change with every sword, so it's not like there's no fluctuating factors involved in swordsmithing. Historically in most cultures swordsmiths specialized because the actual iron or steel working was considerably more complicated. People did not specialize in horseshoe-making--blacksmiths did a variety of things. (They didn't have horseshoes in Europe in the 4th century yet, though, did they? I thought they got introduced to Europe in the Middle Ages, Roman horse booties--quite a different thing--aside.)

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Would it be ridiculous to invent a Senatorial secret service working in parallel and sometimes at cross purposes with the Imperial one?

Nothing is too ridiculous when it comes to secret services!

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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! :-)

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I *think* the argument being put forward is that there are *more* knives than in previous centuries, because Britain has become unsafe, so people are re-arming. But I don't quite see how he makes that work.

I agree people must have had knives anyway, and I think the logic of deducing anything from a *maybe* increase in found items of a type that survives really badly is a bit rash, particularly as he admits there's no increase in sword or spearhead finds! It seems like evidence the other way, if anything.

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