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)

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

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

YES.

Sorry. Just absolutely not the way it ever worked. The senate and the emperor are (in theory) partners in government. In practice, the emperor would absolutely not have tolerated any kind of threat from the senate, who would not have had the resources to run a secret service independently anyway.

Read Tacitus Annals to see relations between Senate and emp. Grovel, grovel, tremble, tremble.

Govt is becoming increasingly beaurocratic and centred on the palace by Hadrian anyway.

But an individual, ambitious senator might have informers who worked for him privately, if that helps.

[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?

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

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]

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

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.)

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I can't comment about fourth century stuff, but in the late bronze age, it was long assumed (and still is, I fear!) that the kinds of metalwork in circulation can be interpreted on the evidence from hoards. Hoards are assumed to be a representative sample of the material in circulation, as they're linked with the metalworking process, but if you then go beyond the assumption that they ARE a representative sample, and suggest that these hoards may in fact be selective, the entire coat is on a shoogly peg.

I would suspect the same situation is true in the 4th century context - the assumption is made from the material that has survived to the present. And, since metal objects can be endlessly recycled, it may well be true that this pattern is slewed and not at all representative.